Brain Preservation Foundation compared the cost of brain preservation with conventional medicine: similar sums already buy only months of life, yet a chance at future life is dismissed as absurd
Brain Preservation Foundation compared the cost of brain preservation with conventional medicine: similar sums already buy only months of life, yet a chance at future life is dismissed as absurd
In the official Preserving Hope newsletter, neuroscientist Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston examines the objection that brain preservation is too expensive. Current services cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. The article compares these prices with medical interventions already funded by individuals, insurers, and governments. It focuses on procedures in which a large payment buys either a few additional months of life or an uncertain chance of living longer.
In the article published on July 6, brain preservation for possible future restoration appears expensive and unusual. Sparks Brain Preservation charges $45 thousand for brain preservation and $100 thousand for whole-body preservation. Tomorrow Bio lists a price of €200 thousand for program members. Nectome offers preservation for $250 thousand.
These sums are comparable to the value of an apartment, an inheritance, or an insurance payout. The ordinary reaction is therefore understandable: a person sees the price and concludes that the service is a luxury for wealthy people trying to buy their way out of death.
Zeleznikow-Johnston shifts the comparison to medicine, where people already pay to extend life. Treatments routinely cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, work only in some patients, and sometimes provide only a few additional months. The sipuleucel-T immunotherapy for advanced prostate cancer cost about $100 thousand and extended life by approximately four months on average. Estimates for nusinersen, a treatment for spinal muscular atrophy, reached millions of dollars per quality-adjusted life year, yet patients, insurers, and public health systems still funded it.
Biostasis here means an attempt to stop the brain from deteriorating soon after legal death, so that future technologies might theoretically restore the person or read the preserved structure. In March, Sparks presented chemical brain fixation as an alternative to conventional cryonics: first preserve the structure to a measurable standard, then hypothesize about scanning or repairing it. In 2018, the laboratory Brain Preservation Prize concluded with a demonstration involving a pig brain. The structure of its connections was preserved, but no one revived the animal.
The substantive objection to brain preservation is this: there is no measured probability of success, the procedure depends on the first minutes after death, and future restoration remains hypothetical. This is a dispute about evidence. A price of $100 thousand shows the size of the wager, but any claim that the procedure is absurd must be supported by evidence about its probability of success and the quality of preservation.
The article proposes a test for critics. If someone says the procedure is “too expensive,” that person should specify a threshold: at what price and with what probability of success would they stop laughing? In a PLOS One survey of 334 American physicians, respondents considered an ideal scenario in which a patient was preserved within minutes and the brain’s structure was verified down to the synaptic level. Their median estimate of the probability that the preserved information would be sufficient for future restoration was 25.5%. This was an expert judgment, not a measurement. Only future restoration procedures and tests of their outcomes could provide a measured probability.
The inconsistency then becomes visible. Medicine can spend vast sums to delay death briefly because it is treating a living patient with an immediate and familiar problem. Brain preservation offers an uncertain chance of continued life beyond the limits of current medicine. This is where public attitudes often change: an expensive attempt to save someone before legal death is treated as compassion, while a similar attempt after legal death is dismissed as nonsense.
The price obscures other questions. Would a person remain the same person after such restoration? Would a future society have any obligation to restore anyone? Can medicine be organized around a condition that the law already defines as death? These questions are harder than calculating the cost. An error in one direction would mean the permanent loss of a person who might otherwise have been preserved.