Jordan Sparks: A New Cryonics?

A Cryonics Society Paper

A New Cryonics?

Jordan Sparks may be the most controversial figure in cryonics today.

To understand why, we need to face an uncomfortable fact: no one in cryonics knows how to properly preserve a human brain for future recovery. Not Alcor. Not Sparks’ own organization, Sparks Brain Preservation. Not any laboratory in the world. Every current method is experimental. The question cryonicists face is not whether the techniques currently used will work. Rather, the question is which one has superior arguments and evidence.

That distinction matters because the implicit goal of cryonics till now has been to restore a patient’s current body to life decades or centuries from now. How to achieve that has meant that discussions and experiments have revolved almost entirely around minimizing freezing damage to cells, the possibility of molecular-level repair, the limitations of nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, and so on.

Sparks is changing the terms of that debate. Instead of asking whether the body of a preserved patient can someday be restored, he asks: can a cryopreserved body leave us enough information to allow us to bring that person back to life; whether in his original body, or a new body indistinguishable from the original body, or in some digitized form existing on a computerized platform.

Consider an analogy.

Imagine a broken-down abandoned farmhouse. The roof has fallen in, the windows are shattered, rain has stained the walls and warped the flooring, the wiring and plumbing don’t work. A real estate speculator nonetheless buys it for a song, and invites two construction experts over to look at the house and tell him if they can restore it.

The first expert is a contractor. He tells him that, while there’s been a great deal of damage, much has survived. The roof and windows need replacing, the walls need a fresh coat of paint, electricians and plumbers need to be called in—but, bringing it back in good shape is entirely do-able. It just takes time, work and money.

The second expert looks over the broken farmhouse, and says repairing it is too complicated and too costly. The second expert is an architect: for him simply looking at the house and seeing photos of it in its previous condition is enough for him to create an architectural diagram that will replicate the original perfectly, building a new house indistinguishable from the old one in every way that matters.

The first expert is conventional cryonics. It wants to patch up something that’s already there. The second is Jordan Sparks. He wants to use what’s there to work out the plans for a new house just like the old one. Or maybe just a little better.

The question is, is a house built from scratch based on the same blueprints the same house? Or does there have to be a physical continuity between a rebuilt house and what remains of the old house?

The problem sounds philosophical, and it is. But it is also, crucially, practical. Traditional cryonics tries to preserve the physical tissue with as little damage as possible. To Sparks, the physical tissue is important only because it embodies information. Every characteristic that makes one individual different from every other is, he believes, encoded within the extraordinary complexity of the brain’s physical organization. Preserve that organization faithfully enough, he argues, and future technologies may eventually reconstruct the person. The original cells, in and of themselves, need not remain biologically viable. Only the information they encode needs to survive.

It’s a position many veteran cryonicists regard with deep suspicion.

A Farewell To Vitrification?

Where and how exactly does the brain encode ‘information’? The answer, Sparks believes, lies in ultrastructure—the microscopic organization of the brain. Under an electron microscope, a healthy brain is an astonishingly complex landscape. Neurons branch into thousands of delicate processes. Synapses form junctions measured in nanometers. Tiny vesicles cluster near membranes. Mitochondria occupy strategic positions along axons and dendrites. If memories are somehow encoded in the physical organization of this network, then preserving that organization becomes the central challenge.

Modern cryonics addresses that challenge through vitrification. After legal death, blood is replaced with highly concentrated cryoprotective solutions designed to prevent ice crystals from forming during cooling. Instead of freezing into crystalline ice, the tissue ideally solidifies into a glass-like state. The procedure represents a dramatic advance over the crude freezing methods used during cryonics’ earliest years.

The weaknesses of the procedure are equally well known. Cryoprotectants can be toxic. They cause osmotic stress as water leaves cells. Uniform perfusion becomes increasingly difficult when blood vessels have deteriorated after death or when clots obstruct circulation. Cooling large organs to liquid-nitrogen temperatures may produce fractures. None of these problems necessarily makes future repair impossible. But each adds another layer of damage that hypothetical future repair technologies must overcome.

But pathology, Sparks argues, solved this problem generations ago. Rather than struggling to keep tissue biologically viable, pathologists preserve its structure. Aldehyde compounds (principally formaldehyde and glutaraldehyde) form chemical cross-links that stabilize proteins and cellular membranes. Within minutes, biological activity has ceased. But the architecture of the tissue changes very little. Decades later, even without extreme freezing, researchers can still examine remarkably intact cellular structures. Structures that freezing often destroys.

A vitrified brain, however damaged, remains biologically composed of living tissue. Even vitrified, even fractured, it remains itself. But a brain fixed with aldehyde compounds has been chemically altered throughout. The process is irreversible. Whatever future restoration might involve, it is nearly impossible to imagine simply rolling back aldehyde cross-linking and restarting metabolism. Traditional cryonicists see fixation as a process that provides better anatomical preservation, yes; but that abandons the possibility of direct biological revival.

Sparks replies: what revival? No cryonics organization has revived a human patient. No mammal has recovered after long-term storage under anything resembling clinical cryonics conditions. Every existing preservation method depends on future technologies capable of repairing profound damage. If we’re counting on borderline-miraculous future repair, why assume cryogenic damage will be easier to repair than chemical damage? If so, why not choose the method that best preserves the physical structures future technologies may actually need to do so? That, obviously, is fixation.

Ironically, the strongest evidence for that position did not originate with Jordan Sparks. It was work by cryobiologist Gregory Fahy and Robert McIntyre that first developed aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation (ASC). Their approach combined the two philosophies. The brain is first stabilized with aldehydes and then vitrified for storage at cryogenic temperatures. Their objective, like Sparks’, was not to preserve biological viability but to preserve neural ultrastructure as completely as possible.

The work attracted international attention. In 2016, the Brain Preservation Foundation awarded its Small Mammal Brain Preservation Prize after electron microscopy showed exceptional preservation throughout an entire rabbit brain. Two years later, the same approach won the Large Mammal Prize for preserving a pig brain. Independent judges concluded that neuronal processes and synaptic structures remained traceable across the tissue at a level unprecedented for whole brains.

But that work didn’t demonstrate that memories survive preservation. They didn’t establish that consciousness can be reconstructed from preserved tissue. They recognized something narrower, but nonetheless important: that large mammalian brains could be preserved with extraordinary structural fidelity. It was a milestone in anatomical preservation. Not in resurrection.

In terms of applicability to cryonics, the experiments had further limitations. Laboratory animals can be anesthetized, perfused immediately, and preserved under ideal conditions. Human patients rarely die under ideal conditions. They may suffer hours of warm ischemia, vascular disease, strokes, or traumatic injury. They may die hundreds of miles from a preservation team. The challenge there is not preserving a healthy, prepared brain; it’s preserving whatever remains after the unpredictable circumstances of real death.

This is where the research program at Sparks Brain Preservation becomes significant. SBP, the firm founded by Jordan Sparks, has (unlike most cryonics organizations) access to donated human brains that can be studied after preservation. SBP has published striking electron micrographs showing well-preserved synapses, membranes, mitochondria, and neuronal processes in human tissue. Researchers can compare perfusion with immersion fixation, examine different postmortem intervals, evaluate penetration of fixatives, and inspect tissue under electron microscopes.

Nonetheless the organization is careful, at least in its scientific publications, to distinguish sample success from whole-brain success. A beautifully preserved sample from the frontal cortex does not establish that every memory-relevant structure throughout an entire brain has survived equally well. Nor does it show that the molecular changes underlying learning and memory remain fully intact.

That caution sometimes disappears in sharper public discussions. Sparks has criticized conventional cryonics ethically, arguing that its practices have not only been superseded because fixation preserves brain structure more faithfully, but by comparison actively worsens possible chances of revival.

Sparks has his critics. A London Futurists podcast episode featuring Sparks references prior episodes with Max More and Kenneth Hayworth that provide some noteworthy balance. They make a more measured case. That preservation quality varies with technique, timing, and circumstances That a poorly perfused fixed brain may preserve less than an expertly vitrified one, while immersion fixation after a long delay presents quite different challenges than immediate vascular perfusion. The disagreement is not merely philosophical; it concerns what counts as meaningful evidence.

In one respect, however, both sides increasingly agree. The old language of “freezing people for the future” no longer describes what is happening. Today’s debate revolves around structural preservation, connectomics, molecular neuroscience, and information. The field has become less like science fiction and more like a branch of experimental neurobiology. Whether that evolution ultimately vindicates vitrification, aldehyde fixation, or some entirely new approach remains unknown. What is clear is that the argument has moved from speculation to lab work; and that is progress no matter who eventually proves correct.

From Cryonet To Sparks Brain Preservation

Nothing in Jordan Sparks’ career pointed toward neuroscience. He is not a medical doctor or brain researcher. He attended dental school in Oregon, graduated, and established a successful practice in Oregon. Like many dental professionals at the time, he became frustrated by the primitive software then available, and decided it would be easier to write his own programs. What began as an internal office tool gradually evolved into Open Dental, a practice-management system that eventually became a widely used open dental software platform in North America and made Sparks wealthy enough to launch an entire research institute and cryonics services provider all his own.

Sparks’ interest in cryonics began long before Open Dental became successful. Like many people drawn to the movement, he read Robert Ettinger and was convinced by Ettinger’s central proposition: if medicine continues to advance, then today’s terminal illnesses should someday become curable. The only question is how to preserve patients long enough to benefit from those future advances. And more practically: who would do it?

In the beginning, cryonics was a tiny subculture, held together by newsletters, conferences, and internet discussion groups whose participants argued over everything from perfusion pressures to philosophy. One of those forums was CryoNet. Sparks became one of the many people lurking there, and began taking part. In 2002 he announced that he intended to establish a cryonics organization in Oregon.

The response was skeptical. Established organizations already struggled with the logistical and financial demands of standby teams, transportation, legal compliance, and long-term storage. A dentist seemed unlikely to succeed where others with more obvious medical qualifications had struggled. However, Sparks was not interested in starting just another preservation society. He wanted to build a research institution. And his research began pointing in directions that more conventional cryonics firms ignored.

The organization evolved gradually. Founded in 2005 as Oregon Cryonics, it initially focused on helping local members make arrangements with larger providers. As Oregon Cryonics became Oregon Brain Preservation and, eventually, Sparks Brain Preservation, it shifted more and more away from conventional vitrification toward structural preservation as its central mission.

The legal structure changed as well. Today SBP operates as a nonprofit mutual-benefit corporation licensed by the State of Oregon as a Nontransplant Anatomical Research Recovery Organization. That designation allows it to receive anatomical donations for research while carrying out preservation procedures under Oregon law. Unlike earlier cryonics organizations, which often existed in legal gray areas, SBP has made regulatory legitimacy part of its identity.

Sparks also established an adjacent research entity named Apex Neuroscience. Apex is a nonprofit 501(c)3 organization that can receive donations. SBP is also a nonprofit, but a mutual benefit organization, hence not tax exempt. Together, the two form an impressive headquarters and research and patient storage facility 20,000 square feet in size.

Traditional cryonics organizations necessarily devote most of their attention to patient care. Their patients cannot become research subjects, because the whole point is to preserve them intact. SBP, by contrast, has increasingly emphasized research using donated human brains, allowing researchers to experiment with perfusion techniques, compare fixation protocols, perform CT scans, and test and examine tissue under electron microscopes.

Cryonics has long relied on theoretical arguments about what future technology might accomplish. Research makes it possible to ask more immediate questions. How evenly does fixative penetrate the human brain? Which regions preserve best? What happens after six hours of warm ischemia instead of two? How much structural detail survives immersion compared with vascular perfusion? These questions don’t require speculative futurology. They require careful laboratory work.

Andrew McKenzie, SBP’s principal research scientist, has become central to that effort. His publications (some co-authored with researchers including George Church and João Pedro de Magalhães) argue that preservation quality should be judged principally by measurable structural criteria. They do not assert that preserved brains can be revived, nor do they claim that memory has been conclusively preserved. They ask a humbler and narrower question: can the anatomical structures believed to encode memory survive postmortem preservation with sufficient fidelity to remain useful to future technology?

Even McKenzie and his colleagues acknowledge that neuroscience has not yet established exactly which physical features of the brain must survive to preserve personal identity. Synaptic connections almost certainly matter, but they may not be sufficient. Molecular states, receptor distributions, glial interactions, and biochemical processes may also prove essential. We simply don’t yet know.

Sparks rarely disguises his larger hopes. He seems quite certain that future medicine (or perhaps future computation) will eventually be able to recover minds from preserved brains. His website sometimes ventures into predictions about whole-brain emulation that some neuroscientists would regard as visionary, others as overly optimistic. He has given great comfort to those in the cryonics community who favor what is called ‘mind uploading,’ the notion that restoring one’s physical body is not necessary, and not even desirable. Ideally, we want our consciousness restored in a digital environment, like Neo in The Matrix.

Author Charles Platt put the advantages well: “Personally, I tend to believe that humanity will abandon the physical realm and go ‘100% virtual’ when sufficient computing power is available. The virtual realm eliminates most penalties imposed by the physical world, such as disease, pain, and mortality—assuming that ongoing maintenance by robots will support the necessary hardware. So why settle for less?”

Platt, an acclaimed science fiction novelist and one of the founders of Cryocare, wrote about copying a brain into a virtual environment into his classic novel, The Silicon Man, inspired in part by roboticist Hans Moravec’s nonfiction work, Mind Children. Both are highly readable introductions to this perspective. (Platt has also written by far the best and clearest article available about Sparks and Sparks Brain Preservation: “An Alternative to Cryonics: An Introduction to Sparks Brain Preservation”. One can read it at The Biostasis Standard at https://biostasis.substack.com/p/an-alternative-to-cryonics.)

The day-to-day lab work at SBP is less visionary and more restrained. SBP technicians are not trying to upload consciousness. They are trying to determine, one experiment at a time, how to preserve a human brain with the least structural damage.

Of course, SBP does more than that. Sparks Brain Preservation is not only a research center, but an active cryonics provider. SBP patients may undergo aldehyde fixation, not the customary treatments at Alcor, CI, and Tomorrow.bio, but the service and the purpose are the same: to maintain patients in the best state possible till revival.

SBP was once revolutionary in that regard, too. At one point SBP offered preservation services at a tiny fraction of current cryonics prices, particularly for those within 250 miles of its facility.

Those days are gone. Today, the listed price for standard brain preservation is $45,000. That includes rapid response within the continental United States, transportation, fixation, brain removal, storage, and cremation of the remainder of the body. Whole-body preservation is listed at $100,000. Membership is $150 annually, and membership discount can reduce eventual brain preservation prices, and hardship cases are considered. Still, in terms of pricing, retrieval operations, and even optional liquid-nitrogen storage, SBP appears to have gone the way of Alcor and CI.

SBP seems to have copied its competing cryonics organizations in another respect: a complete indifference to competent marketing. While rich in information, the SBP web site at https://sparksbrain.org/ is so retro, it could have been designed in the 1990s. Little effort seems to have been given to outreach to the general public. The research into brain tissue at SBP appears to be innovative and exemplary. The market research is nonexistent. SBP repeatedly claims to be offering a superior product. Perhaps so, but like the rest of the cryonics services companies, it is doing precious little to effectively sell its offering.

And that is unfortunate, for Sparks’ organization has certain unique advantages over its competitors. Oregon law sanctions medical aid in dying (MAID) procedures, even for non-residents. Its end-of-life page states that Oregon permits eligible patients to use its Death With Dignity process, and that SBP’s visitor room is adjacent to its procedure room, allowing preservation to begin very quickly after pronouncement.

As with the other leading cryonics organizations, Sparks and SBP give overwhelming attention to technical, scientific and medical questions, and virtually none to social or presentational issues. That may well produce advances in the former, but in terms of how cryonics is received, it leaves it languishing in the fringe, unacceptable, under-funded and politically fragile.

Progress or Misdirection?

Cryonics has often invited disappointment by promising more than it could demonstrate. During the 1960s and 1970s, some enthusiasts spoke confidently of suspended animation, near-future revival, and technologies that always seemed to lie just over the horizon. The predictions failed, but the movement endured. Over time, its more serious advocates became increasingly careful. They stopped speaking of certainty and began speaking of possibility.

Jordan Sparks belongs to that more mature generation, but he has introduced a different kind of confidence. He is less interested in predicting when people will return than in asking whether today’s preservation methods leave future scientists enough to work with, and in pioneering ways to better secure such information.

But it’s worth stating plainly what Sparks has not accomplished.

He has not demonstrated that human memory survives preservation. He has not shown that consciousness can be reconstructed from preserved tissue. He has not proved that whole-brain emulation is possible, nor that a digital reconstruction would be the same person. He has not solved the problem of maintaining an institution for centuries, or shown that chemically fixed brains will remain unchanged over comparable periods. Those questions remain unanswered because no one, anywhere, knows the answers.

At the same time, it would be equally misleading to dismiss SBP as another speculative venture built on little more than optimism. Sparks has created a licensed organization with a permanent headquarters, a growing scientific staff, an expanding rapid-response network, and a research program devoted to questions that can actually be investigated.

That distinction is more significant than it first appears. Science advances by reducing unknowns one at a time. It cannot answer the largest questions until it has answered many smaller ones. Before anyone can know whether a preserved mind might someday be recoverable, researchers must first understand how different preservation methods affect synapses, dendrites, membranes, and other structures throughout the human brain. Those are ordinary scientific questions. They admit of experiments, measurements, and disagreement grounded in evidence rather than intuition.

Perhaps the strongest argument in Sparks’ favor is that he has made cryonics more falsifiable. Fifty years ago, almost every dispute within the movement could be deferred to hypothetical future nanotechnology. If someone questioned freezing damage, the answer was that future molecular machines would repair it. If another questioned cryoprotectant toxicity, future medicine would solve that as well. Such arguments could never be tested because they depended entirely on inventions that did not yet exist.

Structural preservation changes the conversation. A fixed brain can be scanned. It can be sectioned. Individual synapses can be counted. Membranes can be examined for continuity. Preservation quality can be compared across methods and laboratories. None of these measurements establishes that a person survives, but each reduces the number of questions that must be left to speculation. In science, replacing one assumption with one observation is genuine progress.

That does not mean Sparks is necessarily right. His public statements sometimes outrun the available evidence. He is inclined to express confidence where many neuroscientists would prefer caution, particularly when discussing whole-brain emulation and the sufficiency of structural preservation. Critics are justified in pointing out that neuroscience still lacks a complete account of memory. The field does not yet know which molecular states must survive, nor whether ultrastructure alone captures everything that matters. Those objections deserve to be answered by experiments rather than by conviction.

The same is true of traditional cryonics. Vitrification has advantages that should not be underestimated. Liquid-nitrogen temperatures suppress chemical change almost completely, making long-term stability easier to defend than storage at refrigerator temperatures. If future technologies ultimately depend upon biological repair rather than computational reconstruction, today’s chemically fixed brains may prove less useful than Sparks believes. No one yet possesses enough evidence to settle that question.

It is tempting to portray the disagreement as a contest in which one side must eventually defeat the other. History suggests a different possibility. Scientific revolutions often emerge through synthesis rather than replacement. Aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation—the work recognized by the Brain Preservation Foundation—already combines elements of both approaches. Future preservation methods may borrow from each, or they may abandon both in favor of techniques not yet imagined. (And, indeed, the quest for utterly and absolutely perfect restoration may be both vain and irrelevant: see the Cryonics Society paper, Imperfect Restoration.)

The important point is that the argument has become empirical. Preservation is increasingly judged by what can be measured instead of what can be hoped.

Seen in that light, Jordan Sparks’ achievement looks rather different. What he has done is force an old movement to become more scientific in new ways. He has challenged assumptions that had hardened into doctrine and insisted that they be defended with evidence.

So does that mean that cryonics as we have known it so far is on the cusp of change? Are heresy and schism forming, with fixationists on the one side waiting to awaken in the Matrix, and vitrificationists working on ever more effective methods of perfusion? Probably not. The basic situation is that the damage of death will be compounded by the damage of long-term preservation. Restoration technologies far beyond our present grasp will be needed to recover cryonics patients either way. Technologies far beyond our grasp, but not our imagination. The only question is whether, with his research and philosophy of fixation, Sparks is providing us with a new approach that makes eventual recovery more likely, or less; whether he is taking us forward or only sideways.

Time will tell. That said, Jordan Sparks has expanded the scope of what cryonics once thought possible, is expanding our empirical knowledge of brain structure and function, and has built not only a research institute but another cryonics provider for those wishing to take the ultimate journey. These are no small achievements.

Sources:

Sparks Brain Preservation

• Sparks Brain Preservation, “About Us” — staff, corporate structure, history, NARRO status. https://sparksbrain.org/aboutSBP.html
• Sparks Brain Preservation, homepage. https://sparksbrain.org/
• Sparks Brain Preservation, “Services” — current fees, rapid-response coverage, liquid-nitrogen options, payment methods. https://sparksbrain.org/services.html
• Sparks Brain Preservation, “End-of-Life Options” — Visitor Room/Procedure Room adjacency, MAID/Death With Dignity eligibility for non-residents. https://sparksbrain.org/endOfLife.html
• Sparks Brain Preservation, self-preservation agreement/sign-up forms https://sparksbrain.org/Self_Preservation_Forms.pdf

Government and legal sources

• Oregon Health Authority, list of licensed Nontransplant Anatomical Research Recovery Organizations. https://www.oregon.gov/oha/PH/PROVIDERPARTNERRESOURCES/HEALTHCAREPROVIDERSFACILITIES/HEALTHCAREHEALTHCAREREGULATIONQUALITYIMPROVEMENT/Documents/NARROList.pdf
• Oregon Health Authority, NARRO program fact sheet/rules (OAR 333-081). https://www.oregon.gov/oha/PH/PROVIDERPARTNERRESOURCES/HEALTHCAREPROVIDERSFACILITIES/HEALTHCAREHEALTHCAREREGULATIONQUALITYIMPROVEMENT/Documents/NARRORulesFaq.pdf
• Oregon Health Authority, Death With Dignity Act overview and FAQ. https://public.health.oregon.gov/ProviderPartnerResources/Evaluationresearch/deathwithdignityact/Pages/index.aspx and https://public.health.oregon.gov/ProviderPartnerResources/EvaluationResearch/DeathwithDignityAct/Pages/faqs.aspx

Scientific literature

• McKenzie, A.T., et al., “Structural Brain Preservation: A Potential Bridge to Future Medical Technologies,” Frontiers in Medical Technology 6 (2024). https://doi.org/10.3389/fmedt.2024.1400615
• McIntyre, R.L. and Fahy, G.M., “Aldehyde-Stabilized Cryopreservation,” Cryobiology 71, no. 3 (2015): 448–458. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cryobiol.2015.09.003
• Brain Preservation Foundation, Small Mammal Prize announcement (rabbit brain, Feb. 2016). https://www.brainpreservation.org/small-mammal-announcement/
• Brain Preservation Foundation, Large Mammal Prize announcement (pig brain, March 2018). https://www.brainpreservation.org/implications-of-the-bpf-large-mammal-brain-preservation-prize/

Institutional history and criticism

• Open Dental, “Open Dental Through the Years.” https://opendental.blog/open-dental-through-the-years/
• Alcor Life Extension Foundation, position statement on the Brain Preservation Foundation prize/ASC. https://www.alcor.org/resources/blog/http-www-alcor-org-blog-alcor-position-statement-on-large-brain-preservation-foundation-prize/
• Charles Platt, “An Alternative to Cryonics: An Introduction to Sparks Brain Preservation,” The Biostasis Standard, October 4, 2025. https://biostasis.substack.com/p/an-alternative-to-cryonics
• London Futurists podcast, “The low-cost future of preserving brains, with Jordan Sparks.” https://londonfuturists.buzzsprout.com/2028982/episodes/15517037-the-low-cost-future-of-preserving-brains-with-jordan-sparks
• Charles Platt, The Silicon Man (1991). https://www.amazon.com/Silicon-Man-Charles-Platt/dp/0962371270/

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