Hi! Thank you so much for your work. I have been wanting to ask some questions ever since I read your Asterisk article!
Given that we actually can restore vitrified brain tissue back to life right now (mouse brain hippocampus slices, ~70% functionality, synapse plasticity restored; much less consistently whole brains), does this mean Alcor and CI’s vitrification-only approaches are not so hopeless?
Doesn’t glutaraldehyde permanently damage some of the chemistry of the cell? If engrams are an important part of information storage in the brain, and engrams are encoded chemically, and thus the connectome isn’t the whole picture, doesn’t this mean that fixation by that method could destroy important information?
Why aren’t Alcor and CI doing MAiD? If you are right about the 12 minute window, and they believe you, wouldn’t they want to set up their own clinics in Oregon for this, and to offer preparatory services as well? Have you reached out to them? Have they responded?
What do you think the prices will be in 5, 10 years? Will this always cost as much as a house?
Evidence points at memories being stored in the physical size of synapses between the neurons in the engram. See Aspirational Neuroscience Journal Club’s video walking through the Goto 2021 paper, where mouse memories are deleted by stopping the synapses’ ability to change size:
Also, fixation, because it locks proteins in place, is generally better at retaining chemical information than cryofixation alone. Vitrification itself will lock everything in place, but the process of introducing the cryoprotectants, and the ischemic damage during the delay, causes a lot of disruption at multiple levels. That’s why fixation is standard for neuroscientists looking to label/map specific chemicals in the brain.
Hi! Thank you so much for your work. I have been wanting to ask some questions ever since I read your Asterisk article!
Given that we actually can restore vitrified brain tissue back to life right now (mouse brain hippocampus slices, ~70% functionality, synapse plasticity restored; much less consistently whole brains), does this mean Alcor and CI’s vitrification-only approaches are not so hopeless?
Doesn’t glutaraldehyde permanently damage some of the chemistry of the cell? If engrams are an important part of information storage in the brain, and engrams are encoded chemically, and thus the connectome isn’t the whole picture, doesn’t this mean that fixation by that method could destroy important information?
Why aren’t Alcor and CI doing MAiD? If you are right about the 12 minute window, and they believe you, wouldn’t they want to set up their own clinics in Oregon for this, and to offer preparatory services as well? Have you reached out to them? Have they responded?
What do you think the prices will be in 5, 10 years? Will this always cost as much as a house?
Evidence points at memories being stored in the physical size of synapses between the neurons in the engram. See Aspirational Neuroscience Journal Club’s video walking through the Goto 2021 paper, where mouse memories are deleted by stopping the synapses’ ability to change size:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saFDeGTYnRU
Also, fixation, because it locks proteins in place, is generally better at retaining chemical information than cryofixation alone. Vitrification itself will lock everything in place, but the process of introducing the cryoprotectants, and the ischemic damage during the delay, causes a lot of disruption at multiple levels. That’s why fixation is standard for neuroscientists looking to label/map specific chemicals in the brain.