Aurelia Song

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There's an image here.

Subheading.

Independent Evaluation by the SFF.

About this time, I was chatting with Andrew Critch, co-founder of the Survival and Flourishing Fund, SFF.

Born from Jan Tallinn's philanthropic efforts, the SFF is dedicated to the long-term survival and flourishing of sentient life.

They recommended $34 million of grants in 2025, including support for the AI Futures Project, Lightcone Infrastructure, and MIRI, among many others.

Andrew was interested in evaluating Nectum for an SFF grant.

We talked it over and agreed on a third-party evaluation with real stakes.

He'd travel to our lab in Vancouver, Washington to witness and evaluate a preservation firsthand, then bring the samples himself to an EM lab to scan them, and then ask a neuroscientist of his choice to review the sample quality.

If he liked what he saw, he'd support our application to SFF's grants team.

If we didn't live up to the quality we promised, he'd inform the team accordingly.

SFF uses a distributed grant-making process where each team member has a separate budget for making grant recommendations with substantial discretion.

When Andrew arrived at our lab, we introduced him to our test rat, 5, and he observed as I gave the test rat an injection of heparin, our blood thinner of choice, followed promptly by simulated medical aid in dying.

He then timed us as I waited 5 minutes after the rat's heart stopped, mimicking the time I would have spent performing surgery on a pig or a human, 6.

From there, we proceeded with the tedious 9-hour process.

blood washout fixation and the slow ramp of cryoprotectants andrew watched from start to finish it was late at night before the preservation was complete and andrew watched us remove the rat's brain and perform a visual check for gross failures of perfusion there were none at this point we could have simply placed the brain in cold storage and then handed off the tissue for further evaluation but i wanted to demonstrate just how robust our current method is instead

I cut the brain into two hemispheres, put one in cold storage at minus 32 degrees Celsius minus 26 degrees Fahrenheit as a demonstration of the effectiveness of the cryoprotectant at preventing ice formation, and put the other hemisphere in a laboratory oven at 60 degrees Celsius 140 degrees Fahrenheit overnight.

Just as cold storage slows chemical processes, warmth accelerates them.

12 hours at 60 degrees Celsius is equivalent to, conservatively, a week at room temperature.