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It’s a scene straight out of science fiction: a person is placed in a state of total freeze-dry on their deathbed, so that they can be brought back to life at a future date. But is it realistic? In this extract from Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality (Harper Collins, 2024), which has been shortlisted for the prestigious 2024 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize, Nobel Prize-winning biologist Venky Ramakrishnan explores decades of attempts at cryonic preservation – a process in which people are frozen at the moment of death to be thawed later – and the potential challenges of the field that has emerged from the concept.
The Egyptians mummified their pharaohs so that they could be reborn in a future body for their journey to the afterlife. Of course, now, several thousand years after the pharaohs ruled and with more than a century of modern biology, we would not allow ourselves to do anything like such a superstition. However, there is a modern equivalent.
Biologists have long sought to be able to freeze samples for storage and later use. This is no easy task, since all living organisms are mostly water. When this water freezes and expands, it has a nasty habit of rupturing cells and tissue. That's why if you freeze fresh strawberries and then defrost them, you'll end up with an unappetizing mush.
An entire field of biology known as cryopreservation studies methods for freezing samples to keep them viable for later thawing. The field has developed useful techniques, such as storing stem cells and other valuable samples in liquid nitrogen. Scientists have also figured out how to safely freeze donor sperm and human embryos for use in in vitro fertilization.
Animal embryos are often frozen to preserve certain strains, and biologists’ favorite worms can be frozen as larvae and then brought back to life. For many types of cells and tissues, cryopreservation is effective. This is usually done using additives such as glycerol, which allow cooling to very low temperatures without turning the water into ice—essentially like adding antifreeze to a sample. In this case, the water forms a glass-like state rather than ice, and the process should be called vitrification rather than freezing (the Latin word for glass is vitreous), but even scientists sometimes casually refer to it as freezing and the samples as frozen.
Enter cryonics, in which people are frozen whole immediately after death, with the goal of thawing them out later when a cure for their ailment is found. The concept has been around for a long time, but it was made popular by Robert Ettinger, a physics and math professor at a college in Michigan who also wrote science fiction. Ettinger had an idea for a future where scientists could bring these frozen bodies back to life and not only cure them of their illnesses, but restore their youth.
In 1976, he founded the Cryonics Institute near Detroit and convinced more than 100 people to pay $28,000 to have their bodies frozen in liquid nitrogen in large containers. One of the first to be frozen was his own mother, Rhea, who died in 1977. His two wives are also in storage at the institute—it’s unclear whether they were happily with each other or their mother-in-law for years or even decades.
Sourse: www.livescience.com
