The other day we came across strange news. You don't hear about this every day. A startup sponsored by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for $ 10,000, will keep your brain at the synapse level. Already in this century, the company promises, neuroscientists will appear who can extract information stored in these synapses, upload it to a supercomputer, reload your memories and "archive your mind." But there is one thing: the technology will only work if you are still alive. To keep your brain connected - the intricate network of connections of all of the brain's synapses - they will have to kill you. Sounds insanely funny or ridiculously insane. And it's hard to believe. But we are adults, we are interested in the scientific side of the issue, and not bare promises.
Not so long ago, Nectome even showed its blue dream to the Y Combinator startup incubator and … got into the list of desirable partners. And clients showed up almost instantly. It's not hard to see why: Nectome sells an old but very attractive idea of uploading consciousness to the cloud.
Wait to roll your eyes skeptically. Nectome Brain Conservation Technique won a $ 80,000 prize from the Brain Conservation Foundation (BPF) for the conservation of the pig brain. Now they have teamed up with one of the most prominent neurotechnologists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Dr. Ed Boyden, to continue working on the method together.
Boyden had previously developed awesome technology that physically enlarges brain tissue 10 to 20 times. By combining Nectome's special cryopreservation sauce with Boyden's expansion microscopy, a start-up can achieve something astounding: preserving the entire human brain at the nanoscale, where every synapse can be seen through an electron microscope.
The idea recently attracted a $ 900,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health and over $ 1 million in funding.
Dr. Sebastian Sjung once said, "I am my connectome." It's not hard to imagine that your memories (and even yourself) can be extracted from a carefully preserved brain, and your consciousness will take on new life.
In short, a brain in a vat is nothing new. But what then?
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Frozen in time
Unlike cryogenics, Nectome does not store your head in vats of liquid nitrogen. Instead, it uses the aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation (ASC) method to embalm the living brain prior to cryoprotection.
The main goal is not to maintain "biological viability", say the startup team members, "but to maintain the delicate and highly structural shape of the brain."
First published in Cryobiology in 2015, ASC is an extremely unpleasant method: immersed in a state of complete anesthesia (anesthesia), the body, while the heart is artificially supported, gets rid of blood, which is replaced by a chemical called glutaraldehyde. This retainer acts like molecular handcuffs, sewing proteins together and stabilizing their structure.
Keep in mind: this process kills the brain. There is no turning back.
But this is precisely the goal. The dead brain cannot start posthumous biological processes leading to decay. The retainer keeps the brain as natural as possible - neuroscientists often use it to process brain samples before looking through a microscope.
Once “fixed,” the Nectome team uses an automatic pump to start their own blood circulation system, but with a cryoprotective solution. The brain is then removed by the surgeons and placed in an accumulator for cooling to -135 degrees Celsius.
Thus, "biological time seems to stop, allowing the brain to be stored for a very long time," the scientists explain.
First tested on the brains of a rabbit and a pig, the technology worked great. After thawing, the cryoprotection is washed away, leaving the fully preserved brain for connectomic analysis.
Now replace the rabbits and pigs with humans. This is what Nectome wants to do for its customers.
Priceless currency
Nectome has already launched its fingers into preserving the human brain, according to MIT Technology Review. This February, the team bought the brain of a recently deceased woman and performed an ASC at the morgue. The process took about six hours.
Although the valuable organ was dead within two and a half hours, the woman's brain was "one of the finest ever preserved," says Nectome co-founder Robert McIntyre.
Let's digress for a moment and put aside the promise of uploading consciousness. The integration of ASC with extended microscopy has tremendous scientific potential. According to Ma Chao, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, ASC-treated tissues can provide important information about the subcellular structures in a neuron.
“This information can be very important for research on brain aging and degenerative disorders,” he said in an interview.
By comparing the synaptic structures of a healthy brain and brain with Alzheimer's disease, for example, scientists can obtain valuable data - which regions of the brain are most affected, which structural pathologies, and so on.
Re-created mind
Not everyone agrees that ASC is a suitable way to “archive the mind”.
Some of the arguments against are technological. Despite billions of dollars and several large-scale brain mapping programs, no one (so far) has been able to capture a mammalian brain at the synapse level - not even a mouse.
But the scales of the brain of a mouse and a person are very different: in the human brain there are millions of neurons, each of which forms thousands of connections with others, forming trillions of synapses. Today, even the most advanced attempts to present such a picture cannot cope with even one cubic millimeter of a mouse brain.
Dr. Kenneth Hayworth, president of the Brain Preservation Foundation, doesn't see this as a problem. In 100 years, he says, we will have whole-brain imaging technology. And speaking out in support of ASC as an end-of-life procedure, he notes that since the information content is preserved, there is "at least the possibility of recovering the patient in the future using very advanced technologies."
Technological barriers aside. Perhaps a much more controversial idea would be that your memories, thoughts, and personality can be recovered by studying structure alone.
The living brain, after all, is constantly in motion. Neuroscientists often capture the fleeting process of neurons by inserting electrodes into the brain to capture electrical signals. Or they use glow-in-the-dark protein sensors to monitor neural activity.
In other words, like any biological process, thought is dynamic. It is impossible to recreate a whole person using only the letters of DNA - the expression of his DNA based on the complex interactions between himself and his environment is what makes him a person.
Likewise, it is quite possible that you will not be able to reconstruct the history of neural activity from the immobile brain. It may not be possible to extract a single thought from the complete map of the connectome.
Dr. Sam Gershman, a neuroscience informatics scientist at Harvard University, calls the connection "a functionally depleted source of information about brain function."
Think about it: neuroscientists have had a full connection of C. elegans, a nematode worm, since the 1980s. What did the creature experience before death? What were his last thoughts? Despite the fact that the worm only had 7,000 neural connections, we never learned anything.
"The synaptic structure alone will provide only a static map," Ma says. “However, there are many more factors that can influence memory and intelligence. By freezing the brain at a certain point in time, we lose temporary information about the brain."
After all, it’s not clear what needs to be saved to extract “you” from the massive jumble of neural connections in your head. Is the structure of the synapse sufficient? Do we also need to capture memory-related proteins? What about non-neural cells, glia, that are involved in memory? Or would it be more expedient to simulate the strength of synapses in a living brain inside a computer in order to be able to "load consciousness" after death (and before it too)?
Nectome has a plan for that: by 2020, they plan to extract "high-level memory bits" from the stored mouse brain. On the human brain, they have not even tried to do this yet.
Ethical nuances
Whether the company can deliver on its promise is a question. But perhaps more worrisome is what Nectome plans to offer, in fact, an as-yet-untested service for terminally ill people.
After consulting with lawyers who are well versed in the issue of euthanasia, the company decided that its service would be quite legal. But even Hayworth thinks it needs to be approached with caution.
Any changes to the ASC method must be thoroughly tested in animals and reviewed by the wider medical community before it is proposed as a medical procedure.
So far, there are already 25 people in the queue, and this number will grow. In the end, the potential for revival, while small, is all too tempting.
Still not changing your mind? Think hard.
“We haven’t even begun to interpret the recorded synapses in terms of memories in living people,” said Dr. Ai-Ming Bao, deputy director of the School of Medicine at Zhejiang University in China. “This is real science fiction. They promise too much."
Ilya Khel
