Startup Nectome invites customers to freeze their brains for digitization in the distant future

For a couple of decades, cryonics has been gaining popularity. It is a technology for freezing people who have just died in liquid nitrogen. The authors of this idea and their followers (among whom there are many patients with very serious, incurable diseases) believe that in the future there should be a technology for defrosting living organisms with a complex organization. Therefore, people who are terminally ill are invited to freeze their body so that when the cure method of the disease appears, the client can be revitalized and cured.

About 20 years ago, the first cryonics company appeared. Now there are a lot of them, and each one has to invent something original in order to stand out among the competitors. In Russia, by the way, such organizations also exist, although there are not so many of them. When freezing customers retain the brain, so that in the future a person, if it is defrosted, retains his lifetime ability. According to the creators of such companies, people are turning the most different - both patients of clinics with a disappointing diagnosis, and owners of animals who want to preserve their pets forever.

Actually, it is not surprising that someone voluntarily agrees to, in fact, euthanasia, because cryonics in many cases is the last chance, although very unusual.
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Prices for the services of "cryomedics" can be very different. For example, one of the Russian companies takes 12,000 US dollars for their services. This is only preservation in the frozen state of the brain. The price tag for freezing and storing the body with the head is $ 36 thousand, saving the animal from $ 12 thousand. Naturally, the clients of such companies are wealthy people.

Well, since there is money in this area, the market is expanding, more and more organizations are starting to offer similar services. Some of these companies decide to engage in a certain “niche cryobusiness.” One of these companies is Nectome . It works in the USA, and its main goal is to preserve the brain of its customers for digitization. In other words, customers are given a chance for eternal life in a digital space. It is clear that now there is no such technology, so they are going to use it in the future, after the appearance.

At the same time, the management of the company recognizes that the procedure for freezing the brain is currently completely fatal; it will not work with revitalizing the body of a person who has undergone such a procedure. But this is not required, since the main idea is to create digital copies of people. The Y Combinator team liked the project so much that the startup was singled out among a large number of purely technological companies.

Digitizing the brain, or rather, human consciousness - an idea that excites the imagination of many people. Among others - Raymond Kurzweil . This idea is shown in some films and books (in the TV series “Black Mirror” the question also rises). And indeed, if one imagines that human consciousness has learned to digitize, then it becomes clear that this is about immortality, one of its forms.

By the way, the company Nectome is not a "one-day", in any case, many experts cooperate with it. One of them, Edward Boyden, is the lead neuroscientist at MIT. In addition, the company received sponsorship from the authorities of one of the US states.

However, some scientists question the performance of the company's model. In their opinion, giving your brain to a certain company that is going to keep it frozen for many years is not the best idea. In addition, a large number of ethical and philosophical questions arise, which are not so easy to answer.

In general, the procedure for extracting the human brain for subsequent digitization (unknown in how far the future) for the client will not differ from euthanasia. The only thing that distinguishes the Nectome from the existing "services" of euthanasia - after the death of the client, the brain is removed, which freezes. Many believe that in the future, the digitization procedure will be really available.

Despite the fact that the service already exists and offers its services, the “repository for the brain” is not yet ready and will not be ready in the next few years. In addition, there is no guarantee that the frozen brain will preserve the memory and everything that forms the personality (which, by the way, is unknown). Nevertheless, the company without a twinge of conscience announced that it would work on the example of Tesla , which asked for prepayment when making pre-order for electric cars that were not yet manufactured. True, unlike the real product, Nectome sells, in fact, air. Yes, and for the design of pre-order asks not $ 1,000, but ten times more than Tesla. True, customers who change their mind promise to return the money.

At the moment, there are 25 gullible customers who have allocated funds in full. One of them is Sam Altman , a 32-year-old investor, co-founder of Y Combinator. In his opinion, a company that promises to digitize a human brain will be able to achieve real results as technology develops.

Developing a server where all information about the frozen brain of patients will be stored will take several years. This is not such a simple process, so scientists will have to tinker considerably. The main problem is that, as far as can be judged, the brain is irreversibly damaged when frozen.

New - well forgotten old

The idea of ​​storing bodies or separate organs in frozen form is far from new. Organizations that are engaged in freezing and further storage of bodies, there are a couple of decades. One of the most famous companies of this kind is the Alcor Life Extension Foundation . In its cryocontainers, 150 bodies and customers' heads are stored separately from the body, frozen using liquid nitrogen. One of the bodies belongs to the former athlete, famous baseball player Ted Williams. Freezing with the promise to defrost the body and cure it is carried out despite the fact that scientists do not know how much freezing at ultra-low temperatures affects individual organs and the brain.

A few years ago, 21st Century Medicine was founded. The goal of the founders is to clarify the situation with damages from ultralow temperatures. The scientists who founded this company created, among other things, a new combined method of freezing , combined with embalming. He proved to be effective, if only because there is no visible brain damage with this method of freezing. Experts checked not only the state of the tissues, but also the synapses of individual neurons, by a connection. It turned out that there was no visible damage.

According to neuroscientists, connectomas of a single person can be used to decrypt / store his personality. In this, in particular, Ken Heyworth, neurobiologist, who holds the post of president of the Brain Preservation Foundation, is sure. The organization rewarded the founders of 21st Century Medicine for the almost complete preservation of the pig's brain, which scientists froze using their method.

Most interestingly, the brain may not need to be thawed to digitize. “When the brain is dead, it can be compared to a turned off computer, which still stores the necessary information on the hard disk,” says Heyworth. Of course, the comparison is very, very approximate; it cannot be called correct. But the founders of the service operate with just such concepts.

They believe that information can be extracted by building a digital copy of a frozen brain, taking into account all, absolutely all connections. But they - a huge amount. Now even the study of the brain of the mouse - the most difficult task, what can we say about the human brain. “We may be able to realize these plans in 100 years,” says Heyworth. He himself argues that if he once finds out that he is mortally ill, he will choose euthanasia, which he himself invented, in the hope that his brain will be able to digitize in the future.



The seriousness of their intentions relatively recently demonstrated by representatives of Nectome. They were able to get the body of a deceased elderly woman, and removed her brain just 2.5 hours after death. The brain was frozen in order to demonstrate the capabilities of the technology. It was the first demonstration of the method, called "aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation".

The body was obtained from the company Aeternitas. She controls the bodies of people who have bequeathed their mortal shell to science. Age, cause of death and other details are not indicated in order to avoid revealing the identity of the deceased. The preparation procedure lasts about six hours, all necessary actions are performed in the morgue. According to the creators of the technology, all this can be considered as embalming, preserving not only external signs, but also the internal content, that is, the person’s identity. The brain of the woman was prepared very carefully and after freezing became one of the “pioneers” of the Nectome service.

After the procedure, it was divided into thinnest plates, photographed with an electron microscope. All this is necessary in order to obtain images of all the elements of the brain, including the most subtle connections between individual cells. Only in this case, the brain can be digitized, although in the future.

Despite the somewhat skeptical attitude of scientists towards Nectome, the company managed to get solid funding. For example, $ 960,000 was provided by the National Institute of Mental Health (Eng. National Institute of Mental Health). About $ 100,000 more was received by a startup from Y combinator.

It was said above that many scientists are skeptical about the initiative of a startup. The problem is that now we do not know what the human consciousness is. So there is no guarantee at all that by digitizing images made with an electron microscope (even if all this is done without the slightest disturbance and very carefully), the brain will act as a computer model. And it is not clear when exactly the technologies will appear that will enable the digitization procedure. It is extremely complex. Computer equipment that is able to process all this information, creating a digital model, will appear very soon, if at all.