CBS Local — A startup company is giving people the chance to digitally preserve their memories forever. There’s one catch to the brain-uploading procedure however: the company has to kill you first.
Nectome, a startup founded by two MIT graduates who studied artificial intelligence, says they have created a method of perfectly preserving the human brain using a high-tech embalming process. “Our mission is to preserve your brain well enough to keep all its memories intact: from that great chapter of your favorite book to the feeling of cold winter air, baking an apple pie, or having dinner with your friends and family,” the company writes on their website.
Nectome adds that it believes science will create technology that will be able to digitally “recreate your consciousness” within the next 100 years and their service is the first step in making sure your mind is ready for that breakthrough. The unnerving twist to this digital immortality is that the company reportedly needs your brain to be alive and active when the embalming starts.
According to MIT Technology Review, Nectome says their plan is to focus on people suffering from terminal illnesses. Patients, already sedated and connected to heart-lung machines, would have the special embalming chemicals pumped into them while they are still alive. The product is “100 percent fatal,” according to co-founder Robert McIntyre.
The chemical solution reportedly can keep a body preserved as a statue of glass for hundreds, and possibly thousands of years. The startup already has a waiting list of about 25 people who have paid a $10,000 deposit for the service. “I assume my brain will be uploaded to the cloud,” one of the company’s investors Sam Altman told MIT.
The brain embalming procedure is not yet available to the public because there’s still a lack of evidence that memories can survive in dead brain tissue.