Sparks Brain Preservation

After sleeping on it, I think it should actually be an "Advisory Board of Directors". If they had control over the daily business activities, it would just cause sclerosis and drama. The real reasons people want a Board of Directors is for succession and patient care. So we will write into...

The member portal is now live and you are welcome to join as a full member for $150/yr: Sign up Once signed up, log in here: https://sparks-brain.circle.so We're working on a better explanation of the benefits of becoming a member. That will become more obvious as our website changes from technical ...

It's time for a Board of Directors. We are in a growth push, after all, and we don't want anyone to hesitate from signing up because of worries about succession. It's hard to know how growth will progress. I propose that we immediately open up to start adding directors. I don't think there should be...

We now have a plan for membership. We are revamping the website to be less technical and more marketing. Membership will be a very affordable $150 yearly payment that will be the same regardless of age. All payments toward membership over the years will result in an equivalent discount on services w...

Vitalist Bay had an event in May https://www.vitalistbay.com/biostasis Our research scientist, Dr. Andy McKenzie, gave a talk in May that is now online here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqRW0_ERVtM Here's a summary: 0:00 Overview 1:39 Changing definition of death 3:47 Revival 6:35 Structure 8:21...

We've change the company name yet again to Sparks Brain Preservation. Since we decided to aggressively expand beyond Oregon, we found that the Oregon name was holding us back. Someone in SF would claim that we couldn't get to them fast enough even if we had a vehicle and staff in SF because they cou...

For context, the research program is separate from our main services. Brain preservation continues to be available anywhere in the US.

We've just ordered three ambulances to be built from scratch to our specifications. I spent 25 years looking for an appropriate vehicle, and there are simply no existing vehicles out there that are a good fit. Our ambulances will differ from standard ambulances as follows: -no sirens or lights -no e...

The best model for testing and refining structural preservation is donated human cadavers. We use a lot of cadavers. Organoids are very small. I suppose they could be useful to certain scientists for something, but it seems pretty far removed from what we are doing.

Don't forget about cracking, which can include areas of pulverization. There still isn't evidence that cooling below -20 C improves quality. Storage at -120 is possible, but hard and expensive. Incidentally, cracking might be worse if you use aldehyde prior to cryopreservation. That's one reason why...

I officially changed the name of our company today from Oregon Cryonics to Oregon Brain Preservation. Time to move on from that legacy. I didn't realize that it was so easy to change a company name. The State of Oregon considers it to still be the same company, with all of the history intact. We're ...

We think it remains quite stable at -20 C. We're currently storing at 0 C, which also seems to be very stable, but -20 C is easy and there are published papers that support doing that, so that's the goal. We're working on gathering more evidence so that we can quantify it and to also make sure that ...

Looks like I've gone completely to the dark side. I've decided that offering cryonics is unethical, whereas offering aldehyde brain preservation is not. I did not arrive at this position quickly or carelessly. It took 30 years of very gradually changing my mind. I accepted aldehyde as reasonable abo...

That detail was in the news article that I first ran across that talked about this paper. I read the paper after I made the post and couldn't find that detail either. I didn't feel like digging deeper. I suspect that it's somewhat accurate even though it's not in that specific paper. They've been wo...

The new moderation setting has been working to keep the spam away. But I still need to turn it down a little. If you make a post, I think it will need to go through moderation before it goes live. I'll try to be on the lookout for legit posts to let through, but it won't be immediate.

Any repair or upload technology will involve massive inference. Also, with implants, I'm not suggesting uploading until the technology is very mature. Since we will have had decades of experience with these implants by then, I suspect there will come a point when the pros of uploading will outweigh ...

The scientists' responses have some obvious internal contradictions. The big one is how they treat C. elegans and humans differently. In the estimate of C. elegans emulation probability, there are very few "never" responses. But for humans, there are many "never" responses. This ...

It looks like we will be moving our formalin-fixed brains from refrigerator storage into freezer storage. Yes, this will require some cryoprotection as a step after fixation. The freezer will be -20 C, which is much warmer than the -196 C achieved with liquid nitrogen. This means that the brains wil...

Hey, that's a good idea. If another one shows up, I'll browse anonymously to see if other people can see it.

Well, we had a few spam posts sneak through. Still not sure how. Any new user is supposed to require post approval, so I'll keep going through the settings to see if I missed something.

We do talk to them. Not sure what "joining" there is to be done. We all live in different cities and we are each doing the best we can. I can't really imagine anything more that we could do together than we already are.

I was a guest on the London Futurists Podcast in August: https://londonfuturists.buzzsprout.com/2028982/episodes/15517037-the-low-cost-future-of-preserving-brains-with-jordan-sparks I would also recommend listening to the related episodes featuring Emil Kendziorra, Max More, and Ken Hayworth which a...

The main new countermeasure is that all new user posts will require approval. If I have to waste too much time deleting those, then I might just require new users to call the office to get added.

Sorry about the spam. Working on a permanent fix.

A fruit fly has successfully been uploaded. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07558-y 140,000 neurons. It's the first complex brain to get uploaded. If you fire up the brain in an emulator and present it with a taste input, it will stick out it's tongue. How cool is that? I expect the quali...

Just super busy. Trying to find some time. It won't happen next week as I'll be on vacation. I will try hard to at least keep a current posted list of all patients, even if no time for a case report. As for the donated bodies, we get over 100 per year. We won't post those.

I just disabled registration of new users for a while. Too many spammers, and I won't be available to watch it closely this week. In a few weeks, I'll try to come up with a better anti-spam strategy and then turn it back on. Existing users can still make posts.

The beginnings of this technology already exist. Stentrode is a stent that gets implanted in blood vessels in the brain. It can be used in patients with severe paralysis caused by stroke, injury, ALS, etc. The stent has electrodes on it, making it a brain-computer interface. This feels like a much b...

Kurzweil's latest book just came out. I'm not going to discuss his AI predictions because we each have our own constantly evolving opinions about the trajectory of AI. But what caught my attention was the idea of using nanobots in the brain capillaries to perform a mind upload. I've always said that...

https://www.cradle.xyz/page/problem-statement https://www.cradle.xyz/page/founder-letter Laura Deming is an entrepreneur who seems to get unwarranted press coverage and money from gullible people. Fine, she got into MIT at a young age -- good for her. But then she dropped out. That's not something t...