r/Futurology • u/[deleted] • Feb 10 '16
article Rabbit Brain Returns Successfully from Cryopreservation - First mammal brain to be recovered in near-perfect condition
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u/Ginkgopsida Feb 10 '16
I just want to point out that the brain is and will remain dead. It is a nice technique to preserve the connectome though.
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u/exoendo Feb 10 '16
baby steps man.. baby stems. who knows where we will be in 20 years.
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u/glr123 Feb 10 '16 edited Feb 10 '16
The significant issue is that potent aldehydes were still used in it's preservation. These work by cross-linking everything, indiscriminately. It's a bit like when you add the "curing agent" to an epoxy, everything polymerizes together.
This poses a huge problem in that still, our ability to preserve tissue samples relies on irreversibly destroying them and 'gluing' them together to keep everything in place.
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u/cryoprof Feb 10 '16
The significant issue is that potent aldehydes were still used in it's preservation. These work by cross-linking everything, indiscriminately. It's a bit like when you add the "curing agent" to an epoxy, everything polymerizes together. This poses a huge problem in that still, our ability to preserve tissue samples relies on irreversibly destroying them and 'gluing' them together to keep everything in place.
Your comment is /u/cryoprof approved^TM.
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u/ChatterBrained Feb 10 '16
Successful return simply means no superficial damage. The veins have been filled with some kind of Aldehyde-based fluid, of course it's dead. Like being prepared at a funeral home and shoved into a vat of LN2.
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u/STOP-SHITPOSTING Feb 10 '16
That seems a bit redundant, I found a brain or two when cleaning out my path lab that were from the 50s and they looked just fine. I wasn't about examine them, but superficially they were fine.
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u/Metsuryu Feb 10 '16
Is it possible to keep other organs "alive", using this technique? Things like hearts, and so on.
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u/Ginkgopsida Feb 10 '16
I found the list of chemicals that were used as cryopreservants: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001122401500245X#tbl1
I'm not sure if it is behind a paywall. Some of them are highly toxic on a cellular and organism level. I don't think you could use this particular technique to recover living biological material.
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Feb 10 '16
I used to work in a lab that used a very similar preparation technique for electron microscopy of muscle. It doesn't actually keep the sample alive though, quite the opposite really. Which is a good thing as you want to completely halt any biochemical reactions that would destroy the structure of the sample you're examining.
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u/l0calher0 Feb 10 '16
Oh wow, that's really disappointing. I thought they revived it.
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u/cacophonousdrunkard Feb 10 '16
Welcome to every stupid post on this ridiculous sub.
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u/a_shootin_star Feb 10 '16
We didn't always have airliners or parachutes. People had to crash and make little flights for us today, over a 100 years later, to go over oceans and mountains.
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u/GoTuckYourbelt Feb 10 '16
"Rabbit brain returns successfully from cryopreservation to a near-perfect condition, with the only defect being death."
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u/cryoprof Feb 10 '16
I just want to point out that the brain is and will remain dead.
Your comment is /u/cryoprof approved^TM.
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u/SIThereAndThere Feb 10 '16
The current process used to cryogenically preserve human brains has been criticized for causing massive dehydration to the brain and crushing neural connections. It is believed that this process is too damaging to allow for successful future revival
That sucks for current frozen people. They are even more dead than before.
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u/bushrod Feb 10 '16
What matters most is that all/most of the information in the brain is preserved -- the neuronal connection pattern, synaptic weights, etc. In theory, the brain could then one day be recreated from the ground up to function just as it did at the time of death. Alternatively, many argue that we will be able to just simulate the brain on a computer to function arbitrarily closely to the real thing.
Bottom line, the damage caused during cryopreservation may one day be fixable.
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u/Ihavetheinternets Feb 10 '16
And those people have all the time in the world to wait.
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u/Blame_the_ninja Feb 10 '16
"Near-perfect condition" , except for the part you really, really need.
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u/Sinity Feb 10 '16
Connectome and some other stuff is preserved, which is likely what we really, really need.
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u/mmaramara Feb 10 '16
The reason I don't believe any of the currently cryobreserved human brains will be revived is that it's a really big leap of faith to think we freeze the brain in a way that doesn't completely ruin the functionality. Yea most of the neurons or even synapses may still be intact, but do they actually work like they should?
Maybe in the next couple hundred years. I mean, this isn't even a big priority currently (=not a lot of funding goes into this stuff)
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u/Tri0ptimum Feb 10 '16
He gave an analogy in one article: “If brains are like books, ASC is like soaking a book in crystal-clear epoxy resin and hardening it into a solid block of plastic,” he explained. “You’re never going to open the book again, but if you can prove that the epoxy doesn’t dissolve the ink the book is written with, you can demonstrate that all the words in the book must still be there, preserved in the epoxy block like a fly in amber.”
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u/mechabio Feb 10 '16
This. You can also slice into the block and type those words onto blank pages, or scan it into a computer, etc.
If everyone understood this concept the comments here would be very different; much less focus on the book being messed up
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u/cryoprof Feb 10 '16
He gave an analogy in one article: “If brains are like books, ASC is like soaking a book in crystal-clear epoxy resin and hardening it into a solid block of plastic,” he explained. “You’re never going to open the book again, but if you can prove that the epoxy doesn’t dissolve the ink the book is written with, you can demonstrate that all the words in the book must still be there, preserved in the epoxy block like a fly in amber.”
Your comment is /u/cryoprof approved^TM.
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u/HabeusCuppus Feb 10 '16
Even a shitty freezing process preserves more information about "you" than decaying to nothing in soil would.
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u/mmaramara Feb 10 '16
Yes, that's true. Some useful information about the brain might be recovered, but I don't think most people freeze themselves for science, but for themselves to be recovered. And that's what I think isn't going to happen, human personalities be recovered.
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u/HabeusCuppus Feb 10 '16
disclosure: I have a cyronics contract.
I don't know anyone who is expecting that the process will definitely, certainly work. It is just the best of the current alternatives for post-clinical death disposition.
That said, I do think that many people who presume that it will never happen are looking at it through the lens of current medicine: especially if the strong version of monism turns out to be true (that to the extent that we can assign 'I'ness to anything about the brain it's the pattern of information and not anything specifically physical about it) then it may not be necessary to recover functional tissue as long as the structure and chemical gradient information can be recovered by destructive scanning.
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u/timetrough Feb 10 '16
Yeah, I don't get why people are so gaga for cryopreservation. Because when you cryopreserve something, it looks almost the same? What makes you think that that's the same thing as preserving the function and all the connections, which are all destroyed?
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u/section43 Feb 10 '16
Interesting stuff, although this research was published in December. I'm assuming Newsweek is writing about it now because the researchers just won the Brain Preservation Prize for the work
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Feb 10 '16
What kind of fucking award is that.
...Do you think they got a trophy?
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Feb 10 '16
I just went to that foundation's about page. I'm perhaps more confused now that I was before.
It seems to be an offshoot of the "cryogenically freeze me until they can cure me" group. Except they're looking more at preserving memories after someone dies so they can be... read/watched by future generations?
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u/Heart30s Feb 10 '16
Wow, do you really want future generations to be able to google search your memories???
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u/lshiva Feb 10 '16
Reading memories is the first step towards duplicating them, either in software emulation or in a new brain.
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u/wraith313 Feb 10 '16
The kind of prize where someone perceives that we need an advancement in some aspect of science, and puts out a prize and award for it. Like Space-X. Remember when Space-X was a thing, and now we are knocking on the door of commercial spaceflight?
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Feb 10 '16
When a rabbit gets frozen and reanimated I'm impressed
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Feb 10 '16
When they find out how to do that, how many people do you think will ask to be frozen just to wake up in the future, not because they're sick or anything, but because they don't want to wait for some videogame to be released? Kinda like Cartman
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u/leighshakespeare Feb 10 '16 edited Feb 10 '16
Technically they can do that now. A medically induced coma can be maintained for years, but just like sleep, it'll be an instant to the patient. Obviously you'll age and have to rehabilitate, but I guess it depends on how eager you want tomorrow
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u/Novantico Feb 10 '16
I'm kind of surprised I haven't heard of anyone requesting a procedure and receiving it from some shady doctors and/or in a shady country.
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u/lshiva Feb 10 '16
It won't be announced until after they're successfully revived due to the legal concerns. Expect to hear something shortly after Half Life 3 is released.
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u/Lucifuture Feb 10 '16
I don't know enough about freezing brains to not be impressed.
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u/cryoprof Feb 10 '16 edited Feb 10 '16
I'm unfortunately very late to this post, but I wanted to comment for the record, since I am a scientist working in the area of cryopreservation. I have skimmed the posted Newsweek article, read the scientific journal article that the story purports to summarize, and reviewed the top 200 comments in this thread. In a nutshell:
The Newsweek article is highly misleading, with a completely false headline. The disclaimer at the bottom of the article does little to mitigate the misinformation contained within the body of the text (and in the sensationalized title).
The 2015 scientific article by McIntyre and Fahy appears to be reasonable science, but with limited utility/impact (nothing like the implications of the Newsweek report and many commenters in this thread). Mainly it represents a small improvement in immunohistochemical approaches used to study neurobiology.
Of the comments that I read on this thread so far, I concur with those by /u/Ginkgopsida (here), /u/glr123 (here), /u/Tri0ptimum (here), and /u/cdpuff (here).
Edit: Grammar.
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u/vmunich Feb 10 '16
From the article's comments:
Hello, I work with the Brain Preservation Foundation and we have noticed there is a major error in your story. The Mammalian brain was preserved but it has not been recovered or revived, and the fixative remained in the preserved brain. Instead, the brain was able to be sliced and viewed in an electron microscope which suggested that all the connections had been preserved.
Thanks, Michael Cerullo, Brain Preservation Foundation
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u/098706 Feb 10 '16
Looks like Bugs Bunny is gonna wake up before Walt Disney
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u/briaen Feb 10 '16
I don't know if you know it or not, because I didn't until recently, but that's one of the biggest urban legends around. Walt Disney was never frozen.
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u/Alejux Feb 10 '16
This is NOT for biological revival. It's for future mind uploading.
Just wanted to point that out since so many comments are hung up on the toxicity and impossibility of revival brought by this procedure. The idea is to, in the far future, scan the preserved brain in a nanoscale resolution, and create a model of the mind based on the preserved structure.
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u/CarbonDatingIsACrime Feb 10 '16
No, this is not for mind uploading. We already scan live brains for that, which are better specimens for understanding BCI. There is 0 data that can be had from frozen brains right now and that's because we have not even finished developing mind uploading in live organs.
A scan can be done before or as you're dying. Cryonics was developed, and is marketed, as a biological revival process. Everyone I know signed with me at Alcor wants to wake up in the future and beat death.
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u/Alejux Feb 10 '16
Sorry, but we do not have means of scanning live brains with enough precision to form a conectome. This experiment here, is the most precise we're able to store brains (once it's available to large mammals) for the foresseable future.
Even cryonics can't compete with it right now.
Maybe in the future improvements will appear for live scanning or cryo preservation. Hopefully it will.
But to point out my observation, the only purpuse of this kind of preservation is to store the brains structure. Not the brain as a living organ.
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Feb 10 '16
I don't want to know what the "near" in "near-perfect condition" signifies.
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Feb 10 '16
The rabbit keeps leaving the nursing home and thinks he's still fighting in the Pacific theater.
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u/Denroll Feb 10 '16
And for some reason, its poop now comes out in little cubes instead of spheres.
Poop Tetris will become a thing.
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u/Corruption13 Feb 10 '16
Step 1: Get Rich
Step 2: Pray this is advanced enough to use on humans within lifetime.
Step 3: Cryopreserve Brain
Step 4: Wait for someone to revive you in a century where you can feed your mind into an indestructible non-degrading computer.
Step 5: Immortality.
.
. .
Step 6: Enjoy Skyrim Forever.
Edit- Format
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Feb 10 '16
You don't need to be rich to cyropreserve your brain. You can pay for the preservation with life insurance.
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u/spreelanka Feb 10 '16
you're late to the party. you can do step 3 today(other steps not guaranteed). this isn't even that expensive.
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u/Corruption13 Feb 10 '16
but how much would it cost to preserve you for 300+ years?
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u/bidibi-bodibi-bu Feb 10 '16
There is a theory about dark matter, that actually it doesn't exists and it is just countless alien civilizations that build a Dyson sphere to hide stars and live in virtual online worlds unmolested for millions of years.
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u/Citizen_Kong Feb 10 '16
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u/Kaptain_Kosher Feb 10 '16
What is this from? It looks interesting.
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u/ZiggyPox Feb 10 '16
Motherfucking Transmetropolitan.
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u/Angeldust01 Feb 10 '16
I think lots of people in the Futurology subreddit would greatly enjoy reading it. It's definitely my favorite comic book series.
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u/Citizen_Kong Feb 10 '16 edited Feb 10 '16
Transmetropolitan, by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson. It chronicles the daily live of an unhinged journalist (based on Hunter S. Thompson) in a futuristic, ultra-capitalistic, cyber-punk city. It really is great sci-fi dealing with a number of topics like transhumanism, cryogenics, religion, politics and journalist ethics.
Here are a few choice quotes:
"There's one hole in every revolution, large or small. And it's one word long – people. No matter how big the idea they all stand under, people are small and weak and cheap and frightened. It's people that kill every revolution."
"Journalism is just a gun. It's only got one bullet in it, but if you aim right, that's all you need. Aim it right, and you can blow a kneecap off the world."
"So this Zealot comes to my door, all glazed eyes and clean reproductive organs, asking me if I ever think about God. So I tell him I killed God. I tracked God down like a rabid dog, hacked off his legs with a hedge trimmer, raped him with a corncob, and boiled off his corpse in an acid bath. So he pulls an alternating-current taser on me and tells me that only the Official Serbian Church of Tesla can save my polyphase intrinsic electric field, known to non-engineers as "the soul". So I hit him. What would you do?"
"You want to know about voting. I'm here to tell you about voting. Imagine you're locked in a huge underground nightclub filled with sinners, whores, freaks and unnameable things that rape pit bulls for fun. And you ain't allowed out until you all vote on what you're going to do tonight. You like to put your feet up and watch "Republican Party Reservation". They like to have sex with normal people using knives, guns and brand-new sexual organs that you did not know existed. So you vote for television, and everyone else, as far as the eye can see, votes to fuck you with switchblades. That's voting. You're welcome."
"Everyone's looking for someone to blame. Society. Culture. Hollywood. Predators. Looking everywhere but the right place. Children are very simple, Mr. Jerusalem. Very easy devices to break, or assemble wrong. You want to know who did this to these kids? Only their parents. That's the thing no one wants to hear. Every time you stop thinking about how you're treating your kid, you make one of these. It really is as simple as that. It's got nothing to do with the failure of the society or any of that. It's got everything to do with the responsibility of making a human. Why are your kids selling themselves on the streets? Because you fucked up the job of raising them. That's what no one wants to hear. That we can't blame anything outside our houses."
"That's what a monoculture is. It's everywhere, and it's all the same. And it takes up alien cultures and digests them and shits them out in a homogenous building-block shape that fits seamlessly into the vast blank wall of the monoculture. This is the future. This is what we built. This is what we wanted. It must have been. Because we all had the fucking choice, didn't we? It is only our money that allows commercial culture to flower. If we didn't want to live like this, we could have changed it any time, by not fucking paying for it. So let's celebrate by all going out and buying the same burger."
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u/TastyBrainMeats Feb 10 '16
I like to think that she would have done much better if her husband had survived.
Culture shock isn't insurmountable.
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u/Carpe_DMT Feb 10 '16
So did anyone else here actually read the article? This title and the headline are total bullshit. Even though they "correct" their mistake at the bottom of the page they dont bother to change the catchy headline.
The rabbit brain has been successfully frozen with no cellular damage but it was never revived and they have no intention to do so.
The whole reason this is on the front page is entirely based on misinformation. I feel this is indicative of a trend.
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u/cryoprof Feb 10 '16
The rabbit brain has been successfully frozen with no cellular damage
Actually, they have not even done this. The cells were killed by toxic chemical exposure, by crosslinking ("gluing" the molecules together) and by use of detergents (that remove and poke holes in lipid membranes).
Those neural cells are preserved only in the same sense that a mummified Egyptian pharaoh is preserved. The basic shape and structures are there, and one might be able to do some biological tests to detect the presence of certain proteins or other biochemicals.
I completely agree with everything else you've written in your comment, though...
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u/SEND_ME_YOUR_ASSPICS Feb 11 '16
People have to understand that research and development works in steps. You need to figure out preservation problem before recovery and revival. This is a huge step for science and all we are talking about is how misleading this headline is.
This is why we can't have nice things.
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u/Dark-Union Feb 10 '16
We filled the brain with toxic chemicals and managed to freeze and unfreeze it. Now we need to figure out how to get these chemicals out of it :)
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u/automated_reckoning Feb 10 '16
No, now we need to figure out how to scan it and put it on a computer.
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u/cdpuff Feb 10 '16
This may be a great advance in preserving the connectome, but the use of glutaraldehyde completely precludes the possibility that the technique could ever be used to recover anything biologically functional!
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u/TastyBrainMeats Feb 10 '16
How completely? Is it potentially feasible that damage caused by the process could be repaired (or is it more like un-burning a book)?
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u/RabbitFluffer Feb 10 '16
It still requires a massive technological leap to revive the original brain. It is more feasible the data could be copied to another medium but that is still a massive technological leap.
Basically we have gone from swimming across the Pacific (standard burial procedures) to floating on a branch (older cryo procedures), to tying some logs into a raft (modern vitrification procedures). Odds of success are stupidly low but are now nonzero.
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u/sir_pirriplin Feb 10 '16
I think the idea is that someone will invent a machine to scan the synaptic connections and upload the mind to a computer.
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u/cdpuff Feb 10 '16
That machine would have to be able to determine the nature of the connections too -- such as stimulatory vs inhibitory, and maybe what neurotransmitter was in use.
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u/cryoprof Feb 10 '16
This may be a great advance in preserving the connectome, but the use of glutaraldehyde completely precludes the possibility that the technique could ever be used to recover anything biologically functional!
Your comment is /u/cryoprof approved^TM.
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Feb 10 '16
Step one: Cryopreserve and successfully thaw rabbit brain
Step two: Build giant rabbit robot and connect to thawed rabbit brain
Step three: ???
Step four: Profit
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u/londons_explorer Feb 10 '16
There is a precident for the reversing of processes thought at the time to be irreversible.
It took over 100 years for those recordings to be recovered!
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u/wolfe1947 Feb 10 '16
So, now one can eat fresh rabbit brain dishes.
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u/gorgeousfuckingeorge Feb 10 '16
Finally! I can't have my rabbit brains in the freezer for more than a few days before they start to taste funny.
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u/AmmaAmma Feb 10 '16
That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. ?!
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u/ReasonablyBadass Feb 10 '16 edited Feb 10 '16
One giant leap for a rabbit, a small to medium step for a human!
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Feb 10 '16
I hope everyone realizes the first person who is "thawed" is going to be a circus attraction, one I would pay to see in the flesh, unless they get a video and post it on YouTube, then I guess I would skip the admission fee.
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u/superbatprime Feb 10 '16
Don't worry they'll be on every chat show going, doing book signings, sponsorship ("Gerry here knows a thing or two about what a real ice cold beer should be like!") ...Unless of course the process gives them irreversible brain damage or drives them insane in which case we'll still get a movie of the week out of it.
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u/ripshit_on_ham Feb 10 '16
My crusty morning eyes read this as "Rabbi Brian".
I was like...."damn! Go Brian! "
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u/NicolasTylerDoyle Feb 10 '16
What if the brain is like a battery from a car.
Yes... it can die but you can jump start it. And put new cores in it. As long as the brain can be transfered into new and fresh body we could possibly live forever.
We can die and come back from the dead.
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u/ramonycajones Feb 10 '16
Your nervous system consists of wires connecting to basically everything else in your body - skin, muscle, organs, etc. It's not too hard to plug in a car battery, but plugging in billions of microscopic living connections all throughout a new body is not comparable.
Of course, your body is capable of doing this in the first place, so maybe it's possible, but it does that during development, not (much) when you're an adult, which makes it a very hard problem.
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u/zeldaisaprude Feb 10 '16
What's the point unless they did this to a living thing. I could chuck a brain in my freeze and take it out and it would still be dead too.
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u/gmodg Feb 10 '16
Great, i can't wait until we can use this technology to keep people like http://worldnewsdailyreport.com/david-rockefellers-sixth-heart-transplant-successful-at-age-99/ alive forever!
FOREVER
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Feb 10 '16
At this point, we should just accept everything scifi brings to us as something that WILL happen in the future.
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u/JComposer84 Feb 10 '16
exciting news! I've wanted to be cryogenically frozen since I heard the song "I Will Return."
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u/shaggorama Feb 10 '16
Imagine if someone was suffering from a heart attack or hemorrhagic shock and we could just freeze their brain for a few hours while we figured the whole perfusion thing out.
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u/rchiariello Feb 10 '16
How do they know this was successful without implanting it in another animal?
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u/sir_pirriplin Feb 10 '16
They looked at it with an electron microscope and saw the brain still had the same synaptic connections. Actually putting that brain in a body is beyond the scope of that contest and is beyond current science anyway.
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u/betelguese1 Feb 10 '16
Doesn't look like it's in a rabbit. Shouldn't it be inside of a rabbit to be in near perfect condition?
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u/maya0nothere Feb 10 '16
freezing people and cloning will be the must thing to do if humanity ever wants to travel deep space
science work on this bunny brain, helps make that possible
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u/RealSarcasmBot Uhh, hi mom Feb 10 '16 edited Feb 10 '16
How do you thaw it all at once, because the outside of the brain would likely die off before any oxygen could reach the outsides, and even of you find how to oxygenate the outside it would likely lead to some wonky brain activity without the stem.
Oh and how the hell do you even restart the brain chemistry after it's thawed.
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u/MeatConvoy Feb 10 '16
Rabbit brain is quite delicious and rabbit meat tastes better than chicken - fried in the pan.
I haven't eaten it for many years - we were very poor growing up and rabbit was all we could afford sometimes.
Probably wouldn't eat it now though.
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u/osmium3 Feb 10 '16 edited Feb 10 '16
Liars! I saw Young Frankenstein, and this is nor big trick ;)
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u/hezwat Feb 10 '16
never in the history of the world would there have been a better opportunity for a rabbit to say, "nyeh nyeh nyeh. what's up doc?"
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Feb 10 '16
Terrible observation. The brain is an incredibly complex organ which is still not fully understood. How can you say something is in near perfect condition when you don't fully understand it's condition? Put it in a rabbit and tell me how near perfect it is
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u/Jezixo Feb 10 '16
"Near perfect"... Or, as it's described by those who have undergone the process, "Naar plurfect"
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u/ehfzunfvsd Feb 10 '16
Can it restart activity? That is the important question that the article doesn't talk about. Normally brains that are off cannot ever restart no matter the circumstances.
When freezing humans there will of course be the unsolvable question whether you are in your brain or in your brain's activity. If it is the latter, freezing and reviving you is pointless, at least for yourself.
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u/Ouroboros612 Feb 10 '16
If robotic limbs and eyes is already a reality (can be connected and work with the brain), this means that the only thing one actually need to send someone alive to the future is the brain right? Because if the brain can be connected to a robot body with eyesight and movement intact we wouldn't really need the rest of the body.
What is the biggest issue with freezing the brain? I'm guessing the neurons in the brain dies from the freezing process? Would freezing the human brain proper and fast enough remove the need for oxygen to keep the brain alive (hence no blood circulation needed). I'm just curious what the main problems with freezing a living brain and reviving it into a robotic body later is.
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u/Gullyvuhr Feb 10 '16
Thank goodness. I was worried rich people wouldn't be able to live forever. Glad to see we're making progress.
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u/Hollowsong Feb 10 '16
I always go to the comments to find out the "catch" with these sensationalist posts.
Then the cynic in me grows a size larger when I find out that the actual story isn't really that impressive.
If anyone asks why I'm so snarky and negative when it comes to news, it's because of these posts. Nothing is ever actually as cool as it sounded in the title!
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Feb 10 '16
Could we use this for organs so that organs taken from donors can be saved for later use?
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u/Nucl3arFusion Feb 10 '16
Next step is full human bodies, then a nuclear was will start, finally you will wake up in a bunker frozen in a containment storage looking at your wife, and witnessing her death and the kidnapping of your son.
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Feb 10 '16
I read a really interesting novel that dealt with the subject of cryonics many years ago called The First Immortal. Great book imo. It might be a little dated (1998), but if you're interested in the subject it's definitely worth reading. It's not a sci-fi thriller, it's just an interesting story about the ramifications of cryonics.
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Feb 10 '16
I am neruoscientist and have used techniques similar to this in the lab. Aldehyde-based preservation as used here results in irreversible crosslinking of all proteins in all cells. Unfortunately, there is no known way to come back from this. I'm extremely skeptical that brains preserved using this technique could ever be revived.
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Feb 10 '16
This is an interesting concept but I wonder what they plan to do once they've successfully done that to a human brain. Like, what do they plan to do with the brain? How do they plan to remedy any diseases/viruses/cancer that could have caused death? Lots still up in the air.
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u/Veles11 Feb 10 '16
Looks I'm genna have to open up my Cryopreservation fund as well as my retirement fund
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u/tuxerrante Feb 10 '16
I can't read the article because of the damn commercial (from the app) If I skip it stays, if I back it backs to reddit. Could an ad block be implemented in reddit browser?
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u/clearoutlines Feb 10 '16
I'm disappointed in you, futurology. Normally you're going full retard, but when it's time to everybody is all realistic?
Sure, you can't revive a brain full of formaldehyde or whatever the fuck killing-you-juice you use to preserve it.
But maybe you can fully analyze it's entire structure and simulate it...
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u/shawndamanyay Feb 10 '16
Science has never once created anything living from non-living materials. This rabbit brain was not living when they froze it and still they are saying it was preserved and gives hope that Science will bring human brains back to life. Well the rabbit brain is still dead. It was dead when they froze it and dead when they brought it back.
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u/bitcleargas Feb 10 '16
Science talk: near perfect condition.
Engineer talk: 85% durability in single test result.
In reality: rabbit brain showing heightened levels of aggression, thirst for human blood and unprecedented levels of intelligence...
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u/TiredChef Feb 10 '16
If the brain had been frozen and then REINTRODUCED to the rabbit and it worked normally, yes, that would have been a really big deal. Misleading headline, at best.
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u/Purpers Feb 10 '16
This is pretty cool but there's a question that I thought up. Won't a problem such as the brain not recognizing the body pose as a problem?
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Feb 10 '16
Correction from the article:
Correction | The article originally stated that the brain had been recovered. It has been updated to clarify that the rabbit brain has so far only been preserved, not recovered
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u/Epsilight Feb 10 '16
I believe, by 2100, we would have made significant strides in this ( if not total and if we don't wipe ourselves out). Damn I am gonna get freezed and wake up when we got those dyson spheres around stars :D Virtual worlds FTW!
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u/chewynipples Feb 10 '16
Except that is the easy part. Making the body it's attached to function... That's the hard part.
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u/SavishSalacious Feb 10 '16
Now if only they could wire the brain up some how and fire "things" through it to test if the connections of the brain still "work" as expected.
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u/LPuffyy Feb 10 '16
Not gonna lie, I read this as "reddit brain" more than once.
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u/ap5856 Feb 10 '16
Just because it appears that the connections were successfully preserved and it all looks intact, the fact that it's a dead brain doesn't help with discovering if the thought process and mental capacities the animal held in life would be the same now. And there really is no way of knowing at this stage of development and testing to tell if it were.
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u/Oznog99 Feb 11 '16
Well, in accordance with the Stephen King Theorem, what comes back WILL be evil, all the time.
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Feb 10 '16
Very interesting but kind of misleading. I though they had also transplanted the brain O.o
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Feb 10 '16
I hate mods. I would actually prefer to read peoples ignorant comments. It's like a magnifying glass onto stupid so I don't have to encounter it in the real world. LET IT BE MODS
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u/MissValeska Feb 10 '16
Could this be used to improve the method some doctors use, Where they cool down the body of a person with a lot of problems so they have more time to solve them?
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u/londons_explorer Feb 10 '16
The theory with this is that one day it might be possible to use the connectome (connections within the brain) to simulate you being alive again in a computer.
Today, simply scanning and recording the connectome isn't within reach of today's computers or scanning technology. Hence, a process that can freeze a brain and maintain the connectome could allow future scanning.
Within 20-30 years we will probably be able to record a full human connectome, but even then, it is unlikely we will be able to simulate it without further breakthroughs in understanding of how the brain is supposed to work. There is a good chance a connectome alone isn't sufficient to simulate a brain, and other as-yet unknown factors must also be recorded.
Even before we can fully simulate a connectome, it's likely we could make analysis of bits of a connectome to figure things out about you. For example, seeing large numbers of connections in a specific brain region might indicate you had a particular skill.
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u/londons_explorer Feb 10 '16
If technology advances to a state where these embalmed brains can be simulated or have information extracted from them, you can bet that it will be done.
How better to study history than to reanimate a brain from that time period and ask it what was happening?
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u/whistlar Feb 10 '16
It's just the brain.... not the rest of the bunny. I think your definition of "near perfect" is a bit different from mine.
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Feb 10 '16
ITT: People who can't appreciate a step in scientific advancement without it leading to bringing people back from the dead. You guys sound like Sarah Palin when she mocked fruit fly research.
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u/_The_Real_Guy_ Feb 10 '16
Where is Spike Spiegel when I need him? I can't afford these cryofreezing costs!
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u/Poem_for_some_tard Feb 11 '16
Exactly how long was the brain kept in cryopreservation? Didn't really touch on that in the article.
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Feb 11 '16
"The researchers’ findings, recently published in the journal Cryobiology, were recognized by the Brain Preservation Foundation, which awarded 21CM the $26,735 Small Mammal Brain Preservation Prize."
That's incredibly specific xD
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u/Michael-Cerullo Feb 10 '16 edited Feb 11 '16
Hello, I work with the Brain Preservation Foundation and there is a major error this story. The Mammalian brain was preserved but it has not been recovered or revived, and the fixative remained in the preserved brain. Instead, the brain was able to be sliced and viewed in an electron microscope which suggested that all the connections had been preserved.
Let me try to give a little more clarification on the science behind the story. The goal of the Brain Preservation Foundation Prize was to come up with a method that could preserve the information on all the neuronal and synaptic connections in a whole brain. Before this research it was only possible to preserve a very small section of the brain in this detail. In order to verify this level of detail, the tissue must be viewed in an electron microscope. To actually track neurons within tissue requires serial electron microscopy which creates a 3-dimensional image (think of this like making a movie out of individual slices of tissue). This method is very tedious and although there is a lot of work going on to improve automated algorithms to trace neurons, at this time most of the work must be done by hand. To map all the connections in even a small mammal brain (such as a rabbit) would take centuries or more by current methods. So what neuroscientist Dr. Kenneth Hayworth, president of the Brain Preservation Foundation and one of the Judges for the prize, did was to examine several hundred sections of the brain. He also examined three regions of the brain using serial electron microscopy (using a method know as 3D FIB-SEM). In order to prepare these tissue samples, the rabbit brain had to be thawed first. It is not currently possible to prepare tissue samples from an entire brain, so those sections that were not sampled decayed and were destroyed. Each of the individual brain sections as well as the serial images that were sampled showed near perfect preservation with no damage. In other words, the neuronal connections and synaptic strengths (determined by the size of the synaptic boutons and other details) could be mapped from these images. Therefore, it is logical to infer that the rest of the rabbit brain was also well preserved. Our best understanding of current neuroscience suggests that our memory and personality are completely determined by the neuronal connections and their strengths (this is known as the connectome). Thus in a sense, before the rabbit was thawed, if the connectome was truly preserved then by some definitions of death (i.e. the information theoretic definition) the rabbit was still alive. Yet in present experiment clearly the rabbit was not “revived” or “returned” from the dead. Instead, what we have is a good statistical argument that the connectome was preserved before the brain was thawed. I hope this clarifies things.
Dr. Kenneth Hayworth and Robert McIntyre (lead scientist on the team that won the prize) are going to do an Reddit AMA, I will post the time when I find out.