Aurelia Song

It took me nine months to create ASC.

It took me nine years to modify it to work in our current legal context and write those three modifications above.

I won't get into those nine years in this post.

I do want to share an image, though, that I'm publishing here for the first time.

As far as I know this is the best preserved whole human brain in the world, and it belongs to a 46-year-old man who died of ALS and chose to donate his body for scientific research.

I perfused his body just 90 minutes post-mortem, much faster than typical emergency cryopreservation services, but well outside the 12-minute ischemic window.

There's an image here.

It is the best-preserved whole human brain I've ever seen.

It is also, like every other human brain I preserved with any appreciable post-mortem delay, not traceable.

It's not a quality I, or the BPF, can accept.

Looking at the degree of damage scares me.

I originally thought that humans might have a two-hour post-mortem preservation window.

If that had been true, I would have probably worked to integrate preservation into hospices across the country.

After reviewing the electron micrographs from animals and humans under various preservation conditions, it became clear that the hospice model was non-viable.

We couldn't wait for a person to die on their own timeline and only then begin our procedure.

We'd need them to undergo a full process involving medical aid in dying, made, and before we could promise any benefits from such a process, we needed to perfect it on animals.

It took a lot of refinement and expert consultation, but eventually we pinned down the 12-minute window and blood thinner through a series of experiments on rats.

We then streamlined the procedure so it could be done in less than 10 minutes on pig carcasses and finally demonstrated excellent post-mortem preservation in a pig model.

We've just recently published the results.

There's an image here.