What if we told you we could back up your mind?

If your first reaction to this odd marketing appeal is “Oh no, not this again,” you’re not alone. The company is Nectome, and that question is exactly how it is presented on the home page of its website. The pitch is clearly reminiscent of Alcor and the much-ridiculed pseudo-science of cryonics.

But nowhere does the website come out and say that the company’s promise to “keep your memories intact for the future” means preserving your brain in the course of a pre-arranged death. In other words, assisted suicide is a prerequisite for its “services.”

Assuming Nectome believes that any publicity is better than no publicity, MIT Technology Review gave the company a huge boost with a recent feature article, brilliantly headlined:

A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal”

That provoked follow-ups by everyone from the Daily Mail to Vanity Fair, from the Guardian to Extremetech, and dozens more. If you dig below the sensationalist headlines, there is a little peer-reviewed science there, much of it conducted by Nectome co-founder Robert McIntyre. And the company has obtained grants totaling nearly $1 million from the US National Institutes of Health, which presumably assumed it was funding brain preservation research for the purposes of drug research rather than for immortality schemes.

Indeed, the somewhat buried hook for the story was that the Brain Preservation Foundation (BPF) had awarded MacIntyre (and others) its “large mammal” prize for preserving a pig’s brain. BPF is all about — you guessed it — preserving brains; it’s mostly volunteer run, and the anonymous $100,000 donated in 2010 for prizes represents almost half its donations.

McIntyre did the relevant work, it seems, in collaboration with others at a different company, 21CM. He was the lead investigator there, but left the company “to pursue refinements … and to seek new applications” for the technique. More bluntly, a 21CM press release insists that the company “does not endorse” the kind of “revival” in question, nor anything similar using nanotechnology, and most specifically:

While 21CM firmly believes in personal choice and respects the views of all honest people, we are not a cryonics company and as such do not specifically endorse any form of cryonics.

Apparently Nectome differs on that point.

And you too can join in. For the low, low price of $10,000, you can book a place on Nectome’s waitlist – right from its website, which says:

Get on the list as one of our early adopters. Help fund our research and get first access to services we make available.

Neither this page, nor the form to which it links, mentions that you have to be euthanized to participate. On the other hand, it provides the reassurance that your deposit is fully refundable if you change your mind, or perhaps if you suffer premature evacuation from your corporeal being. Deliberate evacuation is what they’re after, as MacIntyre told MIT Technology Review:

“The user experience will be identical to physician-assisted suicide. Product-market fit is people believing that it works.”

There are believers. Apparently, 25 people have paid their deposits, including "whiz kid" venture capitalist Sam Altman. Altman is hedging his bet by planning to hide in Peter Thiel's New Zealand bunker to ride out the coming apocalypse.

The whole ghoulish scheme is vaguely reminiscent of such oddities as the Nobel Sperm Bank, Peter Thiel’s Seasteading fantasies, Ray Kurzweil and Singularity U, the Global Future Congress, and the 115-lb, six-foot fellow who still apparently hopes that restricting his calories will extend his life long enough to reach immortality. Most pertinently, perhaps, the Buddhist transhumanist George Dvorsky has insisted that it would be unfair if only human brains were uplifted; what about the cows?

By the way, that ten grand deposit is only the start. If you do sign up, Antonio Regalado discovered, the death requirement is indeed specified, along with a hint at the price:

… While the costs involved are not finalized, to set expectations, it does involve a heart bypass surgery, as we use the vascular system to quickly and thoroughly deliver preservation chemicals throughout the body. …

A customer might therefore expect to get away with $100,000 for the initial surgery. There would of course be no post-operative therapy, but storage fees are likely to grow over time, so you might easily have to pay more than that for an annuity to cover continuing expenses. Not to mention incentivizing your legatees to keep an eye on the proceedings for the next millennium or so.

After all, why on earth would some future person want to revive you?