That’s something we’re very interested in as well, since of course we’d like to expand internationally as we grow. If I recall correctly, Aurelia has spoken with a couple of Buddhists who believed in reincarnation and were excited about preservation.
In general I’ve been surprised by the broad base of appeal the idea of preservation has, including among religious people.
It’s 100k for a full pre-sale, or 20k for a discount card. The discount card is good for a free preservation if you wait 10 years to use it; if you use it sooner than that, you get a pro-rated discount based on how long you held it.
Details available here. The 20k option has been, as we expected, popular with a lot of people here; it’s intended to be a very cheap option for young people who plan ahead.
I’ll add it to our list of potential posts!
Thanks Anna! (Anna here is Nectome’s lab manager and is, of course, correct on the science.)
Given the full intention of reanimating the person in question, what’s the distinction between this and a medically induced coma?
This is a really interesting question, and one we’ve discussed a lot! I think it would be a very reasonable legal ruling to say that this counted as a kind of long-term medically induced coma. But no one has made that legal argument yet, and we’re committed to complying with the law as it stands.
I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on our new post! We get more in-depth about outside review of the science there.
There’s a very important legal distinction, which leads to some moderately inconvenient practical constraints. (Disclaimer: I’m neither a lawyer nor one of the science guys; if I’ve made a mistake here Aurelia will step in to correct me.)
When preserving an animal, it’s OK for us to administer euthasol, wait for the animal to be solidly unconscious, and then begin the surgical process of connecting the pumps that perfuse fixation chemicals. In terms of timing, this is great. It means that we can switch smoothly from the heart to the pumps, like you would during a surgical heart bypass. That’s a pre-mortem procedure.
With humans, on the other hand, there are (reasonably enough) a lot more restrictions on what’s legal to do. You can’t just hook someone up to a heart bypass and administer drugs that would stop their heart, even if they’re terminally ill and consenting. (You can imagine a world where there was a legal carveout for preservation, but it’s a new technology and no one has seriously considered building such a legal carveout.) Instead, you need the terminally ill client to orally consume MAiD medication. Preservation procedures can only begin once legal death is declared. It’s still possible to perform a quality preservation under those conditions, but it imposes a much stricter timeline.
Oh, I love these. Thanks so much for doing them! (Off to make myself some imaginary money...)
[Designating someone else to be preserved] is built in by default. [Designating someone else to control them as if they’d bought them] isn’t present by default but is the sort of thing we’re happy to work out on an individual basis if it’s important to you.
We definitely intend them to be resellable assets and expect to see a secondary market. If some early supporters buy extra 100k preservations and flip them for 200k in six months, we’ll be very pleased about that.
I’d give over 25% that if someone who’s signed up with us told us now that they had a month to live, we’d be able to accelerate timelines enough to preserve them.
For dogs we’d just need enough notice to make sure our vet has availability and our chemicals are in stock. Cost varies depending on the size but I’d ballpark somewhere very roughly around $50k, obviously happy to talk more details about particular animals.
Sure, happy to bet; I’d want to operationalize carefully. There’s a few different questions here and I expect the timelines to vary a little. In particular, I expect that if we have a terminal customer we go out of our way to accelerate things—setting up for preservation in our lab instead of a nicer facility where people are happy to bring their families, for instance. I’m less certain than that about when we cut the ribbon on the final location, complete our self-imposed certification process, and so forth, just because there’s a lot more moving parts.
I’d say 75% confidence on July 2026, 90% confidence on December 2026. Most of the uncertainty is around the timelines on annoying finicky regulatory stuff, like zoning on our location and making sure we’re in full compliance with rules on final disposition of bodies.
(Aurelia is really excited about this question and wants to sit down and give it a thoughtful answer, so it’s been waiting on her having a solid block of time to respond.)
Unfortunately the pre-mortem ischemia continues to be a real problem. I’d expect essentially all people preserved under those circumstances to suffer profound brain damage before a doctor was ready to declare death.
You also run into the additional problem that the twelve minute window is just very unforgiving. You can’t have a team nearby in an airbnb waiting for a call; you’d need multiple surgical teams taking shifts literally at the client’s bedside, for days or weeks.
Overall, I don’t think this is something that’s going to be practically compatible with the kind of quality standards we want to hold ourselves to. That being said, of course we have ambitions for continued research into how we can extend the technology to catch more people, and quick respiratory deaths like heart attacks are going to be the strongest candidates for that.
The email address should still be valid! And anything directed to hello@nectome and intended for Aurelia will make it to her eyes as well.
Our goal is of course to reach as many people as possible; we’re all in this because we want humans, generally, to be preserved. If this is something covered by medicare in ten years, I’d consider that a huge victory. Now, that’s a very ambitious goal, but I don’t think it’s theoretically infeasible! End-of-life care is already very expensive for insurers.
Absolutely not saying either of those things. If nothing else, I don’t think the government has any business telling people what they can do with their own brains, or what kind of medical procedures they can hire someone to perform on them.
We’ll get into more detail in future posts about what kind of mechanisms for accountability we are excited about. Broadly speaking, though, we’re interested in labeling and certification, not in any kind of prohibition on alternative services. The hope is fundamentally that ordinary laypeople will be able to easily understand the stance of the scientific community at large and what procedures meet a reasonable standard of care.
You’ve started the team singing Giant Woman around the office all day.
Feel free to drop us a line at hello@nectome and I’ll make sure that gets to you.
Oh, thanks so much for doing that—we spent a bunch of time yesterday debating how to word a market such that people wouldn’t worry about whether we’d evaluate it fairly, but of course someone else running it is just better.
Ten years ago, it was. There’s obviously still some people who aren’t comfortable with it, but I’ve been surprised how rarely people register any kind of discomfort; they’re way more likely to express concern about, say, overpopulation, or whether the future would want them.
Yep, sorry, still on the agenda. She’s been needed in the lab pretty much nonstop.