President of Y Combinator, Sam Altman is willing to pay $10,000 to be killed so his brain can be preserved forever

It’s all because McIntyre’s company, Netcome, has developed a high-tech embalming process to preserve brains postmortem, presumably making them available for examination (and digitisation) by future generations for the very reasonable price of $10,000, refundable if you change your mind beforehand.

Nectome’s technology will chemically freeze human brains in order to preserve the neurons and synapses, theoretically also preserving the memories stored there. The process of doing this is according to McIntyre, is 100% fatal but it’s aim is to connect terminal patients to life support, put them under with anaesthesia, and then fill the body with a chemical embalming cocktail through the carotid arteries while the individual is still alive. The process eventually kills the individual.

Nectome, a startup co-founded by Robert McIntyre, an MIT graduate has already received nearly $1 million in federal funding from the US National Institute of Health for the benefits this technology provides to studying the brain and diseases that affect it.

The startup also already has 25 paying customers which includes investor and Y Combinator president, Sam Altman. The 32-year-old tech-billionaire is paying $10,000 to be killed so his brain can be preserved forever. He says: “I assume my brain will be uploaded to the cloud.”

In 2016, McIntyre and his team from 21st Century Medicine were the first to successfully preserve every neuron in a rabbit’s brain, winning more than $26,000 from the Brain Preservation Foundation for their achievement.

At the time, McIntyre said: “we know that it can be stored for centuries and not decay. What if we image the tech we have now, but a million times faster? It is not absurd.”