The MIT Media Lab will sever ties with a brain-embalming company that promoted euthanasia to people hoping for digital immortality through “brain uploads.” The startup, called Nectome, had raised more than $200,000 in deposits from people hoping to have their brains stored in an end-of-life procedure similar to physician-assisted suicide.
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MIT’s connection to the company drew sharp criticism from some neuroscientists, who say brain uploading isn’t possible. “Fundamentally, the company is based on a proposition that is just false. It is something that just can’t happen,” says Sten Linnarsson of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. He adds that by collaborating with Nectome, MIT had lent credibility to the startup and increased the chance that “some people actually kill themselves to donate their brains.”
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Nectome is working on how to embalm people’s brains in a way that preserves the connections between neurons. Such a “connectome,” some speculate, could retain information about a person’s memories. Most neuroscientists think the ability to recapture memories from brain tissue and re-create a consciousness inside a computer is at best decades away and probably not possible at all.
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In its statement, the Media Lab said it was canceling the contract “upon consideration of the scientific premises underlying the company’s commercial plans, as well as certain public statements that the company has made.”
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