h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Is Cryonics a scam??

apart from the dream of curing death and disease in the future??

has the freezing process and revival ever been sucsefully tested on a living creature, comparable with a human being (dog, chimp etc.)

have they ever flushed a creature, cooled, frozen, defrosted, refilled and "clear" it back to life?????

I'm going to bet "no"

For freezing to work at all - it would need to be flash frozen or else the ice crystals would damage to cells, think Birdeye's peas and mushy strawberries.

You can more or less indefinitely freeze a cadaver but there's nothing metabolic going on in there any more.

For a time I don't know how much this is still used but hypothermia was a used routinely in open heart surgery to minimise the metabolic requirements of the brain and other organs while the blood was reoxygenated and recycled in an external pump.

The trick then is to manage the re-warming.


Sci-fi makes use of "stasis fields" to accomplish this - time is not 'frozen' inside these just moving more slowly than the rest of the universe thus not braking the relativistic laws of the universe.

In a recent feature-length broadcast of the series Stargate universe I saw, the entire crew bar one had to go into stasis. The blue light they stepped into was accompanied by a misting of breath and 'frost effect' to get across the idea that these people were now "frozen" but that's just to satisfy the cultural expectation.

Resuscitation under other circumstances is pretty common but as for "flushed, cooled, frozen, defrosted, refilled and rebooted" - no, not so far as I am aware, has it been done nor is it possible.

Two animals have been successfully frozen and resuscitated: a frog and a rat. The frog evolved to survive freezing. They replaced the rat's blood with another oxygen-carrying liquid before freezing it.

i know its a valid area of research to solve the problems of deep space exploration

but are those who pay thousands to have their cadavers frozen not just exchanging one dream of an afterlife(religion) for another (based on science)

*shudders*

What about the ones who just had their heads frozen?

they better hope that thier trust fund performs well enough to afford a new body!!!

or that their executor is honest enough not to pull the plug and pocket the cash!!!!

*giggles*


There will be a lot of Talking Heads about!

Gnomon:
"Two animals have been successfully frozen and resuscitated: a frog and a rat. The frog evolved to survive freezing. They replaced the rat's blood with another oxygen-carrying liquid before freezing it."

Which is rather different from being frozen once you're dead and then being revived in hundreds of years. It seems unlikely to me that people who have been frozen now will be successfully revived.

how long was the rat under for and did it make a full recovery??

have there been any failures with more complex/fragile animals

dogs/chimps etc.

I´m not sure it can be called a scam, as I don´t think they tend to give any guarantees. Their point is rather that the odds are still better than if you don´t get frozen. If you pay for it with the payout of your life insurance, what have you got to lose?

The problem is as you freeze something, the water in your cells turn into ice and bursts the cell walls. Try freezing and rethawing a cucumber, and you can see the problems these corpsicles face.

That's why they replaced the rat's blood with a different liquid before freezing it. The other liquid doesn't carry nutrients, but it does carry oxygen, so the rat can survive for a few hours on it. And the other liquid doesn't expand when it freezes, so the freezing is less destructive.

As far as I remember, the rat survived the experience and went on to live a normal lab-rat life.

""As far as I remember, the rat survived the experience and went on to live a normal lab-rat life.""

running round mazes, smoking fags, that sort of thing??

Taff, you'd better sit down before I tell you this:

It was dissected.

mummyfied???

packed in sillica gel you mean??

That would be dessicated, Taff. Sorry to break it to you.

did they re freeze his head for future generations???

i'm in a mood

to myself here alone

you'd think i was

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14509425

the inspiration for the question

as the freezing and thawing/revival has never been carried out on a living human being

it all seams a bit of a "wing and a prayer" process

as for the retaintion of genetic material!!! even if you were cloned, it wouldn't BE you, YOU is a collection of memories and experiences that are formed by living them, a clone is at best a potential you, YOU would still be dead, kind of defeats the point of the process???

the inspiration for the question... looks a bit like a garden shed operation - the pic of the orange skin

Freezing a cucumber and freezing a human are not really all that comparable. Plant cells have a rigid cell wall which is destroyed by the ice crystals. Mammalian cells do not have this and so _can_ survive flash freezing. (albeit it's still not really very good for them.


One can never say never but there's so many problems attached with it that it's extremely unlikely to ever work in my opinion.

The real problem I would think would be degredation of the DNA in your cells. You can't sequence the DNA of a wooly mammoth extracted from ice in Siberia for example as it breaks down relatively quickly - certainly within hundreds of years. So even if your cellular structure survived - would the molecules themselves that do the chemistry - the DNA, the enzymes and the cell organelles survive intact... Tricky.