Delivered at the 2009 H+ Summit in Irvine, California
Fellow transhumanists, like you I am very enthusiastic about the future and I want to personally experience the future a few hundred years from now. But I am also a realist. I believe that one day medical science will find cures to the thousands of diseases that currently afflict us, and will even stop and reverse aging – but I do not think this will happen in my lifetime, nor in the lifetime of many of the people within the sound of my voice today. Perhaps not even in my children’s’ lifetimes. The technical problems involved in curing all human disease and degeneration are simply too complex, and too much basic science remains to be discovered.
SEEING THE FUTURE
If we wish to personally see the future there is only one rational alternative that I know of – brain preservation for long-term storage. Brain preservation technology is quite advanced and there is every reason to expect that, given sufficient intellectual and monetary resources, a standardized surgical procedure could be perfected within the next five years that would guarantee 99.9% of the synaptic connectivity of a human brain could be preserved, along with sufficient structural and molecular information to allow the person to be successfully reanimated by future technology.
THE PROBLEM
Unfortunately the proper intellectual and monetary resources are NOT being devoted to this research. In fact, the general medical and scientific community has turned its back on such research. Some within the scientific community have actually been outright hostile to such research. The few companies offering brain preservation services (i.e. cryonic suspensions) are unregulated and their methods have not been verified at even close to a sufficient level in open scientific journals.
Further, it is currently illegal to perform a brain preservation procedure before death has been declared, and no hospital in the nation provides the fast response stabilization procedures necessary to ensure proper preservation. This means that a person must often endure hours of ischemic damage before the preservation procedures can begin – the result is massive destruction of brain structure. This situation is far worse than the back-alley abortion clinics prior to the Roe v. Wade decision – this is like a back-alley emergency heart surgery clinic servicing the entire United States out of a small building in Arizona. And even under the most optimal of conditions, these companies are under continual legal and media attacks undermining their long-term stability.
This situation is intolerable. We have the technology to reach the future within our grasp, but ignorance and superstition are preventing us from developing and applying this technology. I am terribly angered by this situation, and I hope that I can get at least a few of you in the audience angered as well. Angered enough to do something about it.
SCIENCE VS. SUPERSTITION
How did we get into this mess? – Well I argue that it is mainly due to miss understanding and miss targeting of the goal of cryonics. Demonstration of viability after suspension has always been the gold standard by which cryonics has been measured. That is, can we lower a person down to temperatures low enough to stop all decay and then simply “rewarm” the person and bring them back to life. This goal is incredibly difficult to reach, perhaps on par with curing ageing itself. This goal is also completely unnecessary. This goal has not been set by the technical requirements of reaching the future as understood by our best present day science, it is a goal set by superstition – a superstition that your soul is somehow locked into the biomolecules of your body and that if your revival technique requires too drastic a change to that original biological substrate then ‘you’ will be lost.
Different people put different thresholds on how radical a preservation and repair technology can be before their ‘self’ is lost. Most dismiss the idea of long-term suspension out of hand assuming that a complete shutdown of neural activity cannot be recovered from. This is ludicrous since many people survive surgeries each year that do exactly that. Other people dismiss the idea of preserving only the brain, or are uncomfortable with significant nanotechnological repair of the brain.
Almost everyone I have talked to draws the line for revival techniques that require destructively scanning the information contained in the circuitry of the brain and uploading this into a computer. They say “this mind upload may be a copy of me but it will not be me”. Well I am here to say this is nonsense, utter nonsense based in superstition and not science. Furthermore, it is nonsense that will prevent you (and I) from reaching the future.
A COMPUTATIONAL THEORY OF THE MIND
The past hundred years of research in cognitive science and neuroscience have firmly established that the entirety of what we call our mind, or our soul if you like, is in actuality a complex information processing stream computed by the neuronal circuits in our brain. Our subjective first-person conscious experience is synonymous with the particular symbolic and subsymbolic computations performed by the moment-to-moment firing patterns of our neurons.
This is called the “computational theory of mind” and it is about as well established as the fact that we evolved from a common ancestor with the chimpanzee or the fact that the earth is billions of years old. NOT BELIEVING IN THE COMPUTATIONAL THEORY OF MIND IS EQUIVLENT TO BEING A CREATIONIST. It is a willful ignorance of the last hundred years of cognitive and neuroscience research.
The key point I want to stress is that it is essentially a corollary of the computational theory of mind that long-term structural preservation of the brain, followed in the future by destructive scanning of its neural circuitry and uploading into a computer emulation will bring the original person back to life.
We understand enough about the brain’s functioning to define the requirements that such a long-term brain preservation procedure must meet to ensure successful revival – the precise connectivity between all neurons must be preserved along with enough structure and molecular information to infer the function of these neurons and connections.
PRESERVATION TECHNIQUES
The good news is that there is not just one, but two preservation techniques today that come very close to meeting these requirements at least in the laboratory – 1) cryonic vitrification followed by low-temperature storage, and 2) chemical fixation and embedding in plastic followed by room-temperature storage. And we have the tools necessary to comprehensively verify the quality of preservation of these techniques. Furthermore, there is every reason to believe that these techniques could demonstrate essentially perfect preservation of large brains in 5 years given relatively modest monetary and intellectual resources.
DETERMINING THE CRITERIA
Demonstration of such structural preservation of the brain should be the criteria by which cryonic and other preservation techniques are judged, not viability. We must get the scientific community to appreciate this connection between structural preservation and a medical cure for death, and we must bring them up to speed on how incredibly close we are to achieving the necessary level of structural preservation. Only when we get the scientific community to re-embrace this research will we have a real chance at overcoming not just the technical roadblocks but also the legal and practical roadblocks. Only then can we have a decent chance at personally seeing the future a few hundred years from now.
CHANGING PERCEPTIONS
How can we achieve this radical realignment of the perception of brain preservation? I have racked my brain over this, and have been especially frustrated with the continuing disregard of these ideas by the scientific community even in the face of powerful new research coming out of 21st century medicine showing good structural and even functional preservation of small brain slices – even in the face of new techniques for 3D scanning of neural tissue at the nanometer level coming out of the Max Plank Institute at Heidelberg and my own lab at Harvard University, and even in the face of the first large scale simulations of cortical dynamics in the Blue Brain Project.
I believe that the general scientific community simply has not had the complete argument clearly laid out before them. I have an unwavering faith in the scientific method and in the true open-mindedness of the scientific community. If we clearly articulate the reasoning behind why we believe human brain preservation is a viable alternative to death, if we set the clear goal of demonstrating whole brain ultrastructural preservation, and if we adequately publicize this reasoning and goal, then I have faith that the scientific community will join us wholeheartedly in pursuing these goals and in lobbying for the eventual availability of these techniques as surgical procedures in hospitals where they have always belonged.
SECURING THE FUTURE | AN INNOVATIVE APPROACH TO BRIDGING THE GAP
The most efficient way I can think of to accomplish these goals is the formation of a Brain Preservation Technology Prize. A prize has the crucial advantage that it must very precisely define the criteria for success – and this will allow us to redefine in the minds of the public (and crucially in the minds of the scientific community) what the criteria for a successful cryonic or other preservation should be.
Contestants would have to demonstrate a surgical procedure for long-term preservation of a large mammalian brain that preserves 99.9% of the synaptic connectivity of the brain. Success would be judged by thick sectioning the entire brain and performing a comprehensive electron microscopic survey to verify that all regions have been adequately preserved. Then, crucially, 10 small subsamples would be removed from random brain regions and prepared for 3D electron microscopic volume imaging using the SBFSEM, FIBSEM, or ATLUM – three new devices for mapping the precise connectivity of neural circuits that Todd Huffman will be talking about in his talk on Sunday. This step is crucial because it will prove that the basic substrate that our memories are written in – the synaptic connections between neurons – has been preserved at a level sufficient to be precisely traced. In addition, it will vividly demonstrate the types of technologies that may one day be used to upload a preserved brain and restore the person to life.
The medical groups that develop the surgical perfusion and preservation techniques should not be required perform these electron microscopic survey and tracing tests themselves. That is too great of a burden to put on any one group, and it is also not in the spirit of an independently verified prize. I have spent the last five years developing machines for sectioning and electron imaging brain tissue, and I have plans on my desk for a new machine that could perform a thick section survey of a volume the size of a whole human brain. A well funded prize could ensure that all surgical contestants have easy access these or other types of imaging tools necessary to evaluate their attempts, and to independently verify their eventual success.
WHY THIS WILL WORK
A well funded prize will generate the kind of publicity and excitement necessary to spur a real revaluation of the principles behind brain preservation. One of the most useful things that a prize will accomplish is to publicize the existing progress that has already been made toward structural preservation of a brain. For example, the vitrification techniques developed by 21st century medicine and the surgical techniques employed by ALCOR currently preserve structure far better than most in the scientific community even think possible. This is despite several peer-reviewed journal articles demonstrating such preservation with limited electron microscopic imaging. A well publicized prize will spotlight this research, pointing out what has already been accomplished and what needs to be further accomplished.
Furthermore, a prize will not be rejected by skeptics; on the contrary it will be embraced by skeptics. Such a prize is absolutely not advocating that people spend money on unapproved medical techniques, quite the opposite; it will be seen as providing a skeptical investigation of the practice much like James Randi and his million dollar prize for a real paranormal demonstration.
In closing, I think it is time for us in the transhumanists community to start embracing a more ambitious set of near-term goals. Here is my list of goals:
In five years or less we should realign the scientific community’s attitude toward brain preservation from one of indifference and hostility, toward one that is fully embracing of brain preservation as a viable means of curing death.
In five years or less a reliable surgical technique for brain preservation should be demonstrated that can preserve 99.9% of the synaptic connections in an entire human brain. This should be verified independently through a comprehensive electron microscopic survey of the entire preserved brain and by several small 3D volume reconstructions.
Within 10 years or less every hospital and paramedic unit in the United States should be ready to perform the initial stabilization steps of such a surgical preservation procedure – with later (less time critical) steps being handled at centralized facilities.
Within 10 years or less the legal rights of people that wish to be preserved should be secured. Persons should be ensured a quality surgical preservation procedure performed by a licensed professional. And, very importantly, brain preservation should be treated legally as an elective surgical procedure with a very real chance of successful resuscitation of the patient. As such, persons must have the right to undergo a brain preservation procedure before “legal death” has been declared.
These are ambitious goals. I submit that one promising way to actually achieve them is through the formation of a well funded Brain Preservation Technology Prize. If I were a millionaire and not a low paid scientist I would fund such a prize myself. If called on, I will gladly offer my technical expertise in the area of nanoscopic volume imaging toward the task.
Hopefully we as a community can rally behind this or some other plan and will see in the near future the scientific community, and perhaps the public as well, embrace brain preservation as a medical cure for death and as a doorway to the infinite riches of the distant future.
Thank you.
Kenneth J. Hayworth, PhD is a Postdoctoral Researcher at HarvardUniversity, Center for Brain Science. To learn more about Kenneth’s brain preservation technology, to see the prize proposal or to see links to technical papers that support arguments in Kenneth’s speech, visit www.brainpreservation.org
