Aldehyde-Stabilized Cryopreservation

Stories out about progress achieved by Nectome, a Vancouver, WA company that is working on brain preservation. As is often the case, there is a magic leap from that step to 'mind uploading' and so forth. As I understand it, the current breakthrough involves preservation of a pig brain, keeping the neural connections and chemistry intact. 

From the story in the Express (U.K) - "Mind uploading closer than ever as scientists freeze brain in time":

The team, led by Aurelia Song, Anna LaVergne and Borys Wróbel of Nectome Inc, found that blood washout and chemical fixation must begin within approximately 14 minutes of cardiac arrest to prevent irreversible damage from clotting (the "no-reflow" phenomenon).

Starting the process at around 18 minutes resulted in failed preservation, but under the 14-minute threshold, every neuron, synapse and molecular structure remained "beautifully preserved" across the whole brain.

The work, conducted on pigs as a human-sized proxy, refines aldehyde-stabilised cryopreservation: blood is replaced with fixatives to halt decay, followed by cryoprotectants that allow vitrification—a glass-like state at around -32°C—potentially stable for millennia.

 Service is offered in Oregon and Washington due to local laws around assisted dying.

Brain connectome model running in computer

 Well this is pretty interesting.

In 2024, Eon senior scientist Philip Shiu and collaborators published in Nature a computational model of the entire adult Drosophila melanogaster brain, containing more than 125,000 neurons and 50 million synaptic connections, built from the FlyWire connectome and machine learning predictions of neurotransmitter identity. That model predicted motor behavior at 95% accuracy. But it was disembodied: a brain without a body, activation without physics, motor outputs with nowhere to go.

Now the brain has somewhere to go.

The blog post "The First Multi-Behavior Brain Upload" with accompanying video, describes how they've integrated "Eon’s connectome-based brain emulation with a physics-simulated fly body" and show the resulting virtual fly moving in a space.

Seems like this is mostly based around physical movement. Is the claim that this connectome is a generic model for the entire species of fly, or is it in some way unique to a particular fly. If this approach is scaled up to a mouse, as described, could it capture memories of a particular mouse (say of how to get through a maze?).