Aurelia Song

Conflict of interest note.

During grad school, I worked as a volunteer for the Brain Preservation Foundation for about a year.

After learning more about brain preservation, I decided to quit as a volunteer and enter the prize myself, with Ken's approval.

You may notice that some of the references I cite throughout this post attribute my work to my dead name, Robert McIntyre.

Today I go by my chosen name, Aurelia Song.

That's the end of the list.

Heading.

In the lab, Ken Hayworth and the BPF.

Subheading.

What is the Brain Preservation Foundation?

Ken Hayworth is a neuroscientist currently working at Janelia Research, part of HHMI, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

In 2010, Ken started the Brain Preservation Foundation and launched the Brain Preservation Prize as a challenge to the neuroscience and cryonics community.

He wanted to see researchers provide evidence that their preservation could work according to neuroscientifically reasonable standards.

As a connectomycist, Ken is used to looking at 3D models of brain tissue created with electron microscopy.

These models are scanned from brains preserved with the kind of high-quality fixation that's been standard in neuroscience for many years.

After much serious thought about neuroscience Ken has come to the conclusion that this level of physical preservation is overwhelmingly likely to capture the information necessary to restore a person in the future and I'm inclined to agree.

Again, I'll get to this in an upcoming post.

But the electron micrographs coming from the cryonics community didn't look like what he normally saw in the lab.

There was no 3D analysis, just single frames.

Worse, the tissue was severely dehydrated, making it difficult or impossible to tell whether the tissue was traceable, that is, whether each synapse could be traced back to its originating neurons.