AMA is here : http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1r6exr/i_am_kenneth_hayworth_a_phd_neuroscientist_and/

The Brain Preservation Foundation's founder Ken Hayworth is going to be available on Reddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA) this Thursday at 7:00PM EST to answer your questions. We hope to have a very interesting discussion ranging from the technical aspects of plastination and cryopreservation to the social consequences of widespread adoption of brain preservation.

Hayworth is a Senior Scientist at the Janelia Farm Research Campus and is an expert in state of the art brain preservation and imaging.

From the Brain Preservation Site:

Kenneth Hayworth, President and Co-Founder of the Brain Preservation Foundation, is currently a Senior Scientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Farm Research Campus (JFRC) in Ashburn, Virginia. JFRC is perhaps the leading research institution in the field of connectomics in the United States. 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. For an overview of this work see his recent review paper and online presentation. 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. Hayworth is a vocal advocate for brain preservation and mind uploading and a co-founder of the Brain Preservation Foundation which calls for the implementation of an emergency glutaraldehyde perfusion procedure in hospitals, and for the development of a whole brain embedding procedure which can demonstrate perfect ultrastructure preservation across an entire human brain.

Links:

- http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA
  Ask me anything page where the discussion will be held

- http://chronicle.com/article/article-content/132819/     
  Overview article explaining plastination and the Brain Preservation foundation

- http://hplusmagazine.com/2013/05/28/neuroscience-and-the-future-of-humanity-interview-with-ken-hayworth/
  Extensive interview with Hayworth.

- http://www.brainpreservation.org/
- http://www.janelia.org/people/scientist/kenneth-hayworth
- http://www.brainpreservation.org/content/contact

(First time poster, long time reader)

I'm currently volunteering for the Brain Preservation Foundation (http://www.brainpreservation.org/), and I'd like to ask for your  help.

The purpose of the BPF is to incentivize and evaluate the development of technology which can preserve a human brain in such intricate detail that all of the brain's cells and connections are preserved. It's the only prize of its kind for a relatively endangered, yet essential type of research.

We run a cash prize ($100,000 USD) called the "Brain Preservation Technology Prize" for the first team that can preserve a large mammal's brain to our high standards. The first $25,000 of that prize goes to the first team that can preserve the ultrastructure of a mouse brain.

Steve Aoki (http://steveaoki.com/), a musician that you might have heard of, is currently planning to give around $50,000 to one of four brain-related charities. One of these charities is the Brain Preservation Foundation! Whichever charity gets the most votes will win all the money.

This money is critically important to us to get the necessary supplies and lab time to administer the brain preservation technology prize. Evaluating brains that people send us involves electron microscopy, which is quite expensive (around $8,000 to evaluate a brain!) We are currently getting submissions and this extra money will give us the funds we need to run the prize.

To vote, just visit http://on.fb.me/15XFdTG, and click the "like" button by the "Brain Preservation Foundation" comment. You can see a graph of the votes at http://aurellem.org/bpf/votes.png (updates every 15 minutes). Thanks for taking the time to read
and vote!

More about the Brain Preservation Foundation :
http://www.brainpreservation.org/

More about the charity:
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151608608587461

Votes graph:
http://aurellem.org/bpf/votes.png


I'd also love to hear your own opinions on the BPF and your assessment of its effectiveness, as well as your thoughts on  chemopreservation vs cryopreservation.