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This start-up is planning to preserve and upload the human brain, but there’s a deadly catch

The service has been described as “100% fatal”.

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The human brain is made up of millions of neurons (Ben Birchall/PA)

A US start-up is looking to preserve human brains with the aim of digitally backing up their minds, but there’s a grisly catch.

In order to live on for eternity as a computer simulation, Nectome says it needs the person’s brain to be fresh, making the service “100% fatal”.

The company was founded in 2016 by two artificial intelligence researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with aim to preserve the mind of a deceased person.

It is backed by Y Combinator, an organisation that invests and mentors tech entrepreneurs, and has received a $960,000 (£687,000) grant from the US National Institute of Mental Health.

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The process involves freezing the brain using a process known as vitrification, which preserves every minute detail of the brain at a microscopic level.

The technique won a prize from the Brain Preservation Foundation for preserving a rabbit’s brain in 2016 and a pig’s brain in 2018.

3D illustration of Interconnected neurons with electrical pulses.
(Getty Images)

Nectome believes that its service is legal in certain US states such as California, where the End of Life Option Act allows doctor-assisted suicide for terminally ill patients.

However, the company says its services may not come into use until around 2021. And, at present, it doesn’t have a viable method for reviving or uploading the brains it stores.

According to Nectome’s website, the company hopes to demonstrate a fully uploaded simulation of a biological neural network sometime around 2024.

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