• Question: Will cryogenic freezing be feasible in my generation?

    Asked by rosie123 to Mark, Paul on 25 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Mark Roberts

      Mark Roberts answered on 25 Jun 2010:

      It’s quite possible yes – there are technical challenges in doing so. The main one is trying to stop ice from forming as ice crystals will break your cells open.

      We currently have ways to do it with small tissues and things like human eggs, but it’s quite hard to do on a large thing – even a liver or heart is too big at the moment

      but as technology (and antifreeze!) improves I think it probably will be possible.

    • Photo: Paul Roche

      Paul Roche answered on 25 Jun 2010:

      Someone asked a question like this a few days ago, and I think we all said that it was actually happening already – but what has not happened yet is that anyone has been frozen and then revived (i.e. brought back to life). It’s still not clear whether that will ever be possible (and even if it was, would you want to come back to life sometime in th efuture, where everyone you knew was dead and everything was different? Might be a bit traumatic…).

      Cryonics is a fairly well established area of science now (so the actual freezing of people, or just their heads…), but nobody has made any real progress in the “unfreezing/reviving” end of things, as far as I know.

      Cryogenic freezing is one of the ways that has been suggested for sending humans into deep space, such as to the nearest star – which is still about 4 light years away from us, and would take thousands of years to reach with our current technology. If you have seen Avatar, this is how they transport the people to Pandora, by freezing them and then defrosting them as they get there – but that is freezing and then thawing live people, which ispresumably much easier than trying to “bring someone back to life” after they have died and been frozen…

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