You Should Be Very Skeptical of Nectome's Deadly 'Mind-Uploading Service'

Four things are true: One, a startup called Nectome plans to embalm the living brains of dying people, with the promise that the preserved tissues might someday be brought back to life. Two, the grim plan has gotten a ton of press coverage in the past few days, ever since MIT Technology Review covered it on Tuesday (March 13). Three, most of that press coverage doesn't cite any outside neuroscience experts. And four, all of the experts that Live Science contacted to discuss the story have expressed, one way or another, that they found the plan ridiculous.

Nectome plans to insert itself into the process of physician-assisted suicide. The company wants to flood the arteries of living people who have terminal illnesses with embalming fluid to preserve their brain tissue. The idea is that the dead organ would then be converted into a map of all the connections among neurons — constituting a complete, physical "connectome," from which a person's consciousness might one day be resurrected. The evidence that they can pull it off? They've managed to successfully preserve a pig's brain "so well that every synapse inside it could be seen with an electron microscope."

The company also says, somewhat ghoulishly, that the process is "100 percent fatal."

Here are some of the first responses Live Science got from three neuroscientists and their graduate students after contacting them in the last 48 hours to seek their opinions of the company:

"Oh, lord."

"Don't you think it's not even worth reporting? You're just giving them more publicity."

"Oof, OK."

The last quote came from Jens Foell, a neuroscientist at Florida State University who specializes in using neuroimaging (MRIs, mostly) to study the relationship between the brain's doings and a person's behavior, perception and personality traits.

It's "cool" that Nectome managed to preserve the pig brain, Foell told Live Science, but what the company preserved is "not the whole story" of what that brain was or the information it processed and contained.

"It's true that synapses are where all the action happens," he said. "But cell firing behavior is determined by other things, including processes within the cells that are determined by proteins that are much smaller than synapses (and some of them are short-lived)."

Reference: livescience.com