Excellent points! Personally, having worked in neuroscience labs and done a bunch of both I’m really excited about cryopreservation and aldehyde preservation of brain tissue… I’m super bullish on aldehyde and bearish on cryo. Aldehyde is a lot cheaper, and a lot more robust! You can then do important further techniques like plastic hydrogel infusion (e.g. CLARITY) to further improve the preservation durability and the readability of the preserved brain.
Once hydrogel preservation becomes available I plan to sign myself and my spouse up for it. I place high likelihood on not-so-distant scan-to-WBE, and low (but non-negligible) probability on nanotech reconstruction. Scanning is a LOT easier, and rapid progress is being made. I predict first full human brain scan and emulation sometime in the 2040s, even with only a moderate-AI-progress-but-not-full-blown-singularity future. If we hit full-blown singularity in the early 2030s, we probably get WBE within a year or two (if alignment goes well).
I am curious what you think about optical techniques for connectome tracing. Personally, I really like the idea especially as optical microscopy will allow for lots of stains to be used and will hopefully make inferring electrical properties from dead cells easier. So far though, there doesn’t seem to be a large effort of connectome tracing from expansion microscopy (although a lot of research into the various microscopes and robots to automate everything) and even less on getting cellular properties post mortem. If you have thoughts I would like to hear, if you have research you think is relevant that would be great too.
On the contrary! There’s a lot of work going into expansion microscopy connectome tracing! Both in academia and commercially. I think it’s very promising.
Wow this is great, I am once again incredibly frustrated by my seeming inability to find relevant research without asking people already in the know. If you can think of anything else that would be interesting, please let me know. If there is a single site anywhere that has links and lists of relevant research that would be great. Even OpenWorm and CarbonCopies seem a little scattered but this might be a reading comprehension issue on my part.
I’ve met some of the team working on this project. They seem competent and motivated and optimistic they will succeed: https://e11.bio/blog/roadmap
Excellent points! Personally, having worked in neuroscience labs and done a bunch of both I’m really excited about cryopreservation and aldehyde preservation of brain tissue… I’m super bullish on aldehyde and bearish on cryo. Aldehyde is a lot cheaper, and a lot more robust! You can then do important further techniques like plastic hydrogel infusion (e.g. CLARITY) to further improve the preservation durability and the readability of the preserved brain. Once hydrogel preservation becomes available I plan to sign myself and my spouse up for it. I place high likelihood on not-so-distant scan-to-WBE, and low (but non-negligible) probability on nanotech reconstruction. Scanning is a LOT easier, and rapid progress is being made. I predict first full human brain scan and emulation sometime in the 2040s, even with only a moderate-AI-progress-but-not-full-blown-singularity future. If we hit full-blown singularity in the early 2030s, we probably get WBE within a year or two (if alignment goes well).
I am curious what you think about optical techniques for connectome tracing. Personally, I really like the idea especially as optical microscopy will allow for lots of stains to be used and will hopefully make inferring electrical properties from dead cells easier. So far though, there doesn’t seem to be a large effort of connectome tracing from expansion microscopy (although a lot of research into the various microscopes and robots to automate everything) and even less on getting cellular properties post mortem. If you have thoughts I would like to hear, if you have research you think is relevant that would be great too.
On the contrary! There’s a lot of work going into expansion microscopy connectome tracing! Both in academia and commercially. I think it’s very promising.
Here’s an example: https://cic.ini.usc.edu/
Wow this is great, I am once again incredibly frustrated by my seeming inability to find relevant research without asking people already in the know. If you can think of anything else that would be interesting, please let me know. If there is a single site anywhere that has links and lists of relevant research that would be great. Even OpenWorm and CarbonCopies seem a little scattered but this might be a reading comprehension issue on my part.
I’ve met some of the team working on this project. They seem competent and motivated and optimistic they will succeed: https://e11.bio/blog/roadmap