Alcor Member Profile: Todd Huffman
Alcor Member Profile
From Cryonics July-August 2012
By Chana Phaedra
There are few people in the world who blaze a trail through life like Todd Huffman does. Whether he is assisting in a cryonics case, developing new microscope technologies, or helping to stabilize technology infrastructure in conflicted environments, there is nothing run-of-the-mill about anything he is involved with. And since he is speaking at the Alcor-40 conference in October 2012, we were interested in learning more about Todd’s background as well as his current and future endeavors.
Todd Huffman is a speaker at the Alcor 40th Anniversary conference (Alcor-40) in Scottsdale, AZ in October 2012
Born in Long Beach, CA, Todd became interested in emergency medicine in high school and took EMT and CNA classes in preparation for entering the field. While attending college at California State University, Long Beach, he worked in a number of environments in order to apply his medical knowledge. Over the years he assisted in caring for dementia patients, in ER medicine, and a neurology ward. It was during this time period that he learned of cryonics through the Extropy Institute’s email list and also became acquainted with several Alcor members at Extropian conferences. Because of his background and interest in emergency medicine, it wasn’t long before he was volunteering on Alcor’s standby and stabilization team in Southern California. These experiences caused him to contemplate cryonics as an interesting long-term project to work on, and after participating in a few cases he became an Alcor member in 2002.
Todd obtained a B.S. in neuroscience in 2003. After graduation, he moved to Phoenix to work for Alcor full-time. He worked in both research and field recovery for about a year but eventually decided to pursue further education at Arizona State University, where he obtained a M.S. in bioinformatics in 2006. He then enrolled in the Ph.D. program in at the Biodesign Institute at ASU. While in graduate school, Todd continued to consult for Alcor and for Suspended Animation, Inc., primarily in field work and training of field responders.
Ultimately, Todd left the doctoral program in order to pursue his interest in science and technology development. Specifically, he was interested in the role of science and technology in unstable and/or conflicted environments. As a freelancer he’s worked for various international NGOs, commercial companies, the US Dept of State, and US Dept of Defense. Todd has been involved in projects in Afghanistan, Uganda, and Haiti, and he played supporting roles in developing technologies in a number of other countries experiencing conflict around the world.
Dressed to impress with girlfriend Katy.
These countries, often in the midst of war, suffer from a wide range of technological issues. Todd was one of a number of consultants recruited to address such problems. Together, as small 3 to 6 person teams, these partners strategize ways to implement communications and energy technologies and the supporting infrastructure for those technologies in an assigned conflict zone. As a part of this effort, the team(s) must also assess the role of these technologies in reconstruction and ongoing stability efforts in the area.
In Afghanistan, Todd’s team helped to support medical communications in rural parts of the country. They set up lines of communication and trained doctors how to use telecommunication to augment their medical staff. For example, where interpretation of an x-ray may have previously been impossible in a rural facility lacking a radiologist, implementation of stable long-distance communications technologies in these clinics enables staff to send and receive critical information to and from larger institutions with greater resources (such as radiologists).
“Sending a file to someone else and then being able to receive communication back from that person sounds really simple to us and is something we take for granted, but isn’t commonly available in war torn environments” Todd explains. “The infrastructure for this type of communication didn’t exist before we got there, so the doctors and staff also have to be trained how to use it.”
In the cryonics community — where members sometimes shudder at the risk inherent in just taking a flight — purposefully entering a distant war zone when one is not personally involved in fighting the war may sound like insanity, but Todd’s opinion on the matter is decidedly different. “The world is a complex and dangerous place,” he says, “and the future of humanity as we envision it is not assured and in fact threatened by global instabilities. Sources of violence and instability need to be understood and addressed in order for the kind of scientific and cultural advances necessary for cryonics to develop. An insular and myopic futurist community does not deserve and will not be able to realize a future of continued progress.”
While Todd remains involved in such efforts, he has become more focused on his own company, 3Scan, in recent years. 3Scan’s goal is to revolutionize high throughput screening microscopy, and is predicated on technology that Todd helped develop in collaboration with a group at Texas A&M University. The machine, known as the Knife Edge Scanning Microscope (KESM), beams light through the back of a diamond knife in order to slice tissue and simultaneously image the slice using a continuously recording camera. This procedure not only completely automates the imaging of serial sections, it also prevents the well-known (and despised) artifacts introduced by physical handling of the tissue prior to imaging.
Todd founded 3Scan in 2010 as a spin-out company partnering with Texas A&M, and in 2011 began ramping up the company bringing on additional engineers to redesign the system for large scale commercial use. “For the past year, 3Scan has been rebuilding and optimizing the machine for a larger audience and to expand its capabilities. For example, the first machine could handle a maximum tissue volume of 1 cm3, which is the size of a mouse brain and results in about a terabyte (TB) of data. The new machine, however, is capable of around 125 cm3, which can fit a small primate brain and result in several hundred TB of imagery data.”
Leaving nothing to chance, Todd has had the instructions from his Alcor medicalert bracelet tattooed on his torso. (Note: the above information is altered in minor ways for reasons of privacy and to prevent harassment.)
All of Todd’s work at 3Scan relates to his broader interest in neural computation and, ultimately, in developing the means to reverse engineer neural circuitry. “The original goal of the KESM was to do large scale reconstructions of neural connectivity,” he explains. “I think the classical cryonics biological revival scenario is a bit naive and self-centered, humans and society are going to be dramatically different. I believe our preserved brains will be more likely subjects for cognitive archeology, the first person perspectives encoded in our neural circuitry will be useful and interested for the purposes of understanding history and culture. Exactly how this will manifest is unknown, but I believe it to be a worthwhile endeavor as I see value in contributing to the overall knowledge base of our species even if I don’t personally ‘see’ the future.
Which brings us to Todd’s presentation at the Alcor-40 conference. “In general,” Todd says, “my talk is about large scale neuromorphology, what it tells us about the brain, and specifically what it tells us that is relevant to cryonics. I also touch on what revival scenarios might look like, from my perspective.”
His perspective, fittingly, is one which is based on an interest in neural architecture and the information that can be extracted from it — a sort of neural archaeology. “I think that reconstructions using the information extracted from neural circuitry about the collective human experience may be more likely than the classical biological resuscitation that most people envision.”
And while this may be a contentious point for some, one topic requires no debate: Todd’s deep and personal involvement in the cryonics movement. Whether he is participating in a field recovery or developing technologies to speed along our understanding of brain structure and the information encoded therein, Todd is always making friends with existing members, promoting the cryonics cause within the scientific community, and encouraging those he meets to sign up with Alcor.
“I feel that it is important to have other friends who are cryonicists,” Todd says, “because cryonics is not a service where you slap down a credit card and it just happens. It’s a small community and the procedures are performed by the members. By having friends in this community it increases your chance of getting a good preservation — people are more likely to be motivated to help if the patient is someone they know and care about.”
Todd enjoys some wine at gathering of Alcor friends and colleagues in 2006.
Given Todd’s field experience, he also has much to say about how Alcor members can get involved, even if they don’t have a lot of (or any) medical knowledge. As part of understanding how one can function in a support role, Todd stresses the importance familiarizing oneself with how cryonics procedures work.
“There are many support tasks that are very important,” he emphasizes. “Buying ice, renting a van, all sorts of things. In many cases, the professional staff on the case is not from the area where the procedure is taking place, but the volunteers are, and that local knowledge — like where to get the ice or the van — can really help out immensely.”
In terms of personal hobbies Todd likes to experiment with building civilizations. He’s the mayor of a 200+ strong Burning Man village, the Playagon, and is a citizen of Langton Labs, a 20+ person industrial living situation which could be described as “a commune but with scientists and engineers instead of hippies.” He’s also a founder of the BIL conference, a free and open event that happens to be down the street from the TED conference, and volunteers with a variety of other non-profits and events. These small scale projects are good for exploring and innovating in important dimensions such as communication, logistics, infrastructure, and community.