Leonardo Di Caprio and Jennifer Lawrence’s film tells us how a huge comet approaches Earth. Colliding with it will mean the end of humanity, the end of everything. Kate and Randall, played by Lawrence and Di Caprio, are experts in astronomy and will warn of the danger: there are six months left to take action. But one of the solutions to survive this impact is to cryogenize. Cryogenicize for decades to return to live in another place or in another time. Is it possible to cryogenize humans as seen in “Don’t look up” or is this process impossible and we will only continue to see it in science fiction and in the movies?
Legend has it that Walt Disney was frozen before his death in order to be resurrected in the future. A future in which science was capable of curing the cancerous tumor that he had in his left lung and that predicted a more than certain death. However, today we know that this was nothing more than a legend that convinced half the world motivated by some of his family’s performances. It is also true that sometimes reality is stranger than fiction and legends do not come out of nowhere. The cryogenization process is a practice that has been going on for almost half a century. Currently, it is estimated that there are about 2,000 people in cryogenics around the world, and almost two hundred are in the Arizona desert waiting to be resuscitated in the future.
What is cryogenization?
Return to life , that great aspiration of human beings, many of whom have already paid for it. A great promise, but to what extent is it feasible? Basically, cryogenization consists of preserving the body of a person once they have died through a preservation technique in liquid nitrogen that we commonly know as freezing. A procedure that is carried out with the consent of the person before they die and whose objective is to give them the hope of being able to return to the world when the conditions and medical advances that can do so are met.
When a human body freezes, the water in our body turns into ice. This leads to it increasing in volume and generating crystals that destroy our tissues . “Freezing breaks down cells which makes our organs useless and impossible to rebuild,” according to National Geographic. The first cryogenization of a human body was performed in 1967 on James Bedford, an American psychologist who died of cancer. As a curiosity, cryogenization must begin within two minutes of the person’s death . The speed of the process aims to stop the death of brain cells as a result of lack of oxygen.
Cryogenics
Tissue from a frozen heart is revived
Several centers around the world are studying cryogenization and researchers at the University of California Berkeley have already made heart tissue samples beat again after being subjected to sub-zero temperatures for three days. A technique that is far from the urban legend of Walt Disney, but that leaves the door open to the conservation of organs for transplants that can extend the lives of their recipients.
A fact made possible by the process known as isochoric freezing – first developed by the same team in 2005 – with which researchers were recently able to prevent the transformation of ice crystals in heart tissue. The researchers published the results of this study in the journal Communications Biology. In it they comment that this tissue cryopreservation technique works. “To our knowledge, this is the first study on isochoric freezing and resuscitation of an autonomously beating human heart muscle,” says Matt Powell-Palm.
On the other hand, there is also vitrification , a cryogenization process that prevents the formation of ice by using an antifreeze gel at -196 degrees. For now, the most complex structures that scientists have been able to freeze with this process are the embryonic organs of animals. Everything points to the fact that today you cannot freeze an entire body without damaging its internal structure in the process.
In the face of cryogenization, everything is questions and uncertainties . There is still a long way to go before scientific and technological advances allow the resuscitation of cryogenized bodies in the future. In addition, one of the most disturbing questions that can come to mind on this subject is what life would be like for a person who, after a century or more frozen, is reanimated to live in a world that has nothing. to do with the one he left behind.