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Projects such as the 2045 Initiative aim to find new ways to extend life and, ultimately, overcome death. While other experts, such as gerontologist Aubrey De Grey, follow a line more focused on biology and bioengineering, Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov's initiative has four stages: 1. Controlling a robotic body remotely through a brain-machine interface (2015–2020); 2. Transplanting a brain into a robotic body (2020–2025); 3. Transferring the human mind into an artificial brain (2030–2035); 4. Transcending the physical body in a holographic avatar (2035–2045).
The project's name comes from futurist Ray Kurzweil's prediction that the singularity will be reached around 2045 — that is, roughly the moment when artificial intelligence would surpass the processing power of the human brain, overtaking us and enabling emulations as powerful as those envisioned by the 2045 Initiative.
On the other hand, there are also companies such as Alcor that focus on the cryogenic preservation of their clients' bodies and/or brains, so they can be revived in a future when the technology exists. And finally, there is the controversial Italian doctor Sergio Canavero, who made headlines worldwide by saying he would perform a human head transplant by 2018 — but his volunteer eventually withdrew, and last year Canavero resurfaced in the international media with a test on a cadaver that he claimed was successful, a claim not well received by other experts.
The latest development, however, is an experiment at Yale University based on preserving a pig's brain outside the animal's body. Broadly speaking, the test involves searching for a new definition of death, as the researchers have tried to restore circulation to the brains of decapitated pigs, keeping the organs reanimated for up to 36 hours.
As described in an MIT Technology Review article, this experiment offers scientists a new way to study intact brains in the lab with great precision, but at the same time it also opens new possibilities for extending human life, for example by preserving the human brain with external support.
The research also gained attention because, on May 28, it was discussed at the US National Institutes of Health due to its ethical dimension. During the event, neuroscientist Nenad Sestan presented his team, which has been testing 100 to 200 pig brains obtained from slaughterhouses, restoring their circulation using pumps, heaters and bags of artificial blood warmed to body temperature.
Although they managed to keep blood circulating for up to 36 hours, there is no evidence that consciousness was also restored in these isolated brains. What Sestan found incredible, however, was that billions of cells in the brain were still healthy and able to carry out their normal activities. “These brains may be damaged, but if the cells are alive, it's a living organ,” says Steve Hyman, director of psychiatric research at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who was also involved in the work.
According to Hyman, preserving a brain is not so different from preserving other organs such as the liver, heart or lungs destined for transplant. But it is precisely this technical proximity that, according to him, leads many to believe this could be a way to avoid death. “We may get to a point where, instead of people saying ‘freeze my brain’, they'll say ‘hook me up and find me a new body’.” Hyman believes such expectations are still very far off today and that transplanting a brain into another body is not remotely possible.
Called BrainEx, the project is trying to connect brains to a closed system of tubes and reservoirs that circulate a red fluid capable of carrying oxygen to the brain stem, the cerebellar artery and other deep regions at the center of the brain. In his presentation at the National Institutes of Health conference, Sestan said the technique could succeed in any other species, including primates. “This is probably not restricted to pigs,” he said.
Because of this broad applicability, Sestan has already been asked, for example, whether the technique could be used in medicine. “Human brains removed from a body could become test subjects for more exotic cancer cures and speculative Alzheimer's treatments that are too dangerous to test on living people.” But once again, it is the ethical side of the research that comes back as a problem:
“If, for example, a person's brain is reanimated outside the body, would that person wake up in a kind of sensory deprivation chamber, without ears, eyes or a way to communicate? Would that person retain their memories, an identity or rights? Could researchers ethically dissect or discard that brain?”
One of the advisers to the US National Institutes of Health says there will be many “strange” questions to resolve, even if they have nothing to do with the idea of a “brain in a jar”. For Sestan, the fact that this experiment has fascinated so many people may also be something to be careful about, because the hopes around it are probably heading toward the great challenge of overcoming the inevitable human fate: death.
For the neuroscientist, however, although it may be possible to do the same with human brains, it will still be necessary to outline the right measures when the procedure is done with human organs. From a philosophical standpoint, several contemporary researchers believe, for example, that consciousness cannot exist without a body, which also calls into question the idea of a post-self life.
