Plastination is maturing and needs funding, says Hanson

Is Robin missing anything here, or is this indeed as important as he says?

I think it's as important as he says; I was very pleased to see that he has gone through with it, and I've donated $50 to the Evaluation Fund.

It loses any data that is not structural in the neurons' physical shape - whose importance is not currently known. We can presume that electrical signals can be rebooted, but can chemical ones? Will the brain fail as badly as a drunkard or someone who drinks twenty espressos, if shorn of its chemical context?

This is particularly plausible because the brain is full of low-level feedback loops controlling endocrine stuff - I could fully expect them to go completely bugfuck if their sensor inputs suddenly read "0.0".

To give an example here: "gonadotropin-releasing hormone analogue" drugs are used to block secretion of sex hormones. They were originally designed to increase them. GNRH is the "on switch" signal, the drugs mimic it. And indeed they do initially increase hormones - then the brain's regulatory feedback slams on the brakes, all the way to zero. Nobody knew that particular feedback was there before they poked it with a drug.

This tech may make testing the above much easier though.

Freeze, slice, stain, and microscope can check chemicals in the way this cannot.

This seems important enough for Main to be honest.

A few comments:

1) Sign up for cryonics now. Do not delay because you think "Plastination might be better someday in the future".

• No one is offering plastination now, and you can die now.
• It's not clear when, if ever, anyone is going to offer plastination.
• It's not clear that plastination, if actually offered, will actually be better than cryonics.

2) With chemical preservation, good vascular perfusion is critical. Brain tissue which is not perfused is lost.

3) With cryopreservation, good vascular perfusion results in excellent preservation by vitrification. Brain tissue which is not perfused is still preserved.

4) Most of the costs for neuropreservation are from the up-front logistical and surgical costs. If you want minimal ischemic time and good vascular perfusion for chemical preservation you're still going to have to pay most if not all of those costs.

Wins for what? I don't think plastination is an option for human preservation today. When it becomes an option, it probably wins.

The problem with plastination is scaling up the volume that can be done at once. This is a matter of pumping fluids around. Tiny chunks of mouse brain that were plastinated 50 years ago have readable synapses today. The experiment is whether new methods of applying chemicals to whole mouse brains work as well as first cutting up the brain; and whether cutting after plastination preserves enough information.

After scaling up plastination, it has the remaining downside that it displaces lots of chemicals. RH asks to preserve "two dozen chemical densities," which it probably fails at. Also, lots of sub-synapse detail (eg, type and placement of ion channels) is probably lost.

I wonder how current cryonics organizations will adapt if/as plastination becomes viable, especially if plastination does well on the critical scanning demonstrations where vitrification is largely unproven.

Can cryonics orgs like Alcor adapt quickly? What about those currently paying insurance premiums based on higher vitrification prices?

Exciting times regardless!

This isn't a new idea, but good to see it getting some press and testing (especially to compare against cryonics). I was initially enthusiastic about the concept as a cheap replacement for cryonics, but currently I favor cryopreservation or possibly a combination approach as the more likely winner.

The main problem (my layman's understanding) is that you can't fix lipids with the cheap relatively harmless kind of fixatives, like gluteraldehyde. Instead you need expensive, hazardous stuff like Osmium Tetroxide. Aschwin de Wolf has written about this in the 2009 issue of Cryonics Magazine.

Overall impression: This is a fascinating and highly valuable research project, but it is too soon to consider it a viable consumer option on par with vitrification yet. My current guess is the cooling + aldehyde partial fixation combo approach may be better for consumers than room temperature aldehyde + OsO4 + whatever else in the near future.

The one thing that makes me think chemopreservation has a lot of potential for rapid improvement is the point Robin makes about mainstream science already having a strong interest in it. Given that, it might improve much more rapidly despite being a technically much harder issue.

I think that it's at least as important, and am backing that up with money (only $100 for now, but I may add to that number later if my financial situation improves). Cryonics requires you to be kept cold in an uninterrupted fashion until you are revived, whereas plastination would allow for cheap and easy storage in a basement. There's the disadvantage that the hardware becomes useless, but it doesn't look like even modern technology is far from making that a moot point.

Exciting news! In my mind the financial failure of a cryonics corp is a very significant factor lowering the probability of cryonics working. If plastination works, it could be a big step forward.

If you are interested in doing cryonics, donating to this group may actually have a positive private return, as plastination is likely cheaper and more effective.

Need to make sure you are preserving the gates in membranes, ion channels, etc (if you don't, likely you won't be preserved). You are probably not preserving microtubules and proteins attached to them and this might matter. DNA methylation and proteins attached to DNA may also be important. I do like the approach as tissue sample preparation though.

It seems to me that plastination is unlikely to preserve chemical details of synaptic protein expression. We really don't know how crucial that is to personal identity, but I suspect it might be possible to have a two stage process, in which the brain is first flooded with dyes, which diffuse into the neural tissue, and bond onto specific synaptic proteins. Then, when the brain is preserved in resin, you have gross visible records of neural and synaptic chemical details.

On a related note, might it be possible to safely break the brain down into more manageable fragments for preservation, by cutting through the sections of the brain that are architecturally simplest, or vary the least between individuals? The corpus callosum and lower mid brain seems like a good place to start.

How big is the "must keep the original atoms" crowd in cryonics? At least Robert Ettinger seemed to think uploading is nonsense because atoms. I'd assume they would not get behind plastination, since it basically assumes viable uploading as a way to get the plastinated brick of a brain into doing anything ever again. Given how many unknowns there are in both approaches though, what people actually get behind might be motivated more by tribal thinking than philosophical first principles.

Has Hayworth or anyone else written up a layman-accessible, or even technical, outline of why plastination might beat cryonics in terms of information-preservation?

It's not especially relevant, but the setup of this reminds of the Spanish Prisoner scam.

DEAR SIR:

Good day! I look forward to doing business with you! I am a medical researcher who has unlocked the secret to informational immortality. However, in order to prove my technique works and collect a sum of $100000 (one hundred thousand) USD, I must first raise $25,000 (twenty five thousand) USD. If you can help me by sending me this small sum, I will be happy to provide immortality to you and your suffering species.

Looking forwards to strong business relations, etc.

Anyone know how this research might be relevant for uploads?