Some thoughts on Nectome's long-term stability

Preservation Sequence: part IV

One of the best ways to reduce Nectome’s long-term risk is to show that preservation is a thing people want by buying one yourself; this is a critical time in the organization and your contributions now have an outsized impact in our likelihood of success. I’m happy to discuss our preservation personally with anyone who’s interested. Our current presales are open until the end of April.

Up till now I’ve been talking about Nectome’s recent advances in structural preservation, and what that means for the immediate concerns of doing preservation to our standards. With this post I want to do something different: I want to talk about Nectome’s future and how we’re thinking about long-term care of people who entrust their preservation to us.

In contrast to the last posts where I had experiments and images to back up what I was saying, this post is more speculative. I’ve spent the last ten years thinking about how to do long-term care for people: I’ve talked with lawyers and hedge fund managers; I’ve studied the world’s end of life laws; I’ve listened to people like Mike Darwin tell the stories of past cryonics attempts. We have a lot of great business advisors among our investors who care about us succeeding. But I’m not an expert at long-term organizational stability the way I am for preservation. And making a good long-term plan is intrinsically harder than doing preservations well, in my opinion, because it’s far less constrained to deal with the uncertain future than it is to do a surgery well.

I want to talk about our current default plan for long-term care, and our reasons behind it, and then I want you to give me your thoughts. I think I have a lot to learn from people who’ve also spent a lot of time thinking about the future. I hope that Nectome will ultimately be a lot stronger because we got good feedback early on from the kinds of people who read these posts.

Robust to outages and cheap to maintain

The first and most immediate concern for long-term safekeeping of our clients is their physical long-term integrity. What happens if the power goes out? What about a natural disaster? What if we need to move them quickly? Basically, how will we keep people physically safe?

Traditional cryonics uses -196°C, the temperature of boiling liquid nitrogen. While it provides long-term stability, it’s expensive and vulnerable to supply disruption. In idealized pure-cold cryo, the goal is to chill the body until it forms a solid glass; to sustain this glassy state, you need a constant supply of liquid nitrogen, and a team of people to replenish the supply. If and when that supply chain ever breaks, people preserved this way begin to thaw within a month.

This is even worse than it sounds, because there’s an intermediate danger zone between “glassy”(around -130°C) and “liquid” (around -40°C): passing through it causes catastrophic damage as ice forms in the brain during a process called devitrification. A cryonics patient who warms to room temperature passes through this zone twice before returning to their proper temperature – once on the way up, once on the way down again. This must be avoided at all costs, meaning that traditional cryonics has to have 100% uptime; cryonics patients actually can’t be warmed up without sophisticated technology like microwave-based rewarming that hasn’t been perfected yet.

In contrast, the aldehyde-based fixation that Nectome uses is cheap to sustain. We will maintain a temperature around -30°C, above the “danger zone”, and keep preserved people in a liquid state for the long-term.¹ That’s colder than your kitchen freezer, but typical in many biomedical applications. Instead of relying on deliveries of expensive, consumable coolant, we can buy a mass-manufactured freezer from any of a wide range of commercial suppliers. For us, the more likely scenario of failing warm is much less destructive than failing cold. In the worst case where we have a total equipment failure including our backup generators, or we go bankrupt and have to transport the preserved people to a companion facility, even a few days transport at room temperature is not damaging to ultrastructure.² Overall, Nectome-style preservation is a much simpler and more forgiving endeavor than, for instance, storing frozen embryos.

The resilience of aldehyde-based fixation also unlocks the novel possibility of using permafrost. While our business model is currently based on having a dedicated, supervised facility, permafrost is an option that some people find appealingly geopolitically robust, and a nice method of last resort. The ground layer in parts of the Arctic and Antarctic never thaws year-round; a preserved person placed there in permafrost would maintain adequately low temperatures for centuries without any human intervention at all.

I hope Nectome itself survives for a long time, but in the event of tail risks such as economic collapse, catastrophic societal upheaval, or bankruptcy without recourse, aldehydes do give us permafrost as a lifeline. Our final commitment as an organization may be to transfer our preserved people to permafrost.³ While some catastrophes would happen too quickly to react to, many would be handleable in this fashion.

My question to you: if you had to take care of preserved people as cheaply as physically possible for the long term, assuming the temperature must be between -25°C and -35°C for 99% of the time over 100 years, and not between -36°C and -99°C for more than 48 hours over 100 years, what would you do? I think permafrost is the best option here, but where would you choose exactly, and why? Or if you have a better idea than permafrost, please let me know!

Priced to thrive, run on endowment

A second source of risk is the funding model: who pays for preservation? How much should you charge? How do you cover the cost of long-term cold preservation for the indeterminate future? How do you weather challenges like inflation over long time scales? What happens if we get sued?

Let’s start with recurring costs. We’re dealing with a situation where we want to disburse funds over a long period of time, and for predictable sources of expense – mainly refrigeration. Like other organizations faced with this shape of situation, notably universities, graveyards, pension funds, and our longest-lived cryonics companies, we choose an endowment model.

In this model, part of the up-front payment is placed in an endowment, where it is invested in diverse, resilient assets and managed by financial experts hired for this purpose. In this way, the interest gained on the investment beats the exponential attrition due to inflation, which would otherwise wipe out most fixed investments. And while economic upheavals are certainly a risk for the endowment model, we think that investing prudently and diversely is our best option.

I think that Alcor, graveyards, etc got it right: if you have fixed costs you need to fund for a century then you can do it with an endowment. There are other approaches we’ve contemplated—for example we know that asking surviving family members to pay on an ongoing basis tends to fail within a few years. Another option is eventually funding preservations through Medicare, and I consider this a useful future direction, but it’s not on the table currently. Right now, the endowment model has a proven track record for predictable expenses over long timeframes, and I see no reason to re-invent the wheel.

A second piece of the model is that we plan to make a long-term care non-profit, to be run as a distinct organization from us at Necome which handles selling and performing preservation procedures. This separation helps ensure that in the event Nectome cannot sell enough cryopreservations to keep the lights on or if Nectome takes on costly legal battles, the people already in care and the endowment itself will be financially insulated. Alcor uses this model, and we think it’s a wise one.

Finally, there’s a question of setting the price for preservation. It’s pretty common, in cryonics, for companies to run at a loss and stay alive through donations and volunteer work. I understand why this happens: we’re all in this together, trying to get as many people as possible to the future. It would be wonderful to be positioned to provide preservations pro-bono or at the cheapest possible price. As we’re taking our first steps as a company, though, I worry that this would put us in a financially precarious position, leaving us less capable of weathering challenges, expanding our research, and ultimately making preservation into a global tradition that can reliably reach everyone.

For this reason, I think I can provide the best stability and safety for our customers by running Nectome as a for-profit business, turning a profit every quarter, and growing at a brisk but steady rate. As of 2026, some of the first targets on our list include a marketing budget to extend our reach, expansion plans to offer preservation in more places, and a war chest in preparation for when Nectome needs to fight legal battles or go to bat for the emerging category of preservation law and the rights of preserved people.

As we grow, I expect that scale will be a big part of our robustness to social and legal challenges—say, if some part of the protocol gets outlawed someplace. I try to be realistic and measured about our prospects, but I think there’s real hope for a future where jurisdictions compete to pass laws that accommodate a lucrative industry in preservation. I hope that one day soon people will plan on having a career in preservation, that the field will become regulated and respectable. Many different speedbumps are more easily handled with the kind of goodwill and political and financial capital we’re working to accumulate.

My question to you: if you needed to charge an up-front amount of money to keep someone preserved, assuming an amortized annual cost-of-preservation of $X/yr and ignoring the setup costs for the preservation but including room for a robust legal defense fund, how much would you charge? And how would you manage the money? Now’s a great chance to bring up options; I bet there’s some good ones I’m missing!

Allies who keep us honest and wise

How will we keep our quality standards high? What about competitors? What if we’re bought out by a larger company? What about our mental health? Basically, how can we keep ourselves from losing our way?

We have a lot to prove as an emerging startup with goals this ambitious and scientifically demanding. Fortunately, we’re not starting from scratch and we’re not working alone: we’ve surrounded ourselves with a team of skilled advisors—including scientists, business mavens, cryonics veterans—who are among the smartest people we know, and whose collective knowledge helps steer us right and keep us true to our values. Many of these people are understandably sensitive about being named, but I’ll name-drop our YC group lead Michael Seibel and neuroscientist Bobby Kasthuri.

Some of our community members, like Andrew Critch and recently Max Harms, have given generously of their time to come investigate what we’re doing with a skeptical eye. I’m enormously grateful for the spirit of scientific inquiry and citizen journalship in which they approached us; I consider that kind of rigor and respect to be one of the greatest gifts one human being can give another. I believe Max intends to write about his findings and opinions on his blog, and I’ll link his piece here once he publishes it.

We deliberately cultivate costly external validation, both to be transparent, and because it keeps our standards high. One of our goals is that, by pioneering radical transparency and sky-high scientific standards in this newly-forming field, we’re helping to set a standard for all who follow. One of the risks we’ve got our finger on is the prospect of being undercut by a competitor that is cheaper because they cut corners on quality and scientific validation—someone who’s offering slapdash preservation that costs less because it sacrifices quality standards in favor of snazzy advertising and fast talk. I hope that rigorous standards applied across the cryonics industry mean that the whole field can be our allies, pushing us to offer consumers a better, cheaper product.

Like any scientist working to expand the boundaries of their field, I’m constantly indebted to those who came before me, and I rely on the hard-won metis of cryonics veterans. I’m glad I don’t need to discover the pitfalls of ongoing family payments for myself, and that I can imitate Alcor’s holding company setup wholesale. Every time I talk to Mike Darwin about what he’s seen over the years, I learn something new about how to run Nectome.

You’re part of our community, too. Someone who’s preserved poorly can’t call up the Better Business Bureau and complain, so they need you to keep the field honest. Cryonics consumers should demand to see randomized samples at sufficient resolution to see synapses, prepared in animal models representative of the kinds of preservation clients actually receive, like Andrew Critch did. As cryonics becomes more mainstream, insist on good third-party regulation. You are entitled to receive the lifesaving services you pay for, not an inferior substitute.

In short, we’re not going alone, and we don’t intend to. We’re passionate about making sure preservation succeeds for us, too, and our friends and family. We’re radical about demanding external validation to calibrate our optimism.

My question to you: Check out https://www.brainpreservation.org/accreditation/, the BPF’s page describing the accreditation program it’s building. Do you find the steps they’re taking convincing? Sufficiently rigorous? Give us feedback please, either in the comments or to Ken Hayworth (kenneth.hayworth@gmail.com) directly.

Another question for you: If you were starting a preservation company and were worried about keeping yourself honest, how would you set it up? What sorts of advisors would you want to have?

Proactive about laws and culture

What if they make preservation illegal in our jurisdiction? What if we get sued? What if we never get any kind of scale?

Preservation can seem weird to people right now. It occupies a strange and illegible position adjacent to the medical landscape, leaving its practitioners vulnerable to legal attacks and social opprobrium. I won the Brain Preservation Prize for large mammals in 2018, but it took almost another decade of innovation to devise a method legal to use on humans.

Nectome’s preservation has a lot of social and logistical advantages over previous cryonics approaches. Our cases are planned, opt-in procedures; we significantly reduce the last-minute chaos of cross-country phone calls, relatives questioning the patient’s wishes, hospitals attempting to restrict access. Because we’re physically near all our clients as legal death occurs, we have a good opportunity to establish clear consent, and can avoid ever being in a position where we have to disinter someone’s remains.⁴ Relatives have a chance to say farewell to their loved ones, and we can speak with them in advance about what to expect from the preservation process.

Another social advantage we can offer is compatibility with ordinary funerals. When I’ve worked with donated human cadavers, the results have been something I’d be happy to show to their families: the surgical incisions are easily covered by clothing and other techniques, and the person can rest peacefully at room temperature for weeks without issues. People I speak to feel very positively about this, and I’m hopeful that it lets us spend fewer weirdness points. I’d like to smoothly integrate with the existing funeral industry, just like with the medical and legal systems.

We’ve taken care to operate within a convenient and sensible legal jurisdiction. This is why we’re based in Oregon, even though I anticipate many of our early clients will be from California. Oregon’s medical aid-in-dying (MAiD) law is the oldest in the US and enjoys a strong local base of support.

One way a preservation may fail after the fact could be if the preserved body is autopsied, which typically destroys the brain. Our model is protective here: when someone uses MAiD, their death is declared by their attending physician, and their underlying terminal illness is listed as the cause. The legal system considers their death to be a natural one, and the medical examiner has no interest in investigating further because the person’s death has already been documented and was expected; generally they’re interested in unexpected / exceptional deaths.

Even with all of this, I’m aware that we face a great deal of uncharted legal territory, especially as we hope to expand beyond the relatively small scope of prior cryonics organizations. I consider it our job at Nectome to map out that territory, and this is why we’re building our own regulatory framework to fill a legal void. Right now we’re working under scientific research laws, but one of the goals at the top of my long-term list is carving out a new, proper legal niche for preservation.

I take inspiration here from birth doulas, who have historically operated in a similarly underregulated area. Doulas built their own regulatory standards and agencies, and many states have chosen to simply legitimize those agencies, or to adopt standards heavily informed by theirs. For instance, in Oregon, doulas may complete one of eight approved training programs in order to receive Medicaid reimbursement. I imagine a world where Medicaid offers to reimburse preservations certified by the BPF, with preserved people considered to be in a “chemically induced long-term coma” instead of classified as scientific research samples.

My question to you: Imagine you’re running Nectome, and you’re launching your post-mortem preservation program. What are you most worried about in terms of social and legal issues, and what would you do to address them early on?

S-risks

What if it feels like something while being preserved? What if the world changes and the future wants to revive and hurt preserved people? What if society collapses? These are all questions I’ve heard, here and elsewhere.

With regards to what it feels like to be preserved, I can with high confidence say it feels the same as DHCA, and that’s nothing at all. You need action potentials to think, and they’re not happening during preservation because of the dual effects of cold and crosslinks.

On the other hand, I can’t out-of-hand refute the risk of the future being very unpleasant, either because of takeover by a hostile AI or some other mechanism. The best solution I’ve come up with to help mitigate this risk is to very carefully record the preferences of everyone who we preserve and offer to cremate them if we anticipate that the chain of custody is likely to become compromised. Around half of people in my experience say that they would like to be cremated if we are going to lose chain of custody,⁵ or under some other condition, and the other half want to be preserved at all costs no matter what.

If it seems like things are deteriorating, and despite our best efforts we will lose control of the people we preserve, it may be that the last act of Nectome is to bury half of them in permafrost (according to their wishes) in an undisclosed location in hopes that someone will care later, and cremate the other half as they requested. It’s not something I’d ever want to do, but if I can create the safety for people to choose preservation today by promising to maybe cremate them in the future, I think it’s the right thing to do. I hope this means that someone preserved by Nectome is only subject to the same ordinary danger of very sudden S-risks that you and I are subject to today.

My question to you: Can you think of another way to mitigate S-risks for people being preserved today? Under what conditions would you like to be cremated after you were preserved?

Towards the future, with optimism and care

There is some faith in an organization that only comes with a proven track record of longevity. At the same time, rationalists can do better than reference-class forecasting. What Nectome can offer you, today, is an organization built on the wisdom of previous cryo attempts, and a set of unprecedented advantages against a variety of the most-likely failure modes on our list. We’re also thinking about long-tail risks and how we can address them.

One of the most important things at this tender stage is that we’re trying to become resilient at scale. There’s a lot that can kill a small company that a large company can weather with ease. We’re working daily to reach more people. Pre-sales are doubly valuable to us in this project: they contribute directly to our bottom line at a critical time in our company’s development, and they help us secure more investment.

I’ve asked a lot of questions here, and I really do care about your answers. My commitment to you is that I’ll read and respond to every comment posted here in the next two weeks, within three days, barring anything super unexpected on my end.

There’s no better time to influence how Nectome implements its preservation program, and I’m really looking forward to hearing your thoughts. Let’s make this a beautiful community effort.

1. We can still vitrify, but we choose not to by default since it’s not really necessary, it’s cheaper, and failing warm is much safer at our default temperature.

2. Incidentally, this tolerance for periods at room temperature is also why we're compatible with ordinary funerals, unlike previous methods.

3. For those who prefer this. Some people want to be cremated if we can't maintain control of them and enforce restrictions on how they're revived; others might prefer a transfer of custody to a family member or another cryonics organization. We discuss this with clients individually as part of the pre-preservation process.

4. To be clear, I think Alcor acted heroically here to defend the interests of their clients. It's just an ugly and contentious situation that I'm glad to avoid.

5. We're talking about things that severely disrupt the chain of custody, like a new law that confiscates Nectome's preserved people, not things that simply change custody in a sensible manner, like Nectome and another company merging and changing names, with the merged entity pledging to respect the wishes of the preserved people.