The Brain Preservation Foundation

The mission of the Brain Preservation Foundation (BPF) is “promoting validated scientific research, knowledge, and technical services development in the field of whole human brain preservation for long-term static storage.” In essence, they share my goal: enabling terminally ill people to choose preservation, giving them a chance at revival through future medical advances.

The Brain Preservation Prize

In 2010, the foundation announced a $100,000 prize for the first individual or team “to rigorously demonstrate a surgical technique capable of inexpensively and completely preserving an entire human brain for long-term (>100 years) storage with such fidelity that the structure of every neuronal process and every synaptic connection remains intact and traceable using today’s electron microscopic (EM) imaging techniques.”

In 2018, Aurelia Song and Greg Fahy won the prize. As per the BPF’s prize announcement page:

Using a combination of ultrafast glutaraldehyde fixation and very low temperature storage, researchers have demonstrated for the first-time ever a way to preserve a brain’s connectome (the 150 trillion synaptic connections presumed to encode all of a person’s knowledge) for centuries-long storage in a large mammal. This laboratory demonstration clears the way to develop Aldehyde-Stabilized Cryopreservation into a ‘last resort’ medical option, one that would prevent the destruction of the patient’s unique connectome, offering at least some hope for future revival via mind uploading.

The Memory Decoding Prize

The BPF’s sister organization, Aspirational Neuroscience (AN), has put forth the Memory Decoding Challenge: a $100,000 prize to be awarded to “the first group to decode a ‘non-trivial’ memory from a static map of synaptic connectivity.”

Read more about it on the newsletter post here.