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posted by cmn32480 on Monday March 19 2018, @04:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the is-this-one-from-Abby-Normal? dept.

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

The startup accelerator Y Combinator is known for supporting audacious companies in its popular three-month boot camp.

There's never been anything quite like Nectome, though.

Next week, at YC's "demo days," Nectome's cofounder, Robert McIntyre, is going to describe his technology for exquisitely preserving brains in microscopic detail using a high-tech embalming process. Then the MIT graduate will make his business pitch. As it says on his website: "What if we told you we could back up your mind?"

So yeah. Nectome is a preserve-your-brain-and-upload-it company. Its chemical solution can keep a body intact for hundreds of years, maybe thousands, as a statue of frozen glass. The idea is that someday in the future scientists will scan your bricked brain and turn it into a computer simulation. That way, someone a lot like you, though not exactly you, will smell the flowers again in a data server somewhere.

This story has a grisly twist, though. For Nectome's procedure to work, it's essential that the brain be fresh. The company says its plan is to connect people with terminal illnesses to a heart-lung machine in order to pump its mix of scientific embalming chemicals into the big carotid arteries in their necks while they are still alive (though under general anesthesia).

The company has consulted with lawyers familiar with California's two-year-old End of Life Option Act, which permits doctor-assisted suicide for terminal patients, and believes its service will be legal. The product is "100 percent fatal," says McIntyre. "That is why we are uniquely situated among the Y Combinator companies."

Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610456/a-startup-is-pitching-a-mind-uploading-service-that-is-100-percent-fatal/


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  • (Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday March 19 2018, @08:19PM

    by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us (6553) on Monday March 19 2018, @08:19PM (#655104) Journal

    This is a form of cryogenics. At least the article describes it as, "aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation" when talking about a test case that was not viable because it occurred 2.5 hours post death.

    However, normal cryogenics are applied postmortem. The summary and article makes it clear that they are looking to preserve detail levels which require the process to be started before death is declared. More precisely, death is delivered by the process rather than occurring "naturally." They actually have a point - if you have waited long enough for the individual neuron cells to die then what good is preserving the remains?

    However, my prediction is that it will take exactly one case where there is a family objection to the process to have it prosecuted as murder. Even assisted end-of-life, where it is legal (six states in the U.S.), requires the patient to self-initiate the final process (the patient is actually given a lethal prescription that they have to fulfill and self-administer). And any physicians/nurses/technicians could well assisting (they talk of heart-lung machines while the process is initiated) be charged with conspiracy at minimum as well.

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