Cryonics: Suspended Animation

Now a lot of people still use the word "Cryogenics" but technically that word is more generic and it just means the science of making things really cold, whereas "Cryonics" is the science of freezing an organism and then reanimating it later. So you've probably heard about this in science fiction referred to as "suspended animation." They do it all the time with human embryos but it's never been done successfully with a full grown adult human, intentionally at least. Now there have been accidents where people have fallen through the ice and have been under for hours even and have been revived so there is a lot of evidence that this type of science can work.

Now the process is basically... what they do is, they're not allowed to freeze somebody who's alive so you have to be legally declared dead. Now this is another issue. People think, "Well, if you're already dead then how are they going to, you know, revive you?" Well it happens all the time, every single day. On average, over a thousand times a year people are revived from legal death. We've been pushing back the boundaries further and further of what we consider dead. A classic example is that in, you know, 50 years ago or so if you tried to do CPR on somebody who had stopped breathing, their heart had stopped beating, you You're abusing a corpse!" or something, right? But nowadays we know that people can actually be resuscitated from legal death.

So there is another big issue with this: When you freeze a body the water between the cell walls freezes and crystallizes. Those crystals not only move the cells around but they can also puncture and damage the cells with the sharp edges of the ice. So what they've done is they figured out methods of preventing this type of freezing damage as soon as the person is declared legally dead. Ideally it'll be a team already there. They'll cool down the body as fast as they possibly can with ice packs and they'll inject medications into the body.

Once it's been cooled enough they hook up a device. It's very similar to what they have in a mortuary where they will remove all of the blood, and they have to try and do this quickly. Oh yeah, and before that they've been doing CPR. They've been doing that to maintain the circulation in the body because as soon as the circulation stops all sorts of processes start to happen that can really damage the body, including blood clotting, spasming of the blood vessels in the brain which can really really damage the brain. So they profuse the body, they call it.

They remove all the blood and they replace it with cryoprotectants. These are fluids that when you bring them down to a very low temperature they solidify, or vitrify, they call it. Turn into almost like a glass which is like a solid liquid and they don't form ice crystals so the same kind of damage does not occur to the body when you do that. Now this is the same type of cryoprotectants that they use when they preserve individual organs for later use in transplantation and they've had a fair bit of success in that.

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