Sparks Brain Preservation
A Non-profit Organization
This page is intended to be the most basic introduction possible to the concept of brain preservation.
The purpose of brain preservation is to eventually revive the individual. Revival would happen in about 80 years from now.
Soon after death is pronounced, chemicals are pumped into the brain through the arteries. The brain is then removed and placed in a container of liquid for long term storage in refrigeration. This is the same common preservation technique that has been used for over 100 years in science laboratories. By acting quickly, all of the delicate wiring of the brain is preserved. In doing so, the entire mind of the person is preserved. There is strong agreement among neuroscientists that this kind of preservation does a good job of preserving the mind.
The brain gets stored in refrigeration while we wait for technology to advance. Storage would last approximately 80 years. During that time, no work would be performed on the brain and no attempts would be made to revive it. Revival technology would not exist yet.
There are many different possible revival scenarios, but they all would result in the original person being fully cured and brought back to life. The revival scenario that is the easiest for lay people to understand is that the brain could be repaired by nanorobotics, and then a new body could be grown around it. Repairing the brain would be very difficult, but growing a new body would be trivial by comparison because a stem cell already knows how to grow a whole new body from one cell. In this scenario, a new skull would be formed around the repaired brain, followed by the guided growth of new muscles, a new spinal cord, new organs, and finally new limbs. The new body would be young and healthy.
Yes, we understand that there will be various forms of damage. Most of the damage would be from delay between death and preservation. Memories lost during years of dementia would probably not be recoverable, but after revival, the newly-healthy person could relearn lost skills. Because of how the brain stores memories in a distributed manner, local brain trauma might not result in as much damage as we imagine. For example, if someone has a stroke that doesn't kill them, the damage to the cells actually happens a day or two later. So if someone dies from a stroke and has their brain preserved, that damage hasn't actually happened yet. We expect most preservations to result in at least slight amnesia.
Any revival process would need to be highly regulated to protect the interests of revived individuals. We expect that revival would involve medical teams operating within a framework of rights for preserved patients. Those rights would include independent oversight from judges, lawyers, ethicists, physicians, family, and others who would help determine what course of action best served each patient's interests based on their own goals and values. At SBP, we are committed to advocating for our patients throughout this process.