Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Nelias in Verba. By Aurelia. Published on March 19, 2026. Independent verification by the Brain Preservation Foundation and the Survival and Flourishing Fund. The results so far. Heading.
Chapter 2: What is the significance of independent verification in brain preservation?
Cultivating independent verification. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. In my previous post, Less Dead, I said that my company, Nectum, has created a new method for whole-body, whole-brain, human end-of-life preservation for the purpose of future revival.
Our protocol is capable of preserving every synapse and every cell in the body with enough detail that current neuroscience says long-term memories are preserved. It's compatible with traditional funerals at room temperature and stable for hundreds of years at cold temperatures. End quote.
In this post, we'll dive into the evidence for these claims, as well as Nectum's overall approach to cultivating rigorous, independent validation of our methods, a cornerstone of the kind of preservation enterprise I want to be a part of. to get to the current state of the art required two major developmental milestones. Idealized preservation.
A method capable of preserving the nanostructure of the brain for small and large animals under idealized laboratory conditions. Specifically, could we preserve animals well if we were allowed to perfectly control the time and conditions of death? This work, 2015-2018, resulted in a brand new technique, aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation.
which was carefully independently vetted by Ken Hayworth of the Brain Preservation Foundation over a three-day-long marathon session during which I preserved a rabbit and pig under his supervision. After, he reviewed multiple samples from both brains with electron microscopy.
I published aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation in cryobiology and won the small and large mammal prizes from the BPF as a result. With this work, we had an existence proof. Preserving entire brains long-term in nanoscale detail was absolutely achievable, at least under laboratory conditions.
Real-world preservation A method capable of preserving the nanostructure of the brain under realistic conditions.
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Chapter 3: How does Nectome's preservation method work for end-of-life scenarios?
Specifically, could we extend the laboratory method to work under the legal requirements and practical limitations that constrain real-world human cases?
Adapting the technique to messy real-world conditions, 2018 to 2025, took significantly more development, resulted in a bunch of insights about what is feasible and infeasible for human preservation, and shaped our entire approach to preservation going forward.
In one memorable instance, once we finally had a technique that worked to our standard of rigor on pigs, we once again put it to the test in a marathon live demonstration. Andrew Critch, co-founder of the Survival and Flourishing Fund, personally witnessed the preservation of a rat under conditions that mimicked human preservation.
The resulting brain samples were imaged in consultation with a microscopy lab at UC Berkeley and Professor Kasturi at UChicago. As a result of our demo, Andrew recommended us for an investment, which we've since received.
The real-world technique has been submitted as a pre-print, ultra-structural preservation of a whole large mammal brain with a protocol compatible with human physician-assisted death. The rest of the post is dedicated to unpacking these results. Five quick notes as we begin. There's a list of bullet points here.
By popular demand, this post is specifically about nanostructural preservation quality, achieving a level of detailed preservation throughout the entire brain and body such that synapses are traceable to their originating neurons and subsynaptic details are retained as well as traditional fixation methods used in neuroscience research.
I'll postpone the argument that whole-body nanoscale preservation is sufficient for future revival, as it deserves its own post.
A draft version of this post has been reviewed by Ken Hayworth, president of the Brain Preservation Foundation, and he signed off on it as an accurate description of the Brain Preservation Foundation, its history, Ken's personal motivation, and the results of the BPF's two preservation prizes. I've not substantially modified it since.
A draft version of this post has been reviewed by Andrew Critch, co-founder of the Survival and Flourishing Fund, and he signed off on it as an accurate description of his visit to Nectum to evaluate their preservation technology and the later results. Again, it's not been substantially modified since. Conflict of interest note.
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Chapter 4: What were the major developmental milestones in preservation techniques?
Ken was inspired by the successful Ansari X Prize to issue his challenge in the form of a prize. He raised $100,000 from a secret donor, too, and set out the prize rules. Brains had to be preserved in a way that rendered them connectomically traceable, and had to be preserved so that they would very likely last for at least 100 years.
There was a small version of the prize for at small a mammal brain, think rabbit, mouse, or rat, and at large mammal brain, pig, sheep, etc., would win the whole thing. I can't overstate how influential the brain preservation prize has been in advancing the field of preservation research.
That $100,000 inspired me to build my protocol and led to millions of dollars of investment in better preservation. I'd love to see more scientific prizes. I think they help young people in research labs justify spending resources on important projects they're passionate about.
A young researcher, like me back in 2014, can go to her superior and say, it's not just a personal project, it's for this prize. Subheading. A protocol that works under ideal conditions. Aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation, 2015. When I started seriously looking into preservation techniques, it seemed to me that cryonics and neuroscience had opposite problems.
Neuroscientists could almost instantly preserve a brain using aldehydes, three, but didn't have a long-term strategy to keep that brain intact for a hundred years or more. Cryonicists, meanwhile, struggled to avoid damaging a brain when they perfused it with cryoprotectants, but knew how to cool a perfused brain to vitrification temperature and keep it there indefinitely.
The obvious solution was to combine the two methods. I could use fixation's remarkable ability to stabilize biological tissue, buying time to introduce cryoprotectants into the brain slowly enough to avoid the crushing damage caused by rapid dehydration. Then, it would be safe to vitrify the brain for long-term preservation. It took me about nine months to iron out all the details.
The most difficult part was figuring out how to get cryoprotectants past the blood-brain barrier. It turned out that even very extended perfusion times, on their own, are not adequate to prevent dehydration. Eventually, though, I got the technique to work on rabbits, that small mammal the model I was using. Modifying the protocol to work for pigs took me a single day and worked on the first try.
I published the results of that research, Aldehyde-Stabilized Cryopreservation in Cryobiology, the first step towards winning the Brain Preservation Prize. Subheading. Independent verification by the Brain Preservation Foundation. The next step towards the prize required direct verification by the BPF. If you're interested, you can read their full methodology here.
At this time, I was working at 21st Century Medicine. Ken Hayworth flew out to my location and joined me for a marathon three-day, dawn-to-dark session, during which I preserved, vitrified, rewarmed, and processed a rabbit and a pig. Whenever Ken wasn't personally observing the brain samples, he secured them with tamper-proof stickers to preserve the chain of custody.
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Chapter 5: What challenges exist in preserving brains for future revival?
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.
Transmission electron microscope image of a circular cellular structure surrounded by tissue.
Chapter 6: How do real-world conditions affect preservation techniques?
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.
Electron microscope image showing cellular structures and organelles with dark outlined formations at top.
There's an image here.
Microscopic view of purple stained tissue showing folded structures and cellular detail.
There's an image here.
Two microscopic tissue samples labeled E and F showing cellular structures at 50 micrometer scale.
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