gwern comments on Bitcoin Cryonics Fund - Less Wrong

7 Post author: lsparrish 14 April 2013 05:59AM

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Comment author: gwern 09 April 2013 02:55:55AM 31 points [-]

Some things I have in mind if it gets big include: subsidizing cryonics dues for low-income people, covering funding shortfalls for those unable to obtain life insurance, cryonics scholarships to support the development of expertise in neural cryobiology and other areas, and hiring a public relations team to fix the image of cryonics.

My own preference would be to donate to the Brain Preservation prize. Apparently no one has ever actually looked at imaging of how well cryonics procedures preserve brain cells, and the prize is a step towards really evidence-based cryonics. (If Bitcoin gains another order of magnitude or two, it would be even more valuable to see if you could fund a simple experiment like vitrifying & reviving some C. elegans or something to see if they retain learned memories like maze-running.)

Comment author: gwern 23 May 2015 06:42:07PM 2 points [-]

a simple experiment like vitrifying & reviving some C. elegans or something to see if they retain learned memories like maze-running

And it's done! "Persistence of Long-Term Memory in Vitrified and Revived C. elegans", Vita-More & Barranco 2015:

Can memory be retained after cryopreservation? Our research has attempted to answer this long-standing question by using the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans), a well-known model organism for biological research that has generated revolutionary findings but has not been tested for memory retention after cryopreservation. Our study’s goal was to test C. elegans’ memory recall after vitrification and reviving. Using a method of sensory imprinting in the young C. elegans we established that learning acquired through olfactory cues shapes the animal’s behavior and the learning is retained at the adult stage after vitrification. Our research method included olfactory imprinting with the chemical benzaldehyde (C6H5CHO) for phase-sense olfactory imprinting at the L1 stage, the fast cooling SafeSpeed method for vitrification at the L2 stage, reviving, and a chemotaxis assay for testing memory retention of learning at the adult stage. Our results in testing memory retention after cryopreservation show that the mechanisms that regulate the odorant imprinting (a form of long-term memory) in C. elegans have not been modified by the process of vitrification or by slow freezing.