The Ship of Theseus… for your brain

Why are we talking about this?: Hébert was recently hired by the Biden Administration for the U.S. Advanced Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H). There, he’s expected to work on furthering research on “functional brain tissue replacement” for longevity.

• The ARPA-H was created in 2022, as an agency within the administration’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). In short, it’s a center for health-focused moonshot projects. Hébert’s peers in the program include projects to cure blindness and diagnose cancer at home.
• Hébert had proposed a $110 million project to the new agency to research brain tissue replacement in several animal models.

Is this brain replacement concept serious?: Yes. Unlike the brain transplant video we discussed a few weeks ago (a fiction that fooled many internet denizens), this research is completely real. 

• Outside of the longevity context, brain tissue replacement could help us better treat conditions like stroke, where patients have lost portions of their brain function.
• However, to Hébert, this has always been about living longer—or indefinitely. In an interview with MIT Technology Review, he references the 1973 version of Westworld as an initial inspiration for thinking about immortality and says he credits his childhood aversion to being ‘okay’ with death as the guidance for his work today.
• Certain fringe factions in the longevity space look up to Hébert. For instance, the Longevity Biotech Fellowship credits Hébert’s work in their in-process life extension roadmap.

Tell me about the research: If you’re imagining Hébert as a mad scientist working in some basement lab on far-fetched ideas, think again. Remember, his work is now funded by the U.S. government. And up until now, he’s been a researcher at the prestigious Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

• It’s not just about brains. Overall, Hébert’s approach to longevity relies on slowly replacing the body’s components with better, younger ones.
• Of course, we already do this with organ transplants and hip replacements, but it gets trickier when it comes to the brain.
• At Einstein, Hébert has been working on progressive brain tissue replacement in mice. The approach involves removing small sections of the subjects’ brains and injecting embryonic cells. The initial goal has been to prove this young tissue can survive—and then function as a new-and-improved brain section.

Our take: Work like this is still “out there”—even for many folks in the longevity space. Yet, we can’t ignore how it’s getting more mainstream buy-in. Billionaires investing in longevity is one thing, but endorsement from the U.S. government is another. We’re excited to see what other breathtaking ideas come out of this space. But perhaps even more so, we can’t wait for the downstream effects of longevity breakthroughs, which can help everyday people improve their health and extend their lives.