What Oregon Brain Preservation is doing isn’t exactly cryonics in the traditional sense. Most of what they offer is aldehyde-based brain preservation, which stores your brain at refrigerator temperatures. They do have a cryonics option, but it’s not free—$15,000 for whole-head cryopreservation, or if you’re feeling more minimalist, $5,000 for just the brain.
fair enough! maybe i should edit my post with “brain preservation some through cryonics for indefinite storage with the purpose of future reanimation is sufficiently subsidized to be free or marginally free in some regions of the world” 😅
I don’t feel strongly about this one way or another, but I think it’s reasonable to expend the term cryonics to mean any brain preservation method done with the hope for future revival as that seems like the core concept people are referring to when using the term. When the term was first coined, room temperature options weren’t a thing. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PG4D4CSBHhijYDvSz/refactoring-cryonics-as-structural-brain-preservation
Do you happen to know whether we have reason to suspect that the aldehyde and refrigerator approach will be measurably less effective for future use of the stored brains, vs conventional cryopreservation?
Both aldehyde fixation and liquid-nitrogen cryopreservation are techniques easy to perform, and routinely employed in ~every biology lab for cell cultures. Reversing the latter is trivial and also routine; reversing the former is not possible with current tech.
How relevant you consider this is up to you. My guess is that people intuit that with improved technology, the relative difficulty of reversing these on the macro scale would be the same.
If the aldehyde preservation method is as good as traditional cryopreservation, then this looks like a pretty glaring market inefficiency—someone should be able to swoop in and undercut the established cryo companies.
I just don’t know enough about the object level arguments to say much with confidence, but I’m a bit skeptical such a gap in the market exists.
What Oregon Brain Preservation is doing isn’t exactly cryonics in the traditional sense. Most of what they offer is aldehyde-based brain preservation, which stores your brain at refrigerator temperatures. They do have a cryonics option, but it’s not free—$15,000 for whole-head cryopreservation, or if you’re feeling more minimalist, $5,000 for just the brain.
fair enough! maybe i should edit my post with “brain preservation some through cryonics for indefinite storage with the purpose of future reanimation is sufficiently subsidized to be free or marginally free in some regions of the world” 😅
I’m in favour of saying true things. I feel the (current) title is slightly misleading.
I don’t feel strongly about this one way or another, but I think it’s reasonable to expend the term cryonics to mean any brain preservation method done with the hope for future revival as that seems like the core concept people are referring to when using the term. When the term was first coined, room temperature options weren’t a thing. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PG4D4CSBHhijYDvSz/refactoring-cryonics-as-structural-brain-preservation
Definitely. Let’s not imitate the deceptive headlines in mainstream media
Do you happen to know whether we have reason to suspect that the aldehyde and refrigerator approach will be measurably less effective for future use of the stored brains, vs conventional cryopreservation?
Both aldehyde fixation and liquid-nitrogen cryopreservation are techniques easy to perform, and routinely employed in ~every biology lab for cell cultures. Reversing the latter is trivial and also routine; reversing the former is not possible with current tech.
How relevant you consider this is up to you. My guess is that people intuit that with improved technology, the relative difficulty of reversing these on the macro scale would be the same.
I don’t know. The brain preservation prize to preserve the connective of a large mammal was won with aldehyde-stabilization though
I don’t know.
If the aldehyde preservation method is as good as traditional cryopreservation, then this looks like a pretty glaring market inefficiency—someone should be able to swoop in and undercut the established cryo companies.
I just don’t know enough about the object level arguments to say much with confidence, but I’m a bit skeptical such a gap in the market exists.