Three and a half years ago I made my largest personal donation ever to the Brain Preservation Foundation, to help fund their Brain Preservation Prizes. Just now they’ve announced that 21st Century Medicine has won their $26,735 Small Mammal Brain Preservation Prize, using a more cryonics-based approach. The other main competitor, Mikula, used the “plastination” approach I favored back then:
Is this a big deal? Does it really change anything about the costs/benefits of cryonics?
It seems to me that a big watershed moment is when scientists manage to extract memories from a cryopreserved dog/cat/mouse, such as recognizing a person or place, or some other learned behavior.
Since the winning approach of aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation uses both fixation and cryopreservation in combination, it's hard to characterize the winning team as fully "cryonics", and thus it would have been hard to tell who would have won the bet as written.
Is this a big deal? Does it really change anything about the costs/benefits of cryonics?
It seems to me that a big watershed moment is when scientists manage to extract memories from a cryopreserved dog/cat/mouse, such as recognizing a person or place, or some other learned behavior.
Amazing news!
Hopefully we would have worded a more careful bet. But yeah might not have caught that case.
Since the winning approach of aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation uses both fixation and cryopreservation in combination, it's hard to characterize the winning team as fully "cryonics", and thus it would have been hard to tell who would have won the bet as written.