Essays and notes on brain preservation
By: Andrew McKenzie, MD, PhD
About
Preface and disclaimer
Metrics
Towards a more accurate definition of death
The brain is all you need
Engram cartography
Biomolecules: the building blocks of engrams
Connectomes: the circuitry of engrams
Engram archaeology: inference in damaged brains
The materials science of materialism
Assessing brain preservation quality
Agonal factors during the dying process
Notes on the postmortem interval: time is brain
Methods
Notes on delivering preservative chemicals into the brain
Publications
“Glutaraldehyde: A review of its fixative effects on nucleic acids, proteins, lipids, and carbohydrates”, McKenzie 2019
“Perfusion fixation in brain banking: a systematic review”, McFadden et al. 2019
“Ex situ perfusion fixation for brain banking: a technical report”, McKenzie et al. 2022
“Postmortem changes in brain cell structure: a review”, Krassner et al. 2023
Blog posts
What should we be measuring in brain preservation?
Can we freeze time?
That time when a bunch of people all agreed to preserve each other’s brains
Removing the brain from the skull in brain banking: much more than you wanted to know
Two paths toward improved structural preservation in brain banking
Four approaches for long-term fixation-based brain banking
What would it mean to decode a non-trivial memory from a map of the brain?
External Links
ACX 2021 Biostasis/Cryonics Survey
Aspirational Neuroscience Prize
Biostasis.com
Brain Preservation Foundation
Brain preservation to prevent involuntary death: a possible cause area
Chemopreservation Wiki
Hayworth-Miller 2019 Twitter debate about brain preservation
John Smart’s “Brain Preservation: Why Bother? Getting to the Zen of Life”
Ralph Merkle’s Cryonics Website
Interviews with
Michael Graziano
,
Rafal Smigrodzki
,
Shawn Mikula
,
Peter Gouras
,
Kennita Watson
,
Bob Blum
, and
Adam Marblestone
Note
All content I created for this site is
licensed as public domain (CC-0)
.