identity is irretrievably lost when the brain activity stops 

My point here is that this is a very strong claim about neuroscience -- that molecular structure doesn’t encode identity/memories. 

Thanks for the clarification and your thoughts. In my view, the question is to what extent the polymer gel embedding is helpful from the perspective of maintaining morphomolecular structure, so that it is worth the trade-off of removing the lipids, which could potentially also have information content. https://brainpreservation.github.io/Biomolecules#how-lipid-biomolecules-in-cell-membranes-could-affect-ion-flow

You are in good company in thinking that clearing and embedding the tissue in a hydrogel is the best approach. Others with expertise in the area have suggested the same thing to me. I'm just not convinced, so I think that more research is required to tell whether that is the best approach.  

ETA: Sorry, just saw your edit. Interesting thoughts on the interaction between preservation and reconstruction. Your perspective and goals make sense to me, although it is not exactly what we are pursuing at Oregon Brain Preservation. We are agnostic as to the potential method of revival and expect this to be relatively further away in the future, if it ever becomes possible. 

Thanks for your interest! 

Does OBP plan to eventually expand their services outside the USA?

In terms of our staff traveling to other locations to do the preservation procedure, unfortunately not in the immediate future. We don't have the funding for this right now. 

And how much would it cost if you didn’t subsidize it?

There are so many factors. It depends a lot on where in the world we are talking about. If we are talking about someone who legally dies locally in Salem, perhaps a minimal estimated budget would be (off the top of my head, unofficial, subject to change): 

• Labor cost of brain preservation = ~$500-1000
• Cost of chemicals, disposable equipment = ~$100-300 
• Cost of death certificate, cremation, funeral services fees for the rest of the body = ~$1000-1500
• Long-term preservation cost = very difficult to estimate, depends on economies of scale, and other factors, perhaps ~$1000-2000 

These are rough estimates. But generally speaking, there is a reason that many brain banks around the world are also able to allow people to donate their brains for free. There are many many thousands of brains preserved in this way throughout the world. It is not nearly as expensive as traditional cryonics. Here is some more information about costs for similar type of procedure from the Brain Support Network: https://www.brainsupportnetwork.org/brain-donation/brain-donation-faq/ 

Cost is a common complaint about cryonics so I could see you becoming much bigger than the cryonics orgs, but judging by the website you look quite small. Do you know why that is?

I don't know. A couple of guesses are that we are just getting started and not really doing any marketing because our focus is on researching the preservation methods. Also, it is likely that many people are skeptical of the preservation methods that we use, since they are new and different than others, as well as being experimental. Here is some more information about our research program, which you might find interesting: https://osf.io/preprints/osf/c28hm 

We discuss the possibility of fluid preservation after tissue clearing in our article: 

An alternative option is to perform tissue clearing prior to long-term preservation (118). This would remove the lipids in the brain, but offer several advantages, including repeated non-invasive imaging, and potentially reduced oxidative damage over time (119).

And also in our fluid preservation article we have a whole section on it. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11058410/#S7

I'm not sure why this option is much more robust that formaldehyde fixation alone. I haven't seen any strong evidence for that. I do agree that it is potentially very useful for 3D reconstruction, but reconstruction is a much different problem than preservation. 

I can't speak for Adele, but here is one somewhat recent article by neuroscientists discussing memory storage mechanisms: https://bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12915-016-0261-6

DNA is discussed as one possible storage mechanism in the context of epigenetic alterations to neurons. See the section by Andrii Rudenko and Li-Huei Tsai.

This is an important question. While I don't have a full answer, my impression is that yes, it seems to preserve the important information present in DNA. More information here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11058410/#S4.4

Thanks for the comment. I'm definitely not assuming that p(success) would be a monocausal explanation. I'm mostly presenting this data to give evidence against that assumption, because people frequently make statements such as "of course almost nobody wants cryonics, they don't expect it will work". 

I also agree that "is being revived good in expectation / good with what probability" is another common concern. Personally, I think niplav has some good analysis of net-negative revival scenarios: https://niplav.site/considerations_on_cryonics.html

Btw, according to the author, 'Lena' is largely a critique of exploitive capitalism: https://qntm.org/uploading 

Very high-effort, comprehensive post. Any interest in making some of your predictions into markets on Manifold or some other prediction market website? Might help get some quantifications. 

A simple solution is to just make doctors/hospitals liable for harm which occurs under their watch, period. Do not give them an out involving performative tests which don’t actually reduce harm, or the like. If doctors/hospitals are just generally liable for harm, then they’re incentivized to actually reduce it.

Can you explain more what you actually mean by this? Do you mean if someone comes into the hospital and dies, the doctors are responsible, regardless of why they died? If you mean that we figure out whether the doctors are responsible for whether the patient died, then we get back to whether they have done everything to prevent it, and one of these things might be ordering lab tests to better figure out the diagnosis, and then it seems we're back to the original problem i.e. the status quo. Just not understanding what you mean.