[ExI] cryonics vs. chemopreservation

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

I am very supportive of both cryonics and chemopreservation of brains.
Unfortunately, at present both have severe drawbacks.

Cryonics is available now and almost certainly preserves the material
underpinnings of a mind but it is a fragile procedure: All you need
for failure is either a massive nitrogen spill (sabotage, earthquake,
etc.) or a 3 month stoppage in nitrogen delivery (Alcor going
bankrupt, massive energy supply fluctuations due to EMP weapon use,
etc.), occurring at any time in the next 30 - 100 years.

On the other hand, chemopreservation is theoretically very robust -
room temp brains in distributed storage are much less likely to be
destroyed by focal attacks (there is no centralized storage facility),
or by social upheaval interrupting the use of high technology - since
there is no high technology involved in the storage part. Yet,
chemopreservation at present does have significant technological
problems at the preservation stage, with concerns about preservative
delivery, and questions about whether the synaptic weight information
can be adequately recovered.

The concerns about chemopresevation could be significantly allayed by
a demonstration of preservation and recovery of memory in animals. The
ideal would be the preservation of a mouse trained for a specific
task, followed by mouse brain uploading and demonstration of the
specific learned behavior in the uploaded mind. This might become
possible in the next 10 - 20 years.

For now however, it would be useful to demonstrate the preservation of
recoverable engrams in yet simpler organism: the worm. Worms learn:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=Pathogenic%20bacteria%20induce%20aversive%20olfactory%20learning

The full map of the worm nervous system has been known for years. A
research project aiming to recover memories from chemopreserved worms
would be a fascinating exercise from a basic neuroscience point of
view (very important for obtaining funding), should be feasible
without the development of new equipment or protocols, and would
provide a tentative rebuttal to the claims that chemopreservation does
not preserve the elusive memory engram. Of course, the engram in a
worm and the engram in a human are not the same thing, biologically,
but there is enough structural and biochemical overlap between the two
nervous systems to draw some conclusions from worm to human.

Rafal