arielzj

Even in the Netherlands, where assisted dying has been legal and normalised for over 20 years, only about 6% of people die this way - and just one in nine cancer patients, the group it's most available to. The piece digs into why so few use it, how the trends are increasing, and how the rise may not be monotonic indefinitely.

Connectomics — mapping every neural connection in a brain — is advancing fast enough that a complete human brain map may be feasible within a decade or two. But there's a problem nobody talks about: human brains donated to science are preserved hours or days after death, by which point the tissue is too degraded for the long-range neuron tracing a full connectome requires. The unexpected fix may come from preservation/biostasis/cryonics organizations preserving brains of assisted-dying patients within minutes of death.

A piece outlining how if the recent claims that Eon systems have uploaded a fly should count as valid, then it would already be the case that these previous papers had uploaded a fly as well:

-Shiu et al,

-Lappalainen et al.,

-the NeuroMechFly groups

There's a long way to go still before a true upload

These were physicians who were being paid to complete surveys - no reason to think they were more likely to select/reject this one over any of the others available to them at the time.

First author here to provide context:

1. We had both general practitioners and various specialists. We set a minimum quota for each so that we'd get some sense of what all the various groups thought. We aimed for and obtained 180 specialists along with the 150 general practitioners. See figure 1 c.

1a. We absolutely did not change the protocol after the survey was designed, or selectively exclude sections of the population. The inclusion/exclusion criteria are as per the methods, and this was a one-shot survey (no piloting beyond initial validation on colleagues). I'm all for open and reproducible science!

2. The introduction does not claim an equivalence between induced hypothermia and preservation, just that induced hypothermia does provide some precedence that preservation may work.

"Some surgical operations, such as repairs of aneurysms of the aortic arch, are performed using deep hypothermic circulatory arrest (Connoly et al., 2010). In this procedure, a patient’s body is cooled to ~20°C, experiencing both circulatory arrest and complete electrocerebral silence on EEG. Patients can survive 30+ minutes in this state with >90% survival rates and intact post-surgical cognition (Percy et al., 2009).

This demonstrates that long-term memory and personality can persist through prolonged cessation of brain activity - a finding which builds upon other neuroscience data showing that these depend on structural properties such as neuronal connectivity, rather than requiring uninterruptible electrochemical dynamics (Stecker et al., 2001).

Some terminally ill patients, based on this medical evidence and their personal beliefs about future medical advances, have requested procedures to preserve their brain structure after legal death..."

3. I was also surprised the probability estimates were as high as they were! I think doctors just think this has a greater chance of working than is commonly perceived.

As a neuroscientist, I became fascinated by the supposed phenomenon of 'terminal lucidity', where people with severe dementia suddenly become lucid again shortly before death. It sounds impossible given how catastrophically damaged their brains are, but it keeps being reported across cultures and centuries. If it's real, it could suggest new treatment methods for Alzheimer's (not just another ineffective amyloid-clearing antibody), yet it's shockingly understudied.