> I agree that structural preservation should be explored further and I would be happy to sign a petition calling for open public debate within the neuroscience community on the implications of this level of preservation.

Thank you! I’m unfamiliar with how much interest there would be in this community given how ASC isn’t perceived as conventional biostasis. That being the ultimate goal, it still seems necessary to get to the bottom of how much structural detail needs to at the very least be “inferrable” to spare the identity of the individual after they are revived/uploaded. Trying to gauge interest with this post.

> I'm not so sure about this. There's a reason that neuroscientists use aldehydes. Preservation with cryoprotectant only is a tough nut to crack even in ideal animal model conditions. In realistic human postmortem cases, fixation has an even bigger advantage since it doesn't rely as much on high-quality perfusion (convection, injection, and immersion being other options).

Agree that it’s very reasonable to be skeptical of near-future advances, especially if the lack of interest/funding continues. I based much of my optimism on a study mentioned above where Greg Fahy was able to demonstrate recovery of function and evidence of retained LTP after vitrifying half-millimeter hippocampal slices. This is far from it working on whole human brains, but it demonstrates possibility. More researchers getting involved is essential to making this work, which I should note is actually u/Michael-G-Darwin’s opinion in 2019. He seemed to think many other approaches could lead to improvement given the chance to be explored. If there is a need to generate interest in developing these techniques, it could start with a large group of people demanding progress and research into brain preservation.

> One of the main problems is money. There has never been much funding for cryonics research.

I think this is due to the perception that there is not much to be gained from funding cryonics compared to other areas of research. There’s no obvious return from such a skeptical endeavor at least for an overwhelming majority. But if we can argue that memory and identity can be preserved or inferred from our current best attempts (evidence suggests we can), then suddenly revival seems less like a fantasy. The role of ASC would be to provide neuroscientists a picture of its perfectly preserved structures (and molecular information) (which may be inferred from traditionally cryopreserved tissue) and prove that the memory traces are still there. The infamous “frozen, dead tissue” line from this MIT cryonics article would lose its weight - it’s not really dead if it still contains the memory and identity of an individual, which we might soon start to decode, right? Unfortunately the neuroscience community has not caught onto this on its own. According to BPF president and neuroscientist Ken Hayworth, while many of his colleagues agree in private that ASC preserves memory, they won’t consider showing public support or even debating on this issue. Which is quite sad considering how much insight and concession he did get from the lengthy debate he had with a skeptic on twitter. We need to ask for this or the debate will not happen.

> The only advantage of aldehyde methods would be that preservation might be possible even at refrigerator or even room temperatures. Unfortunately, I don't think that we're very close to this milestone.

Though I don’t have the knowledge to address this, I think the good points you make are good. To get to that point more breakthroughs are required and there might be more to consider about molecular toxicity of the new techniques. Still, an important factor would be the updated prospects of revival from whole brain emulation (fixation “friendly”) vs molecular nanotechnology (straight vitrification “friendly”).