Sparks Brain Preservation

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 a deadline or a target number. The only requirement is that the candidate be a paid member ($150/yr) of Sparks Brain Preservation by the time we vote. So basically, we wait until the right person or people come along, and then we grow the number of directors. I'm guessing we might eventually end up with about 8. More than that is a pain when trying to have a conference call. So if you are serious, this forum thread is the place to post your candidacy. If you want more privacy, there's a slight chance that we might turn on some forum features of our membership portal at some point. The portal is not quite live yet.

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 bylaws that this board will take control in the event that something happens to me. To give them the resources to ensure perpetual patient care, we will also need to build up the assets of the company. This would include getting the building paid off. And even though I waffle back and forth on the need for a Patient Care Fund, it might make sense from a marketing perspective.

I am hereby submitting my candidacy for the Advisory Board of Directors.

Here is some information about me. I have been interested in brain preservation since college. I originally signed up for preservation with the Cryonics Institute in 2009, and later switched to Alcor. I then switched to Oregon Cryonics (now Sparks Brain Preservation) in 2019, when I was living in New York City.

Over the years, I have read a lot of content about the topic online. For example, I read all of Mike Darwin's blog, and I participated in his Cryonics Intelligence Test as "Synaptic": http://chronopause.com/chronopause.com/ ... index.html. It's interesting that Jordan was one of the few other respondents.

I was also a volunteer for the Brain Preservation Foundation, starting from 2014. When aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation was going to win the Brain Preservation Foundation prize, I began to look in-depth into the molecular effects of aldehydes. I eventually decided that aldehyde crosslinks seem extremely unlikely to destroy any important molecular information. This research led to the review that I wrote about the molecular effects of glutaraldehyde: https://osf.io/preprints/osf/8zd4e_v1. Along with the high-quality structural preservation that aldehyde methods can achieve under a range of circumstances, this led me to my current belief, which is that aldehyde-based preservation is clearly the best current option for structural brain preservation.

After completing an MD/PhD program at Mount Sinai, during my residency and post-doc, I did more research in a brain bank. This made me even more interested in Oregon Cryonics, because the aldehyde methods they used were so similar to what is used in conventional neuroscience research and brain banks. Eventually, I was beyond thrilled when Jordan offered me a position to do research here, which I started in July 2023.

The past couple of years have been a whirlwind. Time goes by fast. I hope that we have done some useful research. And I believe that our current ability to preserve the structure of whole human brains is the best in the world. But we aren't at all satisfied. We are just getting started and still have a ton of research work to do to optimize our methods. I personally won't be satisfied until we have a very reliable (>99% probability) option for preserving the important structures across the entire human brain, verified by ultrastructural imaging, ideally under realistic, less-than-ideal circumstances, for an accessible price. I'm not sure if we will ever achieve that, but we will try to make progress towards it.

I am highly committed to seeing this organization survive and thrive. I believe that one of the most important things that posterity will judge me on is whether or not the preserved patients that I help care for have a chance to live on in the future. I take that seriously. Long-term preservation and organizational survival is a key component of it. That's why I want to be on the Advisory Board of Directors, to help steer the organization over the long-term in a direction which gives our patients the highest probability chance of being revived in the future, if that ever becomes possible, and which gives our members the highest quality preservation, if they ever need these services.

In addition to my medical and scientific experience, I also have some governance experience as a director of Apex Neuroscience. I have a collaborative approach and will strive to listen to the other board members and take their opinions seriously. I want to note as well that if the Advisory Board of Directors discusses my own employment or compensation, then I would of course recuse myself from that discussion or vote. Thanks for reading this.