Great post! This reminded me of Nick Bostrom's slightly scary book on Superintelligence. 

We are quite a long way from being able to upload a brain of any organism and that is probably a good thing. The major problem appears to be the difficulty in the creation of a neurocomputational model. The technological challenges in scanning and processing are there, but the technology we have should be enough for extremely simple brains. [The OpenWorm project](http://www.artificialbrains.com/openworm), whose goal is to simulate the brain of an organism that has only 302 neurons, shows us exactly how complicated this process can be.