Sparks Brain Preservation
A Non-profit Organization
We are not associated with cryonics. Cryonics is the freezing of a person with the hope of revival. It sometimes gets confused with legitimate brain preservation because it has a similar goal of revival. Cryonics has already been marketed to customers for about 60 years, so many people have been exposed to ideas coming from cryonics. Companies involved in cryonics include Alcor, the Cryonics Institute, and Tomorrow Biostasis.
Cryonics has some elements of pseudoscience, including a lack of feedback and resistance to change. Cryonics providers refuse to add aldehyde to their protocol, leading to extensive damage and also routine ice formation. This violates mainstream scientific standards and is causing great harm to patients.
Feedback requires a desired endpoint that is currently available so that it can be tested. For example, the desired endpoint at Sparks Brain Preservation is structural quality, which is an endpoint that is very common in mainstream science and easily testable for iterative feedback. While we hope that revival will eventually be solved, our feedback loop completely ignores revival. In contrast, the desired primary endpoint of cryonics seems to roughly be Biological Revival. That endpoint is hypothetical and in the future, so there can be no feedback. This irrational approach has led them to continue prioritizing viability and avoiding aldehyde, even at the very obvious expense of quality.
Cryonics began in the 1960s as a highly speculative extrapolation from cryobiology. Biological revival has been deeply baked into the cryonics workflow since the beginning, but the Society for Cryobiology states that cryonics is not scientific. Neuroscience has evolved quite a bit since cryonics was established. Connectomics really took off about twenty years ago. Evidence has been growing for decades that there are direct ways to measure preservation of the neural structures that encode the mind. Brain preservation for connectomics has gradually become a mainstream scientific pursuit. Organizations that continue to optimize for cryobiological variables instead of using aldehyde have failed to make that transition. There is no defensible reason to continue to go through scientific motions that mimic preservation of viability even though they clearly do not preserve viability.
In contrast to cryonics, brain preservation is now performed routinely in many mainstream science laboratories. Sparks Brain Preservation uses these very same advanced techniques that involve aldehyde, also known as chemical preservation or chemical fixation. Aldehyde is extensively used by scientists and is considered to be the gold standard in mainstream science for structural brain preservation. Nearly all microscopic images of large volumes of brain tissue ever taken have used aldehyde. Cryopreservation is also used by scientists for certain things, but the quality is known to be inferior when the goal is to retain the structural connectome, so it's simply not used by anyone for that purpose.
Some scientists who are involved in traditional cryonics defend its use because they see it as a path to Suspended Animation. They envision being able to cryopreserve organs and then revive them, and then eventually move to full suspended animation. That's irrational because that technology does not exist yet, so it clearly cannot be used on patients yet. If such a technology ever was developed, then we would be eager to adopt it. Until then, we should only be using the superior technology on actual patients.
Aldehyde works by creating covalent cross-links between proteins. The cross-links are the fundamental mechanism that allows such exquisite preservation of the structure of the cells. This deliberate arrest of metabolism and molecular diffusion is exactly what makes aldehyde fixation so valuable for preserving brain structure. Cryonics providers refuse to add aldehyde. Any preservation that delays or does not include aldehyde results in significant serious degradation, to the point that the original mind might not even be recoverable. Anyone who suggests preservation without aldehyde is contradicting scientific consensus and they are wrong. Aldehyde must be used in every single case and it must be used as early in the process as possible.
Perfusion is known to be unreliable and incomplete in nearly all current human cases, whether for cryonics or fixation. This means that there are always areas where the chemicals being perfused will not reach. This is catastrophic for traditional cryonics because those areas will then freeze and cause brain damage. Because of logistical issues, a fairly large percentage of traditional cryonics patients actually have their entire brain Straight Frozen, which may very well cause complete information-theoretic death. This should not be tolerated. Freezing damage is unacceptable and is entirely avoidable in all cases by first using aldehyde. If subsequent subzero cooling is desired, this is only considered after waiting many months for the cryoprotectant to diffuse to all tissue before considering subzero cooling. Cryonics advocates claim that the ice is no problem because future technology might be able to infer the original structure by reverse extrapolation of the growth of the ice crystals. This is astonishing. They are purposely choosing lower quality today because of a completely unproven entirely speculative hunch.
Traditional cryonics companies promote biological revival as the goal rather than structural preservation. This sounds more exciting and more desirable than our goal of structural preservation. That marketing choice is causing patients to choose the wrong technology for their brain preservation. Because it's not evidence-based and because the wrong outcome is being pursued, damage from delays and freezing is accepted in traditional cryonics as unavoidable. This is directly harming patients.
Aldehyde preservation cost can approach zero in many cases. This allows us to save many more lives and it also reduces the risk and complexity. When large amounts of money are not involved, everyone is safer. It means much lower overall risk of organizational failure.
Alcor has posted electron micrographs of brain tissue that has been preserved with their protocol in an ideal situation:
https://www.cryonicsarchive.org/library/alcor-new-york-academy-of-sciences-paper/
https://www.cryonicsarchive.org/library/new-cryopreservation-technology/
The images demonstrate significant dehydration and they don't even look like normal brain tissue. They claim that this mechanical damage is reversible, but this is debatable and lacks evidence. By using aldehyde prior to any cryopreservation, this damage is avoided.
In 2016, Robert McIntyre and Greg Fahy published a paper describing Aldehyde Stabilized Cryopreservation (ASC) which combined both techniques into a single protocol and demonstrated excellent quality of preservation of brain tissue. However, the additional step of cryopreservation did not actually improve the quality of preservation. Since it also didn't reduce the quality, we do offer cryopreservation after our standard fixation to those who ask for it.
The Q10 rule of thumb applies between 0 C and 40 C. The rule states that biochemical reaction rates are cut in half for every reduction of 10 degrees. For this reason, ice baths are frequently used in cryonics to slow reaction rates to buy more time to perform the perfusion. In contrast, if aldehyde can be quickly introduced, then most reactions stop and the Q10 rule no longer applies. Aldehyde is an alternative to cooling in this temperature range.
When cryopreservation is used alone, it can take hours to first cool the body sufficiently for cryoprotectant perfusion and then hours to perfuse the cryoprotectant chemicals through the circulatory system. During that entire time, there's nothing locking the molecules in place, which results in significant damage. Locking the molecules in place many hours earlier with aldehyde preserves more information.
Conversion from liquid to solid happens at -123 C in cryopreservation. After many hours, this phase change is what finally locks the molecules in place. When aldehyde is used, the molecules are locked in place much sooner and the temperature doesn't matter.
We perform cooling to standard freezer temperatures after using aldehyde in order to keep the lipids more solid. Aldehyde does a great job of quickly locking the proteins in place, but the lipids are only immobilized because they are trapped in a web of proteins. If we allow the lipids to remain liquid at room temperature, it's somewhat plausible that a small portion of the lipids might shift position. Cooling after aldehyde preservation is recognized in mainstream science to probably result in better long-term quality.
Pascal's Wager is an argument that has been adapted to cryonics. The argument is that if there’s even a small chance that cryonics could work, then choosing it would offer extraordinary benefit. If it fails, you would lose little because you'd be dead anyway. Therefore, the rational choice would to sign up for cryonics. With the original Pascal's Wager, the obvious fallacy is that you might choose the wrong god. The cryonics adaptation suffers from the same fallacy. You might choose traditional cryonics, but aldehyde fixative might turn out to be the only way to get a good preservation.
For storage over centuries, there are claims that cryopreservation might provide better stability, but there is no good evidence for that. There is also the known problem of cracking. While cracking is unlikely to cause any significant damage, some attempts have been made in cryonics to avoid cracks by storing at an intermediate temperature of -120 C. Those attempts have not been very successful because it's a difficult problem and because it raises the cost.
This is an argument for why traditional cryonics might be better than aldehyde. But the argument quickly falls apart. Whether chemical fixative or cryoprotectant is used, the chemicals must first get to all areas of the brain or there will be poor preservation. In the case of cryopreservation, the poorly perfused areas are subjected to a straight freeze. That’s probably not compatible with preservation of memories as explained here: Straight Freeze
Traditional cryonics sounds exciting. They claim that maybe they can keep the cells alive. But it's an illusion. The underlying technology is inferior. It's time to end the freezing damage and move to evidence-based care.