Mouse brain slices brought back to life after being frozen for a week
In a step towards suspended animation of people, slices of mouse brains have shown near-normal activity after being stored at -150°C for up to a week
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This is incredible.
Maybe anti-cryo people can finally shut it :-)
On a more serious note, this paves the way for cryopreserving organs and of course later on, our brain, mind & consciousnesses for a future thawing.
Edit: anti-cryo downvotes incoming!
Cryo works for animals and tissues up to a certain size. The problem is that once it’s a bit bigger than a guinea pig it gets a lot harder to reheat evenly which causes damage. Imagine if your skin and muscles were thawed but not your heart, for example.
The size of things we can cryopreserve and thaw is growing bigger every year, hence the importance of the article.
Soon we will be able to cryopreserve a human kidney, then a liver and so on.
I fully expect individual organs to be cryo preserved which is fantastic. Even a portion of a liver would be significant.
But I think the laws of thermodynamics will prevent preservation of whole heads, let alone bodies. (And then there’s all the other issues with cryo like what happens when the clinic goes out of business.)
There is nothing preventing a rapid cooling the problem is to get water removed/replaced because it creates ice crystals. We can already do this somehow.
The problem with thawing is how do you heat it uniformly.
I have never heard about the laws of thermodynamics would hinder this, any information gladly accepted.
And as for the business, well it's better than dying, at least there is a chance!
It’s related to thermodynamics but it’s basically the square-cube law: the bigger you get the more your internal volume grows compared to your size.
Heating something large evenly is very difficult because of this. It’s why burritos are lava on the outside and icicles on the inside out of the microwave, or why you need to cook a large roast slowly.
Hopefully we won't use basic microwaves then :-)
I read about nano particles spread out in the tissues, made to vibrate (probably by EM) to heat up larger portions uniformly.
It's just a matter of time and effort.
Nanoparticles might do the trick!