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Companies offering macabre products and services are nothing new. There are many that sell human body parts, books covered in human skin, and even cadavers that have been skinned. However, startups like Nectome are exceedingly rare in that it wants to literally kill its customers in order to offer them a longer life. The entire premise of its services basically involves a 100 percent fatality rate.
Nectome is one of the startups brought to life by the accelerator, Y Combinator and it is offering customers the opportunity to live far beyond their natural lifespan, Futurism reports. Unfortunately, the whole process depends on the client dying so that the startup can take their brain and preserve it. The aim is to preserve the person that the client was, which means saving their memories.
This may sound absolutely crazy, but according to the company’s own mission page, Nectome has the ability to pull this offer. Its researchers were apparently able to cook up some kind of new mixture, which is effective at keeping the brain in good condition.
“Currently, we can preserve the connectomes of animal brains and are working on extending our techniques to human brains in a research context. This is an important first step towards the development of a verified memory preservation protocol, as the connectome plays a vital role in memory storage,” the company writes.
As the MIT Technology Review notes, in order for the procedure to work, the brain needs to be fresh. This means that the patient cannot be dead for more than a few moments before the brain is submerged in a storage unit filled with the chemical mixture that the startup developed. The implication, therefore, is that the patient needs to die willingly at the hands of Nectome.
Despite the disturbing nature of this proposal, over two dozen people have already come forward to be placed on a waiting list, which will make them the first people to receive the service. None of them could have done it as a joke either since signing up involves putting down a $10,000 deposit. Every single person on the waiting list just paid in order to die.
