Oregon Brain Preservation

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...

I just finished binge watching Fallout. Great show. Some of the ridiculous impossible technologies included cold fusion, brain in a jar, and cryonics. There are two fundamentally different ways of depicting cryonics. The nearly universal way that it's depicted on TV and in movies is as a suspended a...

We're building a vault. While not underground, it will be reinforced concrete on all 6 sides. The plans are all drawn and stamped, but I'm having the engineer make a few minor changes. Should be ready to start building within a few months.

We have a tentative plan for doing remote cases. We will have a number of pathology specialists here on staff. They will be trained in our techniques and use them regularly. Airlines allow formaldehyde in checked baggage, so we will send out one or two specialists to the remote funeral home where th...

The robotic surgery was a total pipe dream, of course. But today we performed our first atraumatic brain extraction. No cuts and no overhandling. Our procedure and skills are getting better and better. It's not perfected yet, but it should be after a few dozen more cases. This was the first time tha...

Agreed. Good job, and it sounds like you are on the right track. I would point out one little nagging detail, though. I'm not sure that your deanimation plan will succeed. That step is probably harder than most people naively assume. There's even a good chance that most historical cryonics cases did...

Absolutely. It's really hard to tell how long it will take because it depends heavily on exponential progress in AI. But I do know it will take a very long time even assuming continued exponential progress. We wouldn't have any hope at all of solving it in a reasonable timeframe if it was linear pro...

Good to see progress from different groups. I think that within about 60 years, we should have massively parallel 3D printers. By that, I mean thousands of very small robotic arms simultaneously 3D printing a single object. 60 years or so after that, such devices will have evolved to the point where...

Removing a brain from a skull is rather difficult to do without damage. It's a problem that nobody else cares about. Scientists doing research don't care if they cause some damage because they can just use the undamaged tissue. A pathologist performing an autopsy doesn't care if they cause damage ei...