Startup wants to upload your brain to the cloud, but has to kill you to do it

A US startup is promising to upload customers' brains to the cloud using a pioneering technique it has trialled on rabbits. The process is "100% fatal". Nectome, founded in 2016 by a pair of MIT AI researchers, hopes to offer a commercial application of a novel process for preserving brains, called "aldehyde-stabilised cryopreservation". The process, which results in the brain being "vitrifixed" – the startup's self-named term for essentially turning it into glass – is promising enough that it has won two prizes from the Brain Preservation Foundation, for preserving a rabbit's brain in 2016 and a pig's brain in 2018. Influential startup accelerator Y Combinator has taken Nectome in, with the organisation's chief executive, Sam Altman, becoming one of the 25 people to pay a $10,000 deposit to join its waiting list.