Breaking News [Media Press Package with additional detail]

A team from 21st Century Medicine has developed a technology that has been independently verified to enable near-perfect, long-term structural preservation of a whole intact mammalian brain.

This new breakthrough just won the Brain Preservation Prize – five years after it was launched by the Brain Preservation Foundation (BPF).

“One of the, if not THE, most important scientific results in the history of medical biostasis and cryonics has been accomplished” Aschwin de Wolf, President of The Institute for Evidence-Based Cryonics

According to the BPF, 21st Century Medicine narrowly beat a team led by Dr. Shawn Mikula at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology (published last year in Nature Methods).

In addition to proof of this accomplishment and the full 21st Century Medicine “Aldehyde-Stabilized Cryopreservation” protocol recently being published in the journal Cryobiology, it was also independently verified by the BPF through extensive electron microscopic examination.

The prize was independently judged by neuroscientists Dr. Sebastian Seung, Professor at Princeton University and Dr. Kenneth Hayworth, President of the BPF.

“Imagine being able save, and at low temperatures, indefinitely preserve people who can no longer be sustained by contemporary medicine so that future medicine can both revive them and restore their health – these results provide strong support of that being possible”

Dr. JP de Magalhães, Chair of the UK Cryonics and Cryopreservation Research Network

This follows recent scientific evidence that long-term memory is not modified by the process of whole organism cryopreservation and revival in simple animal models.

As the two leading think-tanks/scientific networks in cryonics we share here a brief with both more color and our perspectives on what this important breakthrough means and – does not mean – for cryonics. 

In the words of Dr. Ken Hayworth, President of the Brain Preservation Foundation, and one of the prize judges:

“Every neuron and synapse looks beautifully preserved across the entire brain. Simply amazing given that I held in my hand this very same brain when it was a vitrified glassy solid… This is not your father’s cryonics”