Nectome blog author Max Harms proposes viewing cryonics as a way to transmit personal memory into the future
Nectome blog author Max Harms proposes viewing cryonics as a way to transmit personal memory into the future
In an essay published on 11 August, Harms compares brain preservation with an Apollo 17 lunar sample and a scroll from Herculaneum. In both cases, new research methods turned preserved objects into sources of new knowledge.
Cryonics is the preservation of a body or brain after death. Harms proposes passing the detailed brain structure of a specific person on to future researchers. In his model, this structure encodes personal memories that future methods may be able to read.
An archive gives the future material for questions that will emerge as new methods become available.
In December 1972, the Apollo 17 crew brought lunar core sample 73001 back to Earth. It was vacuum-sealed on the Moon and kept unopened for about 50 years. In 2022, a NASA team first scanned the core using X-ray tomography, extracted gas from the sealed container, and then removed the material for separation and analysis.
The Herculaneum scroll shows how a new form of reading can begin with an object whose physical structure has been preserved. On 25 June 2026, the Vesuvius Challenge project virtually unrolled a carbonized scroll from Herculaneum and read all of its surviving text. X-ray tomography produced a three-dimensional map of the papyrus's internal layers, software reconstructed the scroll's surface, and machine learning detected traces of ink. Papyrologists, specialists in ancient papyri, verified the transcription.
“The experience of those who came before us teaches the same lesson repeatedly: we should protect what we can preserve, even when we do not yet know how to read it,” Harms writes.
Harms applies this idea to the brain. In his model, a person's unique brain structure must be preserved in enough detail for future methods to extract information about that individual's memories. In a July comparison of cryogenic and chemical brain preservation, Nectome and Biostasis Technologies proposed evaluating each procedure by how well it preserves the neural structure associated with memories and habits. Harms gives this criterion a cultural meaning: what is passed on to the future is a brain structure associated with the memories of a specific person.