This researcher wants to replace your brain, little by little

Antonio Regalado

MIT Technology Review

Originally posted 16 Aug 24

Jean Hébert, a new hire with the US Advanced Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), is expected to lead a major new initiative around “functional brain tissue replacement,” the idea of adding youthful tissue to people’s brains. 

President Joe Biden created ARPA-H in 2022, as an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services, to pursue what he called  “bold, urgent innovation” with transformative potential.

The brain renewal concept could have applications such as treating stroke victims, who lose areas of brain function. But Hébert, a biologist at the Albert Einstein school of medicine, has most often proposed total brain replacement, along with replacing other parts of our anatomy, as the only plausible means of avoiding death from old age.

As he described in his 2020 book, Replacing Aging, Hébert thinks that to live indefinitely people must find a way to substitute all their body parts with young ones, much like a high-mileage car is kept going with new struts and spark plugs.

The info is here.

Here are some thoughts:

The US Advanced Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) has taken a bold step by hiring Jean Hébert, a researcher who advocates for a radical plan to defeat death by replacing human body parts, including the brain. Hébert's idea involves progressively replacing brain tissue with youthful lab-made tissue, allowing the brain to adapt and maintain memories and self-identity. This concept is not widely accepted in the scientific community, but ARPA-H has endorsed Hébert's proposal with a potential $110 million project to test his ideas in animals.

From an ethical standpoint, Hébert's proposal raises concerns, such as the potential use of human fetuses as a source of life-extending parts and the creation of non-sentient human clones for body transplants. However, Hébert's idea relies on the brain's ability to adapt and reorganize itself, a concept supported by evidence from rare cases of benign brain tumors and experiments with fetal-stage cell transplants. The development of youthful brain tissue facsimiles using stem cells is a significant scientific challenge, requiring the creation of complex structures with multiple cell types.

The success of Hébert's proposal depends on various factors, including the ability of young brain tissue to function correctly in an elderly person's brain, establishing connections, and storing and sending electro-chemical information. Despite these uncertainties, ARPA-H's endorsement and potential funding of Hébert's proposal demonstrate a willingness to explore unconventional approaches to address aging and age-related diseases. This move may pave the way for future research in extreme life extension and challenge societal norms and values surrounding aging and mortality.

Hébert's work has sparked interest among immortalists, a fringe community devoted to achieving eternal life. His connections to this community and his willingness to explore radical approaches have made him an edgy choice for ARPA-H. However, his focus on the neocortex, the outer part of the brain responsible for most of our senses, reasoning, and memory, may hold the key to understanding how to replace brain tissue without losing essential functions. As Hébert embarks on this ambitious project, the scientific community will be watching closely to see if his ideas can overcome the significant scientific and ethical hurdles associated with replacing human brain tissue.

Cryonics: Medicine, Or The Modern Mummy?

Patrick Lin

Forbes.com

Originally posted July 8, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

Meanwhile, others argued that death is a natural and necessary part of the circle of life.  Ecologically, keeping people around long past their “natural lives” may upset an already fragile balance, potentially exacerbating overpopulation, resource consumption, waste, and so on.

This is to suggest that cryonics isn’t just a difference in degree from, say, saving heart-attack victims, but it becomes a difference in kind.  It’s not an incremental improvement, as medicine makes in slowly raising average lifespans, but it's potentially a radical disruption with major systemic effects.

Culturally, Joseph Weizenbaum— who was a MIT computer science professor and creator of ELIZA—wrote, “Our death is the last service we can provide to the world:  Would we not go out of the way, the following generations would not need to re-create human culture.  Culture would become fixed, unchangeable and die.  And with the death of culture, humanity would also perish.”

Beyond external effects, the desire for more life may express bad character.  Wanting more than one’s fair share—of life or anything else—seems egotistical and expresses ingratitude for what we already have.  If not for death, we might not appreciate our time on earth.  We appreciate many things, such as beauty and flowers, not despite their impermanence but because of it.

The info is here.

A fate worse than death

Cathy Rentzenbrink
Prospect Magazine
Originally posted March 18, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

We have lost our way with death. Improvements in medicine have led us to believe that a long and fulfilling life is our birthright. Death is no longer seen as the natural consequence of life but as an inconvenient and unjust betrayal. We are in an age of denial.

Why does this matter? Why not allow ourselves this pleasant and surely harmless delusion? It matters because we are in a peculiar and precise period of history where our technological advances enable us to keep people alive when we probably shouldn’t. Life or death is no longer a black and white situation. There are many and various shades of grey. We behave as though death is the worst outcome, but it isn’t.

Many years after the accident, when I wrote a book about it called The Last Act of Love, I catalogued what happened to me as I witnessed the destruction of my brother. I detailed the drinking and the depression. The hardest thing was tracking our journey from hope to despair. I still find it hard to be precise about exactly when and how I realised that Matty would be better off dead. I know I moved from being convinced that if I tried hard enough I could bring Matty back to life, to thinking I should learn to love him as he was. Eventually I asked myself the right question: would Matty himself want to be alive like this? Of course, the answer was no.

The info is here.

Want to live longer? Consider the ethics

John K. Davis
TheConversation.com
Originally published

Here is an excerpt:

Many people, such as philosopher John Harris and those in the Pew Center survey, worry that life extension would be available only to the rich and make existing inequalities even worse.

Indeed, it is unjust when some people live longer than the poor because they have better health care. It would be far more unjust if the rich could live several decades or centuries longer than anyone else and gain more time to consolidate their advantages.

Some philosophers suggest that society should prevent inequality by banning life extension. This is equality by denial – if not everyone can get it, then no one gets it.

However, as philosopher Richard J. Arneson notes, “leveling-down” – achieving equality by making some people worse off without making anyone better off – is unjust.

Indeed, as I argue in my recent book on life extension ethics, most of us reject leveling-down in other situations. For example, there are not enough human organs for transplant, but no one thinks the answer is to ban organ transplants.

Moreover, banning or slowing down the development of life extension may simply delay a time when the technology gets cheap enough for everyone to have it. TV sets were once a toy for the wealthy; now even poor families have them. In time, this could happen with life extension.

The info is here.