According to an April 2 statement, MIT will terminate Nectome’s research contract with Media Lab professor and neuroscientist Edward Boyden.
MIT’s connection to the company drew sharp criticism from some neuroscientists, who say brain uploading isn’t possible.
“Fundamentally, the company is based on a proposition that is just false. It is something that just can’t happen,” says Sten Linnarsson of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden.
He adds that by collaborating with Nectome, MIT had lent credibility to the startup and increased the chance that “some people actually kill themselves to donate their brains.”
It’s hard enough to stand the pressure of the press and public opinion for normal companies. It must be impossibly hard to do so when you try to commercialize an attempt to escape death.
Many of the companies that are covered here on H+ face the same challenge.