The Unapologetic Cause
We at Nectome are out to save the world.
Because everyone is going to die.
If I say “everyone is dying”, then add, “…of old age,” it sounds like a joke. But 100% of people are actually going to die, and that is…not funny.
The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.
—1 Corinthians 15:26
As I told my boss in my first interview, “Death is the great enemy”. More than anyone else I’ve ever met, my boss always remembers that he’s going to die, he knows it, he’s not happy about it, and he’s determined to do what he can about it.
But how do you solve death?
But, you ask, how do you solve a condition that’s been with all living things, since living things started? How do you overcome 4 billions years of precedence?
Let’s branch out two possible answers.
Cure aging (and protect against accidents).
Freeze the dying and hope the future can save them.
We’re working on a variation of approach 2.
Cryonics…already exists?
So it does. Cryonics companies can have someone frozen in as little as 25 hours after death1.
Our research shows that brains can have lost crucial information by 13 minutes after death.2
My boss worked at a cryonics company for awhile, decided currently available methods weren’t good enough, and set out to come up with something that works, and that works reliably.
Have you found something better?
Yes … sort of.
Robert won the Brain Preservation Prize for using aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation (ASC) on rabbits and pigs. Electron microscopy images showed amazing preservation of all the fine structures in the brain.
What’s the catch?
There’s two of them.
The ASC method preserves the person in a way that doesn’t allow for biological revival3.
The ASC method is performed on living (anesthetized) subjects, who are then dead by current medical definitions4. This is illegal to do to humans.
Uhh…
Yep, we know. Let me deal with the second catch first.
When a person wants to die, killing them is not called murder, but instead called assisted suicide. Assisted suicide is illegal in many places, but there are a few that allow it. Nectome may be able to operate in these places, substituting ASC as the method of death, or at least administering it very quickly afterward5.
About that first catch…
We don’t expect to bio-rez people. We expect to upload their minds to a computer.
I have objections.
We know you do. We’ve heard many of them. But doing that justice will require more time and a separate blog post.
Cryonics places mostly don’t seem to publish statistics, but that was the shortest time in reviewing the published case reports on one particular site. Most of the times looked like 12–24 hours to the start of perfusion, and 5 days to complete freezing.
Specifically, if a perfusion starts that long after death, electron microscopes show that membranes have degraded too much for traceability.
Probably. It’s not 100% impossible that some future tech will get around the irreversibility of fixation, just quite unlikely.
The terminology around death will be its own post eventually.
Much of our work over the past year has been aimed at finding a way to “administer it very quickly afterward”.