MIT Technology Review and TechCrunch, plus company status 2026

What was read

• Regalado, A. "A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is '100 percent fatal'." MIT Technology Review, 13 March 2018. Full text.
• Regalado, A. "MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading." MIT Technology Review, 3 April 2018, including the complete MIT Media Lab statement of 2 April 2018. Full text.
• Ha, A. "Here are some real things people said about brain preservation startup Nectome." TechCrunch, 13 March 2018. Full text.
• Ha, A. "MIT cuts ties with brain preservation startup Nectome." TechCrunch, 3 April 2018. Full text.
• Company status: a web search of public profiles (PitchBook, Tracxn) and later coverage (STAT, 30 Jan 2019; Live Science, April 2018). Summaries only, not read in full.

The facts the coverage establishes

• Company: Nectome, founded 2015 by Robert McIntyre and Michael McCanna (both MIT graduates), in Y Combinator's winter 2018 batch. Method: aldehyde-stabilised cryopreservation, developed by McIntyre with cryobiologist Greg Fahy at 21st Century Medicine; glutaraldehyde fixation followed by vitrification, which preserves a whole brain "to the nanometer level, including the connectome". It won the Brain Preservation Foundation's $80,000 prize (announced 13 March 2018) for a pig brain in which "every synapse inside it could be seen with an electron microscope". No expectation of revival: the aim is to retrieve information from anatomy and molecular detail and simulate it.
• The pitch: "What if we told you we could back up your mind?" Preservation must start on a fresh brain, so the plan was to perfuse terminally ill patients under general anaesthesia via a heart-lung machine, under California's End of Life Option Act. McIntyre: the product is "100 percent fatal"; "The user experience will be identical to physician-assisted suicide"; "Product-market fit is people believing that it works." Slogan softened from "We archive your mind" to "Committed to the goal of archiving your mind".
• Demand test: a $10,000 refundable deposit; 25 people by 13 March 2018, including Sam Altman ("I assume my brain will be uploaded to the cloud"); more than $200,000 in deposits by 3 April.
• Funding: about $1 million raised including $120,000 from YC; a $960,000 NIMH SBIR grant for "whole-brain nanoscale preservation and imaging", with roughly a third subcontracted to Edward Boyden's MIT Media Lab group to combine the chemistry with expansion microscopy for mouse circuit mapping.
• The human demonstration: in February 2018 the team bought the body of an elderly woman through a body-donation broker (Aeternitas) in Portland, Oregon, and began preservation 2.5 hours after death, a six-hour procedure at a mortuary; the brain was to be sliced and imaged, not stored. McIntyre conceded that even a couple of hours dead "damaged it".
• The science position stated at the time by supporters: Hayworth (Brain Preservation Foundation): "If the brain is dead, it's like your computer is off, but that doesn't mean the information isn't there"; imaging a whole connectome "may be possible in 100 years"; he would personally choose euthanasia by this method, but warned that soliciting deposits before a published protocol "may have already crossed" a line. Boyden: preservation "might be a very useful thing" as long as they are "up-front about what we do know and what we don't know"; it is unknown "what brain structures and molecular details need to be retained to preserve a memory or a personality. Is it just the synapses, or is it every fleeting molecule?"
• Critics: Hendricks (McGill): "abjectly false hope"; "comically arrogant"; "cartoon bad guys". Linnarsson (Karolinska): "based on a proposition that is just false"; MIT's involvement "increased the chance that some people actually kill themselves to donate their brains"; "It is so unethical—I can't describe how unethical it is."
• MIT's exit: statement of 2 April 2018 terminating the subcontract "upon consideration of the scientific premises underlying the company's commercial plans, as well as certain public statements that the company has made". The statement's scientific content: it is not known which biomolecules must be preserved to preserve memory, so no preservation method can be called sufficient; consciousness cannot be measured or created; simulation from biomolecular maps is "a very interesting basic science question" with "no guarantee that it is possible at all". Boyden had no financial or contractual stake.
• Nectome's response: "we appreciate the help MIT has given us, understand their choice, and wish them the best"; no clinical preservation offered, deposits refundable; website note that applying vitrification now "would be extremely irresponsible".
• Status since: STAT (Jan 2019) reported the company seeking "redemption" with a more cautious, research-first posture. Public profiles in 2025–2026 list Nectome as a private seed-stage company of about four employees, San Francisco, with no funding round recorded since 2018 and a product described as nanoscale preservation and cryogenic storage for future revival. Verified only at the level of directory entries.

What the brief uses it for, and whether it holds

Brief section 8 (Variant A, ethics): "Consent at death; rights of the dead; the Nectome precedent [10]." Section 10.2: "The dead. Variant A inherits the Nectome problem [10]: a legacy product that touches death draws the headline before it draws a customer." Section 2 also relies on the same science position: "there is no decoder from structure to content" and "slicing gives the structure of a dead brain".

• Holds. The sequence in the coverage is exactly "headline before customer": a YC demo-day pitch, one MIT Technology Review article, twenty-five deposits, a wave of ethics criticism, and the loss of the academic partner within three weeks, with no product ever sold. A dormant company eight years later is the coda.
• The MIT statement is the best short articulation in the evidence base of the brief's section 2: the unknown is not scanning resolution but which molecular and structural details carry memory, and hence whether any preservation is sufficient. The brief could cite the statement itself rather than the coverage.
• Two details sharpen the brief's Variant A framing. First, even the best case (a fresh, prize-winning preservation) was a body bought from a broker and imaged, not read; nobody claims to have retrieved anything. Second, the only serious defender (Hayworth) puts the timescale at a century and still objects to selling it now. That supports the brief's decision to keep Variant A out of the execution plan and to revisit only after a brain-bank effect-size study.
• Note the reputational mechanism: MIT withdrew partly over "certain public statements that the company has made". For Kurisutina the lesson is about language as much as science, which is what section 9's "Never" row ("the word 'memory' without its asterisk") is for.

Cross-references

• [9] Verge: the records-based Variant A, which shipped and was used; Nectome is the tissue-based Variant A, which did not.
• [1], [7]: the mouse papers the brief cites to say what a synapse-level structure does and does not carry are the technical version of Boyden's "is it just the synapses, or is it every fleeting molecule?".