Jordan Sparks has a dream. It is not a normal dream.
The former dentist wants to freeze dead brains and eventually reanimate them, their memories intact.
He is already doing the brain-freezing part. The second part is going to take a while.
“It would probably be 100 years or more before we could reconstruct the memories in a preserved brain,” states the website for Oregon Cryonics, Sparks’ Salem-based company. “Reconstruction would require very advanced Future Technology but no new physics.”
Sparks’ facility is one of just four cryonics centers in the world, and so it has drawn the interest of news outlets such as Motherboard, Portland Tribune, Long Life magazine and now, with a truly in-depth look, Quartz. (The “digitally native” news site’s feature story even includes a 20-second video of Sparks holding a brain, which — if you’re so inclined — you can watch at the bottom of this post.)
“Sparks has invested in a fleet of scientific equipment, much acquired second-hand, including liquid nitrogen, a fume hood, a CT scanner, microscopes, a vibratome and a microtome,” Quartz’s Corinne Purtill writes. “And then there is this line item: a steady supply of human heads.”
Sparks reportedly receives a new head about once a week. He stores them in gray plastic buckets.
His facility includes a hospital bed for patients who want to end their lives via Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act and then have their brains immediately frozen. He’s not taking patients yet.
Sparks does not expect to bring back to life any of the brains that are in his lab right now. He’s in the early stages of creating his dream, learning the discipline’s ins and outs. He’s even still figuring out the ethics of the whole thing, acknowledging that not everyone whose brain ends up being preserved necessarily will want to be reanimated decades from now, if future technology ever actually makes that possible.
“If you revive someone and they say ‘No, I don’t want this’ — well, they’re welcome to commit suicide if they want,” Sparks told Purtill. “From a pragmatic standpoint, they’re probably going to be grateful and not want to do that.”
MORE: Read Purtill’s story.
Our editors found this article on this site using Google and regenerated it for our readers.
