How do you come back from biotech ridicule?

When the first thing the public hears about your biotech startup is that it offers "suicide, with benefits" and is collecting dead bodies to practice on, you have a pretty big hole to climb out of.

Nectome, in South San Francisco, is trying. The three-year-old company has pulled back from claims that it might "back up your mind," not to mention its seed funder's description that it aims to "preserve your brain to bring you back in the future." For now and the foreseeable future, co-founder and chief scientist Robert McIntyre told STAT’s Sharon Begley, he just wants to show that his technology can preserve the long-term memories encoded in the synapses of the human brain.

“I think we know enough to show that you can make a memory-preservation technology,” he said. But creating a backup copy in silico — as in the British television series “Black Mirror” and countless other transhumanist fantasies — isn’t in the cards any time soon.

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