How a Winning Bet on Crypto Could Transform Brain and Longevity Science
James Fickel has dedicated $200 million he made betting on Ether to becoming one of the world’s biggest investors in those fields.
In early April, James Fickel boarded a train from Boston to New Haven, Connecticut, to check on some brains. The brains in question had once been inside pig skulls but now were located in a series of vats inside a building at the edge of Yale University’s campus, connected to an intertwining mass of tubes and a handful of machines feeding them a nutrient-rich fluid. Researchers have long dreamed of studying brains that remain largely functional outside their bodies, and this setup made those visions real.
This avenue of brain research began years ago with work by the Croatian scientists Nenad Sestan and Zvonimir Vrselja, who inspired spectacular headlines in 2019 by announcing they’d restored cellular activity in a pig’s brain for four hours after the animal had been killed at a meatpacking plant. Since then, the science has transformed from a research project into the basis of a startup called Bexorg Inc. The company hopes its technology, which is used on donated human brains as well, will lead to a deeper understanding of the brain’s biology, better drug discovery and, possibly, sci-fi-style rejuvenation techniques for people who have had traumatic injuries. Fickel made much of this possible as an early investor.