After ghoulish allegations, a brain-preservation company seeks redemption
SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO — Robert McIntyre would like to get a few things straight. That “waiting list” of people plunking down $10,000 to have his company preserve their brains for future uploading? Just 30 “early supporters” of his research, he said; no one has been promised or even offered anything, certainly not silicon-based mental immortality.
The elderly woman in Portland, Ore., whose brain McIntyre obtained (via body-donation company Aeternitas Life) right after her death last year so he could practice his vitrification-cum-cryopreservation technique? Just some early research to improve brain banking, “which we feel we accomplished,” he said.
Reports that his 3-year-old startup, Nectome, aims to “preserve your brain to bring you back in the future” (according to the website of its venture capital funder) or to “back up your mind,” as per a now-disappeared tease on Nectome’s website? “What we’re focused on is preserving long-term memory,” insists McIntyre, 30, sitting at a conference table in Nectome’s new, two-room headquarters within shouting distance of San Francisco’s airport, “not reading or decoding it. The field of memory preservation doesn’t exist. We’re trying to create it.”
It has not been an easy year for McIntyre or Nectome, but they’re determined to claw their way out of scientific purgatory.
After MIT Technology Review reported in March that his technology might require death at the speed of assisted suicide, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology biologist stopped collaborating with the company, the university said it has nothing to do with Nectome, and neuroscientists offered little but scorn. Social media decided (incorrectly) “Nectome” is Latin for “I have been killed.” (Necto me is Latin for “I bind myself,” which probably isn’t much better. The name actually comes from “connectome,” meaning the map of all the brain’s neurons, axons, dendrites, and synaptic connections; constructing that map is a holy grail of neuroscience.) Headlines painted Nectome’s intended service as “suicide, with benefits.”
The ghoulish, Nectome’s erstwhile collaborator, replied that he “must respectfully decline.” Neuroscientist Richard Brown of Dalhousie University, whose McIntyre cites as supporting the possibility of memory preservation, was dismissive: “When you die, the brain cells die, so there is no memory after death,” he said. “It is not possible to find memory in dead neurons.”
