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

This raises intersting questions about cryogenics doesn't it? I mean the people whose cells, tissue, heads or even entire body's have been frozen to await a cure, or to be brought back again using cloning. When body tissue is frozen in humans do ice crystals form making the tissue virtually useless or does the DNA at least still reside within the cells?

I saw a program recently that showed Grasshoppers using the same technique but only if the temperature doesn't drop below a certain limit because they die below that. To survive it has to thaw before that!

guru walker

That sounds like some science fiction novel stuff. However, so did cloning about two decades before. The same thought came to my mind, but I thought this whole process requires a sort of special kind of cell-construct, doesn´t it? Probably it would take more than a chemical cell-therapy for human or whatever...

Well, I've seen some speculations about croygenic techniques that involved using nanites to protect the cells. But the other thing I gathered from this article is that even a person who was successfully frozen would only last as long as their cells had "fuel." They couldn't stay frozen indefinitely, the way it's portrayed in sci-fi.

Well, I've seen some speculations about croygenic techniques that involved using nanites to protect the cells. But the other thing I gathered from this article is that even a person who was successfully frozen would only last as long as their cells had "fuel." They couldn't stay frozen indefinitely, the way it's portrayed in sci-fi.

You might aswell freeze a few cells which can provide DNA if freezing can't bring you back. In sci-fi films, they always get put in a Stasis field, (non time) they are rarely frozen.

Nanites might be able to provide the fuel by being designed to turn the ice crystals that form into something else to fuel the cells.

Guru Walker

About the "saving the DNA" thing; even if they were able to clone you back, that clone would be a completely new person. It wouldn't be the same as bringing yourself into the future. Although I suppose it could work if they had some sort of technique for transfering your memory to the clone.

Oh, and your idea about the nanites bringing fuel to the cell might work, but I think they'd need some substances besides just ice to work with. If I remember my biology, the ATP that cells use for fuel includes some carbon, nitrogen, and other stuff.

To answer the original point, you're quite right. People who have been cryogenically frozen to date are almost certainly un-defrostable because their cells will have been spiked to mush by ice crystals. It is extremely optimistic to hope that a future researcher would be interested enough to attempt to extract a complete DNA sequence from all those ruined cells; and in any case, the point of being frozen is not usually to preserve your DNA sequence, but to get woken up and "cured" at some future date.
I am not saying that we won't have the technology to safely freeze people in the future, but I'm afraid the state of those already in cryogenic suspension is pretty certain.

Here we are nine years after the original posting. Does anyone know what, if any, technological advances have come along in the field of cryogenic research?