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Larry H. Bernstein, MD, FCAP, Curator

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New cryopreservation procedure wins Brain Preservation Prize

February 9, 2016

http://www.kurzweilai.net/new-cryopreservation-procedure-wins-brain-preservation-prize

(Left): Control rabbit brain, showing neuropil near the CA1 band in the hippocampus. (Right): Vitrified rabbit brain, same location. Synapses, vesicles, and microfilaments are clear. The myelinated axon shows excellent preservation. (credit: Robert L. McIntyre and Gregory M. Fahy/Cryobiology)

The Brain Preservation Foundation (BPF) has announced that a team at 21st Century Medicine led by Robert McIntyre, PhD., has won the Small Mammal Brain Preservation Prize, which carries an award of $26,735.

The Small Mammalian Brain Preservation Prize was awarded after the determination that the protocol developed by McIntyre, termed Aldehyde-Stabilized Cryopreservation, was able to preserve an entire rabbit brain with well-preserved ultrastructure, including cell membranes, synapses, and intracellular structures such as synaptic vesicles (full protocol here).

The judges for the prize were Kenneth Hayworth, PhD., Brain Preservation Foundation President and neuroscientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute; and Prof. Sebastian Seung, PhD., Princeton Neuroscience Institute and Computer Science Department.

First preservation of the connectome

“This is a milestone in the development of brain preservation techniques: it is the first time that the preservation of the connectome has been demonstrated in a whole brain (prior to this only small parts of brains have been preserved to this level of detail),” said the BPF announcement.

“Current models of the brain suggest that the connectome contains all the information necessary for personal identity (i.e., memory and personality). This technique is not the same as conventional cryonics (rapidly freezing the brain), which has never demonstrated preservation of the ultrastructure of the brain. Thus the winning of this prize represents a significant advance in the methods available for large scale studies of the connectome and could lead to procedures that preserve a complete human brain.

3D microscope evaluation of the rabbit brain tissue preservation (credit: Brain Preservation Foundation)

The Brain Preservation Foundation plans to continue to promote the idea that brain preservation following legal death, by using scientifically validated techniques, is a reasonable choice for consenting individuals to make. Focus now shifts to the final Large Mammal phase of the contest, which requires an intact pig brain to be preserved with similar fidelity in a manner that could be directly adapted to terminal patients in a hospital setting.

The 21st Century Medicine team has recently submitted to the BPF such a preserved pig brain for official evaluation. Lead researcher Robert McIntyre has started Nectome to further develop this method.

“Of course, [the demonstrated brain preservation procedure] is only useful if you think all the relevant information is preserved in the fixation,” said Anders Sandberg, PhD., of the Future of Humanity Institute/Oxford Martin School. “Protein states and small molecule chemical information may be messed up.”

https://youtu.be/l-VpUOQ3Ihg

GPA | Will You Preserve Your Brain?

Background and significance (statement by BPF)

Proponents of cryonics have long sought a technique that could put terminal patients into long­term stasis, the goal being a form of medical time travel in which patients are stabilized against decay with the hope of being biologically revived and cured by future technologies. Despite decades of research, this goal of reversible cryopreservation remains far out of reach — too much damage occurs during the cryopreservation itself.

This has led a new generation of researchers to focus on a more achievable and demonstrable goal–preservation of brain structure only. Specifically preservation of the delicate pattern of synaptic connections (the “connectome”) which neuroscience contends encodes a person’s memory and identity. Instead of biological revival, these new researchers often envision a future “synthetic revival” comprising nanometer-­scale scanning of the preserved brain to serve as the basis for mind uploading.

This shift in focus toward “synthetic” revival has completely transformed the cryonics debate, opening up new avenues of research and bringing it squarely within the purview of today’s scientific investigation. Hundreds of neuroscience papers have detailed how memory and personality are encoded structurally in synaptic connections, and recent advances in connectome imaging and brain simulation can be seen as a preview of the synthetic revival technologies to come.

Until now, the crucial unanswered questions were “How well does cryonics preserve the brain’s connectome?” and “Are there alternatives/modifications to cryonics that might preserve the connectome better and in a manner that could be demonstrated today?” The Brain Preservation Prize was put forward in 2010 to spur research that could definitively answer these questions. Now, five years later, these questions have been answered: Traditional cryonics procedures were not able to demonstrate (to the BPF’s satisfaction) preservation of the connectome, but the newly invented “Aldehyde­-Stabilized Cryopreservation” technique was.

This result directly answers what has for decades been the main skeptical and scientific criticism against cryonics –that it does not provably preserve the delicate synaptic circuitry of the brain. As such, this research sets the stage for renewed interest within the scientific community, and offers a potential challenge to medical researchers to develop a human surgical procedure based on these successful animal experiments.

Comments

Ion Christopher –

Totally weird – IOW those “covalent bonds” act like a preservation matrix. So this brain indeed has been “fixed” – just at a smaller scale and level.

A couple of other factors:

* Quite a lot of the brain that counts (memory) may be on a larger scale than this – and may be preserved. While it is not, per the Connetome idea, at the macro axon scale – it is a general idea that at the molecular scale, something “plays” through the consciousness mechanism (Search = Hameroff Memory.)
I personally suspect a DNA like encoding in an as yet unproven language software. Perhaps even multiple “scale” functionality that would be a combination of organelle specialization (perhaps time perception) and THEN the inter-connectedness.

* As for personality, I know that that is entirely reproducible – in spite of such extreme complexity – but that is a proof for another day.

Just for kicks, note how the “search” code above results in prefabricated libraries being sent to your mind.

Gorden Russell –

You had me until I got to this part: “…a deadly chemical fixative (glutaraldehyde) through the brain’s vascular system…”

So this process perfectly preserves your brain after killer it dead.

So in the future it can be scanned and printed out into a perfect copy — but the copy won’t be you, it’ll be somebody else who is just like you. You will still be dead.

I’d rather be a live brain in a jar atop a robot wired into the spinal column so that I could still have all of my senses while awaiting the time a human body can be regrown.

CT

We have to differentiate on how we define “me” or “you”. Do we mean our memories (data) or consciousness (process). Our memories, personality, knowledge… alone (e.g. while we sleep and are unconscious)… are like fixed data until the brain (or a computer) begins to run and consciousness comes into existence .
We could copy the data to a computer (through scanning), which in the next step (after the simulation is beginning to operate) would create consciousness as well (defining itself as “me” or “you”). It wouldn’t be the same consciousness (process) due to other environmental inputs (and over time other memory/data- background). But the same is true for a biological based consciousness. My consciousness right now is not the consciousness anymore I had last year. It’s always a unique set-up.
From my point of view, the sentiment that there is some kind of metaphysical soul over an entire lifetime is an illusion based on the fact that we have memories, knowledge and personality (which we would have after the scanning process of our brain as well), that were formed in the past, and we are able to (subjectively altered) recreate it (and remember it) in our current state of consciousness. As a result we conclude, that we are/ have the same state of consciousness as the past me, which is (as I see it) an illusion.
So if we would be able to make a perfect copy of our brain that is able to create consciousness (in any kind of computer substrate, digital, analog or quantum) it wouldn’t be more or less the me (the consciousness) at the present than my future me in 5 minutes or years would be (in its biological form). From my point of view, the status quo wouldn’t change.

It is a copy because maybe one day they can do it without killing the original. The only way out of this conundrum was explained to me on this web site a while back in comments: if they substituted every neuron in my brain one at a time over a certain timescale so that eventually my brain would be synthetic, ‘”I” probably wouldn’t even notice.

But you are dreaming during your sleep.

Glutaraldehyde will put an end to all of your dreams.

A printed copy of you may have similar dreams, but not your dreams.