[ExI] Another step towards uploading

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 12:36 AM, John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

> Because they wouldn't be photographing them I imagine that if Alcor were to
> ever use this technique their slides would be much WIDER than 20 microns,
> and they would have far fewer than 7400 slides. The only reason to slice the
> brain at all would be to ensure even diffusion of the chemical fixative.

### You need to take into account the damage introduced during
mechanical slicing. Even a single bad slice (torn, crushed, happens
all the time, as anybody who spent hours at a microtome can attest)
could scramble the long-distance fibers, and if you have many very
large slides there is really a lot of opportunity for non-salvageable
losses. This is not to say the idea is bad, but it might require a lot
of tweaking and development work, not necessarily possible on Alcor's
budget.

Vitrification with helium persufflation should allow complete
preservation of long-distance topology, making the subsequent
reconstruction work much easier.

Rafal