Ken Hayworth Discusses Brain Preservation And Mind Uploading

 Brain Preservation

Recently Ken Hayworth, President of the Brain Preservation Foundation sat down for an interview with Singularity 1 on 1's Nikola Danaylov to discuss his activities and thought about the future possibilities of brain preservation.  While Hayworth remains skeptical we can defeat aging and create viable mind uploading technologies in our lifetimes, he believes chemical brain preservation will provide a bridge to the immortal future.

Last year, we named the Mouse Connectome Observatory as the top innovation of the year 2011. According to Ken Hayworth, with proposed imaging technology scientists could theoretically gather all of the circuits of a human brain - the connectome - to collect the data necessary to recreate a person.

His work in neuroscience and electon microscopy led Hayworth to these understandings and led him to found and become president of the Brain Preservation Foundation.

He is also a strong proponent of chemical brain preservation. Unlike cyronics, such as the procedures sold by Alcor, with chemical brain preservation, shortly before or moments after your death, a response team will start the process of emergency glutaraldehyde perfusion (EGP) for protein fixation (a kind of advanced embalming process).

This has to happen within 15 minutes of your death, otherwise the first phase of neural decay will start to set in as brain cells start to die due to oxygen deprivation.

The infusion of the EGP by the response team basically freezes your brain into place, creating a snapshot of your identity and your long term memories — athough you might lose some short-term memories when you resume life after reanimation, just as sometimes happens after brain trauma today. "Glutaraldehyde is a very small chemical that gets into all your cells, and locks down your proteins and cytoskeleton, creating a kind of molecular cage," John Smart, Vice President of the Brain Preservation Foundation told i09's George Dvorky, "all protein-related interactions grind to a halt because of this crosslinking."

After this, your body will be moved to a centralized facility where, over the course of several months, your brain will be carefully removed and placed into a bath. Unlike cryonics, this stage is not time sensitive. It's at this point that a chemical called osmium tetroxide fixes all the fats and fluid membranes in the brain cells. Then, a series of acetone-like solvents are used to convert the brain into plastic where it can be stored at room temperature.

"All the water gets leached, out, but all the protein (and presumably, the other critical features) is still there," says Smart, "and so are all the neural connections, as are all the neural weightings — including the three dimensional structure."

Following that, technicians (or future AI robots), will cut your plastic brain into nanometer thin slices, and future scientists may be able to reconstruct its three dimensional structure using advanced microscopy — electron microscopes that can see down to the level of atoms if necessary. Then, using an automated re-compiling technique, along with the requisite computer systems, your critical patterns will be reconstructed, slice by slice, in a computer. 

If these patterns interact the same way that critical patterns interact in a living brain, any memories or experiences you want to donate, and perhaps your full identity, will return to the world presumably in a substrate independent robot.  

During a recent interview on Singularity 1 on 1 Hayworth talks about a variety of topics such as: his background in electron-microscopy and how he got interested in it; the motivation behind his work; his skepticism towards curing ageing and mind uploading; his optimism for suspended animation in general and chemical brain preservation in particular; his interesting article Killed By Bad Philosophy; the procedure for chemical brain preservation and the differences to cryonics.

Hayworth is also a Senior Scientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Farm Research Campus (JFRC) in Ashburn, Virginia. At JFRC, Hayworth is currently researching ways to extend Focused Ion Beam Scanning Electron Microscopy (FIBSEM) imaging of brain tissue to encompass much larger volumes than are currently possible. Prior to moving to JFRC, Hayworth was a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University.

Hayworth is co-inventor of the Tape-to-SEM process for high-throughput volume imaging of neural circuits at the nanometer scale and he designed and built several automated machines to implement this process.

Hayworth received a PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Southern California for research into how the human visual system encodes spatial relations among objects. He is a vocal advocate for brain preservation and mind uploading and, through the BPF’s Brain Preservation Prize, he has challenged scientists and medical researchers to develop a reliable, scientifically verified surgical procedure which can demonstrate long-term ultrastructure preservation across an entire human brain. Once won, Hayworth advocates for the widespread implementation of such a surgical procedure in hospitals. Several research labs are currently attempting to win this prize.





SOURCE  Singularity Weblog

By 33rd Square

Subscribe to 33rd Square