Scientists Can Now Preserve a Brain After Death - What’s Next?

0:28This episode is brought to you by Indeed. of a pig's brain after death, I feel we need this is not a drill flashing. Right, so this is a technique that has been used to preserve a whole pig brain and it's going to be offered this technique by a company to terminally ill human patients. The idea is that by potentially preserving the neural structure of the brain, it may one day be possible to reconstruct the mind of the person it once belonged to. Yeah, that one day is doing a lot of work, isn't it? Yeah. So what the idea is that the brain connectome has been preserved and that's this three-dimensional structure of all the neurons and all the connections between them.

1:04And the scientist doing this work, as you say, says that potentially, he says, we could revive dead people and let them carry on living their life. But that is the massive claim we're getting into on this episode of The World, The Universe and Us from New Scientist. I'm Dr Owen Hooper. And I'm Dr Penny Sartre. Alexandra Thompson is here. You edited this story, Alex. Take us through what they've done first. And just to stress, they've done this in a pig, haven't they? They've done it in pigs because pigs have quite a comparable brain and cardiovascular anatomy to humans. So this has been done by a team at a private institution called Nectome in California.

1:41So the first thing they did was insert a cannula into the heart roughly 10 minutes after cardiac arrest. Then they flushed out the blood and introduced these preservation solutions into the brain. and these contain aldehyde chemicals which create sort of molecular bridges between cells which essentially locks the cellular activity in place. Then they introduce cryoprotectants which replace water inside tissue to prevent the formation of ice crystals during cooling which would otherwise be damaging and the brain was cooled to around minus 32 degrees Celsius at which point the structure of the brain can be preserved for hundreds of years.

2:19Hundreds of years. When this story came in, Alex, what was your response? You know, was it like, did your jaw drop or was it, are you used to this kind of thing now? No, my jaw dropped. It was on a sort of instant messaging service. You're not jaded yet. A couple of people pitched in. Yeah. There were lots of wows, lots of shocked face emojis. Okay. So we've got a brain preserved for hundreds of years. Potentially. Oh, yeah. And so this method is a bit like how organs are sometimes preserved temporarily, isn't it? Yes. Yes. So when organs are preserved for transplantation, that also involves flushing them with a specialised cold solution.

2:53But that's around four degrees Celsius and that stops metabolic activity and they're good for a few hours up to a day. So more advanced methods include machine perfusion, where pumps circulate oxygenated, nutrient-rich solutions through an organ. And that allows for longer preservation. and then there's experimental cryopreservation which involves deep freezing at minus 150 degrees celsius which puts cells into suspended animation. There's kind of two things that happen with these things aren't there because you you want to stop the metabolic activity and and like you say put it in suspended animation and prevent damage.

3:29To do that you have to cool it but then the really hard thing is you mentioned ice crystals form and that can just wreck the tissue so that's the really sort of tricky thing about all of these techniques isn't it? Yeah but they have found these chemicals that can do it without the ice crystals forming and that's what they try to do at these cryopreservation centres for brains and bodies that we report on this quite a lot over the years. But you know there's one thing to revive an organ but it's a whole other thing to revive a brain but we'll get into that one. One thing this reminded me of was last year on the podcast us we reported on an experiment where slices of mouse brain had been brought back to life after being frozen for a week yeah that was more about working towards a kind of suspended animation and then reawakening and but but this is different because it's about trying to actually resurrect someone's mind potentially after they've died yeah it was completely different slices of brain from a living animal and they showed the electrical activity in the cells was similar to a normal bit of brain but as you say the leap comes from uh suggesting that that memories might be preserved that we could either read or that somehow could be reactivated and so that's a completely different thing you know restoring a whole the entire brain from someone dead as well is an is yet another thing so we've got we've got several leaps here yeah and we're going to get into this because i'm pretty skeptical that just just the structure itself preserves the person and and so i'm looking forward to getting into that in a bit.

4:56But first, can you tell us a bit more, Alex, about once they'd done this new technique, how did they verify how well it had worked? What did they do to sort of test and see if they'd had the result they wanted? So they've only really assessed how well the brain has been preserved. And that involved taking samples from its outermost layer and then examining them under a microscope. And they found that when perfusion began around 18 minutes after death, there were clear signs of cellular damage. But when they managed to reduce that delay to 14 minutes, they found really quite impressive preservation of structures like neurons and synapses.

5:30So synapses, that's the connections between individual neurons are being preserved by this technique then. Yeah. Getting it down from 18 minutes to 14 minutes doesn't sound like much of a chopping, you know, much of a reduction in time. When you've got the animal right there, It's not like, you know, you have to rush to the bedside or something. Are you saying couldn't they do it quicker? Yeah. I mean, because they've got a pig, they're killing the pig deliberately for this test. Can't they get the chemicals into the brain faster than 14 minutes post-mortem? Possibly. But 14 minutes, there's quite a lot to do within that 14 minutes.

6:06The timing is really critical. So if they could, that would be... It is because... It's like a pit change in a car, in an F1 or something. I mean, it takes within minutes of blood no longer circulating, enzymes start to break down neurons and cells start digesting themselves. With traditional cryonics, that aims to preserve the brain as quickly as possible. But after a natural death, by cooling it and adding these fixatives, but the team, as you say, they have to be at the bedside after a natural death. where to circumvent that problem, the team at Nectome have developed a protocol to look at sort of physician-assisted death, which is when a terminally ill person sort of chooses the time of their passing so it can be organised that the team is there.

6:48Yeah, I mean, this is where I think, for me, it starts to get particularly contentious. Controversial. Yeah, I mean, so let me just quote what the researcher says about this. So this is Boris Robel. he says in theory they could use the protocol to reconstruct the three-dimensional structure of the neurons and the connections between them that's the connectome that we talked about and then he says although we're agnostic towards the type of revival methods we think we might be able to preserve all the information needed for revival so that is a huge claim it does sort of suggest that we know what makes us conscious which again we will get into I mean, OK, I don't know where to start really on this, but let's start because they're doing it.

7:34They're going to offer this to people, first of all, in Oregon, where, you know, it's legal to do assisted dying. So you can go to an assisted dying facility, invite a patient, terminally ill patient to take part in this protocol. And he said, so here I quote him again, they would come to us, take the medication, which would have to be prescribed by an independent doctor, not us. and then after it's legal to do so we would start the surgery and he continues they would need to donate their brain and body for scientific research of course but what we're offering as a company is for their body and brain to be kept essentially indefinitely in the hope that sometime in the future it would be possible to read out the information from the brain and reconstruct the person to allow them to continue in effect with their life so it's a it's a big hope isn't it that someone's got well first that we're gonna understand how to revive it and then that someone would actually choose to do it for the brain but i don't think they know i'm gonna get into this in a minute i don't think they know what they're getting into even if it was possible yeah so i have some thoughts on this that we'll get into a bit more but this episode is brought to you by focus features would you let ai pilot your plane raise your child decide your future On March 27th, Focus Features presents The AI Doc, or How I Became an Apocaloptimist.

8:55Critics and audience at the Sundance and Southwest Film Festivals call it the most urgent movie of our time. The AI Doc, or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, rated PG-13, only in theatres March 27th. Thomas Lewton's here with us. Thomas, you've written a lot about consciousness. I think my first point would be that let's say in the future we can get a digital copy of the connectome up and running if we if we uploaded it would that be conscious without a body? I think we need to be clear about what we're trying to recreate here right which is phenomenal experience so that's things like you know the bittersweetness of your morning coffee the red of redness it's experiences which are in a way fundamentally different from the kinds of physical models that are used in neuroscience that are used to describe cognitive processes in the brain you know i think neuroscientists can be blindsided by viewing the brain as this kind of computer we in which neurons are effectively on off switches like logic gates connected in complex feedback loops and then they sort of wave their hands and say oh consciousness emerges out of firing neurons but we still have no real idea what consciousness is and you know outside of these kind of what you would call physicalist theories there are hundreds of other you know plausible entirely rational ideas around what consciousness might be and where it might reside or might happen and some of them see you know consciousness coming out of of emerging out of matter but others see mind as more fundamental than matter there are idealist theories which say that you know the mental is is more fundamental than the physical uh and that would mean that well it sounds good but what does that mean?

10:39Well I mean it means pretty wild stuff right it would mean that physical reality is a manifestation of cosmic mind so essentially consciousness wouldn't reside in the brain but it's something which spans like across the entire universe so like you can say like this all sounds very woo and kind of nonsense but it's more to make the point that like we'd like we really don't have solid empirical evidence like whether it is something in our brains or that at this present time. And I think we have to sort of be aware of that when a company is saying we plan to do this. I think, to be fair, the one thing that I found interesting about this is that it seems like they are preserving the structure and the neurons, but there's also some preservation of the stuff inside neurons as well.

11:27And that kind of level of detail, maybe in hundreds of years, Maybe that could come about. Our cover feature this week is all about these sort of structural approaches to understanding consciousness where if you're able to map experiences, the kind of qualia, the redness of red, the bitterness of coffee, if you can map that sufficiently well and find these commonalities across people, and then you can match those patterns up with patterns in the brain at whatever level, whether that's neurons, connections molecules we don't really know then yeah maybe maybe they're onto something but I think as you were saying like hope delusion is is the operative word there I think it can be really easy in this age of AI especially like you say to think in terms of computers like the brain is a computer and we must just preserve its bits and then we can build it up in a computer but if we think about the hard problem of consciousness which if I've got this right and please correct me Thomas is that we've got you know this bag of wet stuff in our head there's electricity there's chemistry there's connections there's waves we still don't really understand how that actually makes us who we are and so we can preserve the brain as best we can but we still don't know what the actual stuff that's going in there that makes us us right yeah exactly and you know and don't get me wrong there were loads of like very good neuroscientific theories around how this might happen but you know recently there have been like serious efforts to try and pitch these ideas against each other to try and say you know at least show we're on the right track but they've really actually failed to even get you know to give a general direction in which this kind of research should go so that's not to say that this isn't an enigma that can be solved one day it's just it's you know it's far too early to say in a hundred years time we're going to solve it yeah Well, I think that's why I've got a problem with the sort of informed consent here.

13:27Because let's say that in a couple of hundred years' time, someone comes along and says, oh, look, back in 2026, someone terminally ill, you know, preserved their brain now. Let's scan it and upload it, right? What that makes me think of is the healer cells thing. So those healer cells, that's a line of human cells. They're used around the world. They've been used for, you know, what, 70 years now or more. They came from a woman called Henrietta Lacks, taken without her permission and then just replicated and used in labs around the world. I mean, that's bad enough that it was done without her permission or her consent.

14:06Imagine a line of brains, someone's brain. It's not like just one entity. If it would be uploaded, it would have to be debugged. You can imagine it's sort of stuttering to life. far in the future. And then this person from 2026 who was terminally ill sort of says, where am I? And, oh, you're in a, yeah, you're in a computer. Oh, sorry, you just have to turn you off now to debug this bit. And then that experience of waking up, going on and on, replicated in labs all around the world forever as this experimental tool. It sounds like, well, it is science fiction. Well, I was going to ask you, surely you've read some, are there books that have done this?

14:45It seems such a sort of ripe area for it. Yeah, but I mean, it's horrific, isn't it? Yeah, it reminds me of that animated series Pantheon, which is exactly that sort of scenario, like uploaded intelligence, and then you have these virtual beings who are existing in these isolated, blocked off worlds, essentially being forced to work. Yeah, it's an absolute hell. I mean, okay, that's our sort of hellish version of it, but what are Nectome selling to these terminally ill people? what are they suggesting that one day hundreds of years in the future when everyone you've ever known is passed into out of memory and you're in a world utterly unlike anything you've ever known you'll come back and and have some sort of experience well it might not be you but this brain will wake up in a computer and you'll sign up for that it seems like a false hope and i think that's the side of it which kind of yeah make yeah stresses me out it's like yeah to kind of sell this possibility to people who are undergoing you know really quite difficult circumstances and you know and possibly you know off the back of this we're going to learn all kinds of interesting things about the brain as well but that seems i don't know it's very well dubious so that's the thing when we talked about last year's podcast um with the brain slices frozen that's not so much about reanimating a brain as like actually we'll be able to learn loads about how the brain works and stuff like that in a mouse model and then maybe there's something we can learn about suspended animation for you know maybe you know long-term space travel or for other reasons you might want to there might be medical reasons yeah but this thing about resurrecting someone after death and like and it's not just terminally ill people as well it might you know you often hear billionaires sort of saying yeah i don't believe in death i want to cheat death and like we want to cure death or like deaths for wimps there's a bit of a culture about trying to stay as young as possible because we're like on the cusp of working out how we'll live as ai forever so you just have to stay long enough that is a sort of a trend yeah absolutely but i think as well an important trend that maybe has less prominence is the idea of, I don't know, being more culturally aware of death and trying to live a good death, actually, is, you know, to recognise that this is a, you know, what gives meaning to life is death, actually.

17:16That's a really nice, important place to leave it. We'll leave it there. Thanks, Thomas Lewton, Alex Thompson, for joining us. I'm Rowan Hooper. And I'm Penny Sashay. And this is The World, The Universe and Us. Do follow for more content, and we'll see you soon. Bye for now. In the far future.

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