As a former neuroscientist, I am very in favor of brain plastination, particularly of ‘soft’ plastination (e.g. the CLARITY technique). I think there’s a huge amount of long-term cost savings and safety improvement from making the brain info stable at room temperature and easily readable multiple times over without destruction. The value of soft plastination is that you can still infuse antibody labels and such into the tissue to non-harmfully study the tissue.
The only reason I am not encouraging people to donate to this as a cause area is that it seems so small impact compared to x-risk causes. The people who will live in the next couple hundred years are potentially dwarfed by the people of the far future so… lets just try to get to the far future without being too self-obsessed.
That being said, I do hope to preserve my brain and the brains of my spouse and children and their children, etc. It’s just a small consideration all things considered.
As a former neuroscientist, I am very in favor of brain plastination, particularly of ‘soft’ plastination (e.g. the CLARITY technique). I think there’s a huge amount of long-term cost savings and safety improvement from making the brain info stable at room temperature and easily readable multiple times over without destruction. The value of soft plastination is that you can still infuse antibody labels and such into the tissue to non-harmfully study the tissue.
The only reason I am not encouraging people to donate to this as a cause area is that it seems so small impact compared to x-risk causes. The people who will live in the next couple hundred years are potentially dwarfed by the people of the far future so… lets just try to get to the far future without being too self-obsessed.
That being said, I do hope to preserve my brain and the brains of my spouse and children and their children, etc. It’s just a small consideration all things considered.