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
• Notes on embedding in brain preservation

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
• “Fluid preservation in brain banking: a review”, McKenzie et al. 2024
• “Developing an inclusive and transparent structural brain preservation program”, McKenzie and Sparks, 2024

Effective altruism forum posts

• Brain preservation to prevent involuntary death: a possible cause area
• Questioning assumptions: Why the EA community should lead in the debate on brain preservation

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?
• Why wasn’t preservation with the goal of potential future revival started earlier in history?

External Links

• ACX 2021 Biostasis/Cryonics Survey
• Aspirational Neuroscience Prize
• Biostasis.com
• Brain Preservation Foundation
• 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).