The opening of “The Strange Neuroscience of Immortality,” Evan R. Goldstein’s odd and fascinating new Chronicle article about the ad infinitum view of life:

“In the basement of the Northwest Science Building here at Harvard University, a locked door is marked with a pink and yellow sign: ‘Caution: Radioactive Material.’ Inside researchers buzz around wearing dour expressions and plastic gloves. Among them is Kenneth Hayworth. He’s tall and gaunt, dressed in dark-blue jeans, a blue polo shirt, and gray running shoes. He looks like someone who sleeps little and eats less.

Hayworth has spent much of the past few years in a windowless room carving brains into very thin slices. He is by all accounts a curious man, known for casually saying things like, ‘The human race is on a beeline to mind uploading: We will preserve a brain, slice it up, simulate it on a computer, and hook it up to a robot body.’ He wants that brain to be his brain. He wants his 100 billion neurons and more than 100 trillion synapses to be encased in a block of transparent, amber-colored resin—before he dies of natural causes.

Why? Ken Hayworth believes that he can live forever.

But first he has to die.

‘If your body stops functioning, it starts to eat itself,’ he explains to me one drab morning this spring, ‘so you have to shut down the enzymes that destroy the tissue.’ If all goes according to plan, he says cheerfully, ‘I’ll be a perfect fossil.’ Then one day, not too long from now, his consciousness will be revived on a computer. By 2110, Hayworth predicts, mind uploading—the transfer of a biological brain to a silicon-based operating system—will be as common as laser eye surgery is today.”

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“Thousands frozen, and pets too”: