The Brain Preservation Foundation still needs money

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Aug 21, 2012

Remember the Brain Preservation Foundation? This is Kenneth Heyworth's project to test methods of brain preservation, with a large rewards going to (1) the first group to preserve a mouse brain, and (2) the first group to preserve a large mammalian brain. Two teams, attempting preservation via cryonics and plastination respectively, are ready to have their mouse brain preservations evaluated. But the BPF lacks the funds to carry out the tests (5nm 3D scans of a randomly selected cubic millimeter to verify high-fidelity preservation).

Solicitations for donations have come from both Robin Hanson and Eliezer Yudkowsky, but the response has been...underwhelming thus far.

The BPF general fund has 9 donors listed; The Evaluation Fund has 5, one of whom is BPF's President. This does not include large donations from the anonymous $100k prize backer, Robin Hanson, John Smart, Daniel Crevier, and (again) Kenneth Hayworth. This puts an upper limit on the number of people in the world willing to donate to find out if there exists a method of reliably preserving brains indefinitely at...18 people.

I know that there are more than 17 other people like me in the world, who really want to see the results of these attempts. A world in which brains can be cheaply preserved indefinitely is a world I want to live in - and it would just be sad if this project fizzled because it lacked the funds to verify the already-existing results.

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19 points

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I'm one of the 9.

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As am I... though I am surprised they list a donation of only $100.

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This deserves recognition, up voted.

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laman_blanchard

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This post inspired me to make a small donation.

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9 points

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Me as well.

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This not being funded would indeed be very sad. Recently a story about the tragedy that is death touched a lot of people on LessWrong, I think me editing that article to link to here and encouraging people to donate would be an appropriate move.

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This is appreciated; Thank you.

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I donated a small amount

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When do they need the money by? I'm currently a bit low on funds due to tuition and rent, but I can probably spare $500-1000 in a couple of weeks (I try to maintain an emergency fund, and don't want to dip into that if I don't need to).

Also, do you have a page I link to where they describe the immediate funding gap? If possible, I will turn this into a donation-matching thing, probably on /r/transhuman (leverage is always good).

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I'm one of the volunteers at the Brain Preservation Foundation. Although sooner is always better, there isn't a specific reason why now is better than 2 weeks in the future. If you need the money for an emergency fund, I'd wait to donate.

The page describing the need for our current fundraising campaign is here: http://www.brainpreservation.org/content/letter-president-brain-preservation-foundation

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So, some anonymous person can give away 100k$ to back the prize, but not the 25-50k$ to fund the evaluation process needed to award the prize?

Why don't they offer a 50k$ prize and use the other 50k$ to fund the evaluation, instead of soliciting donations? Why don't they just offer a medal of insignificant material value? The winner is going to get lots of bragging rights anyway.

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Does anyone here know if BPF is a 501(c)(3) organization? If so, I can probably get some of my donation matched by my employer.

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"The Brain Preservation Foundation was incorporated in Delaware on August 27, 2010. We hold Section 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status as a not-for-profit scientific research organization. Your contributions are fully tax deductible. Thank you."

http://www.brainpreservation.org/content/donate

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Thanks - I'm not sure why I didn't see that before. I've now requested a match, for an additional $956.

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It took me googling "tax exempt site:brainpreservation.org" to find that, so it may not just be you.

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Yeah, same here. Their site could use some work.

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advancedatheist

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I'd like to donate, but at the moment I may have to direct discretionary time and money towards saving Kim Suozzi:

http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/ydsy5/reddit_help_me_find_some_peace_in_dying_young_im/

The lack of interest in the prize puzzles me. Some very wealthy cryonicists want to tie up fortunes in speculative revival trusts, yet they depend on financially inadequate cryonics organizations to keep them in suspension against foreseeable adversities, and they seem uninterested in trying to improve the science of preserving their own brains. I don't understand this business model.

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I'd like to donate, but at the moment I may have to direct discretionary time and money towards saving Kim Suozzi: http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/ydsy5/reddit_help_me_find_some_peace_in_dying_young_im/ The lack of interest in the prize puzzles me.

Why would you be puzzled when you have answered your own question?

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Behavior like that has deepened my skepticism of the cryonics crowd - there are glaring discrepancies between professed beliefs and actual behavior.

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Prisoner's dilemma. If someone else donates and I don't, I get to eat my cryopreservation and have it too. Or something like that.

At least this thread has rustled up a few more donations.

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Has Suozzi's story been confirmed by CI yet?

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advancedatheist

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I don't know about CI's due diligence. As the secretary of the Society for Venturism, which has the ability to raise money for Miss Suozzi's suspension, I can confirm that we've pursued our end of checking out her story.

We helped out in getting William O'Rights cryosuspended a few years ago, for example:

http://www.cryonics.org/reports/CI93.html

One of our directors has interviewed Miss Suozzi, and she may have a article about her written up soon which we'll post on the Venturists' website:

http://venturist.info/

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6 points

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Just donated to Kim's fund.

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Do you have any plans to manage a donation fund for her?

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Thank you! Could you publicize your confirmation? I believe there are a number of people willing to donate who were holding off until the story was confirmed. What is the best way to donate to the fund?

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saving Kim Suozzi

saving?

and they seem uninterested in trying to improve the science of preserving their own brains

Maybe they don't want to spread the flour on the dragon

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Some very wealthy cryonicists want to tie up fortunes in speculative revival trusts, yet they depend on financially inadequate cryonics organizations to keep them in suspension against foreseeable adversities, and they seem uninterested in trying to improve the science of preserving their own brains. I don't understand this business model.

Think pyramids, only you don't need thousands of slaves and a truly inconvenient amount of sandstone.

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5 points

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How much money do they need?

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According to them, approximately $25-50k - less than the cost of a single cryosuspension. This should be easily fundable with token contributions from people who have expressed an interest in brain preservation.

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Donated $100 dollars. I think there are 26 total donors now.

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I've donated a relatively small amount, and will donate more when my finances allow (that's not open-ended; I'm expecting a small windfall in a few months). It should go without saying, but if you have a good employer, check to see if they match charitable donations! Mine turned my donation from a pitifully small one into a just plain small one.

Wouldn't it be weird if it turns out that there's an excellent and durable method of preserving brains, but it's not the one that's been used for the last half-century or so? Horrifying, obviously, but profoundly weird as well. The two positions I've seen on the topic have been "it never has and never will work", and "it's worked since some possibly-specified time in the past". A world in which people who sign up for preservation avoid death if and only if they're lucky enough to have signed up after, say, 2030, feels weirder than a world where the rational are rewarded, the irrational punished. The zog, I suppose.

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A world in which people who sign up for preservation avoid death if and only if they're lucky enough to have signed up after, say, 2030, feels weirder than a world where the rational are rewarded, the irrational punished

It feels weirder, but has many precedents. Many 'bubbles' can be profitably interpreted as people being 100% correct about their vision of the future - but messing up the timing (see http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/5646 and http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21575737-lessons-americas-long-history-property-booms-betting-house for examples). I used this in another comment, but consider the case of an investor in the ill-fated Pets.com: was the investor right to believe that Americans would spend a ton of money online such as for buying dogfood? Absolutely, Amazon is a successful online retail business that stocks thousands of dog food varieties, to say nothing of all the other pet-related goods it sells. But the value of Pets.com still went to ~0. Many startups have a long list of failed predecessors who tried to do pretty much the same thing, and what made them a success was that they happened to give the pinata a whack at the exact moment where some cost curves or events hit the right point. (Facebook is the biggest archive of photographs there has ever been, with truly colossal storage requirements; could it have succeeded in the 1990s? No, and not even later, as demonstrated by Orkut & Friendster, and the lingering death of MySpace.) You can read books from the past about tech visionaries and note how many of them were spot-on in their beliefs about what would happen (The Media Lab was a good example of this - I read it constantly thinking 'yes, you were right, for all the good it did you' or 'not quite, it'd actually take another decade for that to really work out') but where a person would have been ill-advised to act on the correct forecasts. Or look at computers: imagine an early adopter of an Apple computer saying 'everyone will use computers eventually!' Yes, but not for another few decades, and 'in the long run, we are all dead'.

If cryonics turned out to be worthless for everyone doing it before 2030 while perfectly correct in principle and practical post-2030, it would simply be yet another technology where visionaries were ultimately right despite all nay-saying & skepticism from normals but nevertheless jumped on it too early.

When a knife drops, a fraction of a second divides a brilliant save from an emergency-room visit. They don't call it the 'bleeding edge' for nothing.

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Wow; that just reminded me of a bit from The Smartest Guys In The Room, where Enron partnered with Blockbuster to stream movies-on-demand over the internet in 2000. It was a scam, but clearly someone thought it was a real thing. (Netflix started streaming movies in 2007.)

And--yes, you said it. Projects like this and OpenWorm are particularly important because they help narrow down really uncertain things; OpenWorm, for instance, might be able to settle the "neurons are really complicated"/"neurons are accurately simulatable-in-bulk by simple models" dispute, as well as the "the connectome is/is not sufficient" thing.

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