ScienceStuffWant to travel to a distant star? Or fast-forward to the future? Jorge chills with scientists to figure out if freezing your body (or just your brain) is the answer.
Hey, welcome to Science Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio. My name is Jorge cham and today on the program, we're going to be asking the question can you survive being cryogenically frozen? Maybe you have a terminal disease and you want to preserve your body until scientists can find a cure. Or maybe you want to travel to the near star, but you don't want to just stare out the window for the whole twenty four trillion mile journey. Or maybe you just want to see what the future is like and we'd rather take a long nap until things got more interesting. Well, you can do all those things if you were able to freeze your body, But is it really possible? What are scientists doing to make this a reality? And most important, would you still be the same person after you get thought out? To answer this question, we're going to be talking to scientists and to someone who actually freezes people for a living. It's a story that involves billionaires, popsicle frogs, and ex Navy seals. So put on your parkass, turn up your thermostat, because we are answering the slippery as ice question, can you survive being cryogenically frozen? I promise you the answer is pretty cool. Enjoy Hey everyone, all right. Today's topic is a little controversial, and the reason for that is that there are people who have frozen their bodies in the hopes that they might get revived later. There are several facilities in the United States and in Europe that will freeze you your whole body or even interest your head for a fee, and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of humans who have chosen to do that. Now we're gonna talk to someone who works in one of these facilities, that is, someone who freezes people for a living later in the program. But first I wanted to make sure I understood the science behind freezing biological matter, what actually happens to yourselves once the temperature draws below freezing, and why is it so dangerous. I was also curious to know if there are any animals in nature that have figured out ways to survive getting frozen. So I thought that the best person to talk to us about this would be a biologist who works in one of the coldest places on Earth. Reached out to doctor Don Larson, who is an assistant professor of biology and zoology at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, now you'll hear when I play the interview that I get really surprised at the beginning of my chat with doctor Larson. That's because I always thought I knew why freezing biological matter destroys the things that get frozen. I always thought that it was because when water freezes, it turns to ice, and ice is less dense than water, so when that ice forms, it expands and basically rips the cell apart. But it turns out I've been totally wrong. The real reason is something completely different. So here's my chat with doctor Don Larson. Hi, doctor Larson, thanks so much for talking with us.
Thank you for having me here.
Now you're in Fairbanks, Alaska. Are you frozen right now?
No, it's warmed up a little bit here. We just got done with our last negative forty cold snap. Why is it hard to survive being frozen? That is a great question. So people tend to think when animals freeze, when cells freeze, that there's this ice crushing event that ice forms either around our cells and crushes it, or ice goes into the cells and burst them. Freezing is actually a desiccation event, though, so the first thing they have to do before they even get all that ice throughout their body is survived drying out.
What you just blew my mind. That's totally different from what I had heard.
And that's it's very common. I have these conversations with lots of different people, and everybody always thinks that it's this mechanical crushing or bursting event. Well, that's like our natural experience with ice. If we leave something in the freezer, like a soda, we've all done that, right, what happens? Those things explode, So it's very natural for us to take that. Oh, if you put a soda in a freezer, it bursts. Why won't the same thing happened to a cell?
Wait, so can you go back a little bit and just explain again how the dessiccation works. What's actually happening there.
Yeah, water's leaving the cell, so as things freeze, the water outside the cell freezes, and as water turns to ice, they're making these little hexagonal structures ice cubes connecting to each other, and they don't want to interact with anything that isn't water, So everything that isn't water gets pushed out of that ice cube that's forming you mean between the cells? Correct, all the ice is outside the cell, and as that happens, solutes go up, so the sugars and salts increase in concentration around that cell. So all of a sudden, our cells are in salt water. It's like if you throw a grape in a container of salt and water. What does it do? It shrivels. It's a desiccation event.
Wait, it sucks the water out of the cells. Yes, oh, and then that kills the cell. Yeah.
If there's not enough water in a cell, the cell membranes will touch on the inside and that will cause bursting of the cell.
Okay, if you didn't follow that, that's okay. The main point is that the real problem with freezing yourself is that ice forms in the spaces between the cells, and ice only wants to have water molecules in it, so it pushes all the salts that are around and concentrates them very close to the cells, which makes them shrivel up and collapse. In other words, it's about cells suddenly being in a two salty environment. Now, the reason I was excited to talk to doctor Larson is that he happens to be one of the scientists who in twenty fourteen found something incredible about a type of frog called a wood frog.
So wood frogs are one of the most widely distributed amphibians in North America. They're all the way down in the Appalachians and Ohio, very far south, and they go all the way up to the Arctic Ocean. They're very far north and fairly far south. Wood frogs have a unique ability that they can survive with seventy percent of their body water frozen. This is really cool. We tried to overwinter some frogs over two different years, so we thought we would see a lot of die off. Our wood frogs survive up to seven months frozen, and they experienced temperatures down to negative sixteen celsius and none of them died.
Wow.
All the previous literature said, hey, wood frogs can survive maybe down to negative five degrees celsius for a couple weeks at most.
So you were expecting them just to perish during the experiment. But they survived.
If we're expecting some loss, we didn't see any. That was the impressive thing.
What happens when these frogs freeze? Is it rock solid? Is it squishy? What is it like?
It's pretty firm, it's like a frozen filet, frozen fish, anything like that. You might be able to bend it a little bit, but if you bend it too much, you're going to snap something off.
Wow. Okay, So wood frogs can survive being frozen at temperatures of minus eighteen degrees celsius or zero degrease fahrenheit for up to seven months. And they're not the only animals that can do it. Like your Larsen said that there are a few other species of frogs that can do it, some insects and a species of Siberian salamander which can go down as far as minus forty degrees celsius or minus forty degrees fahrenheit. But that's about it. All other animals, even hibernating bears or squirrels, if you freeze them, they're going to die. Even the fish that swim in the Arctic Ocean or the penguins that live in Antarctica, if we actually freeze them, they are not coming back. So now the question is what's their secret? How are these frogs surviving?
They get super sweet.
I know you like the frogs, doctor Larson, but what do you mean?
So what frogs do is they pack their cells with glucose, sugar and urea, the precursor to urine.
So what do you mean glucose like just regular sugar, like table sugar.
Yes, when they phrase, they increase their glucose concentrations one hundred times greater, Yes, one hundred There's enough sugar in that little wood frog liver for it to taste sweet to us. So these wood frogs actually have quite big livers, and within that liver we start glycogen glycogens, these long chains of sugar. It's what makes meat taste sweet. It's why people eat liver. But they convert all that glycogen into glucose and then pump it.
Throughout their body as fast as they can, and that gets into the cells throughout the body. Right, And then you said something triggers this mechanism. What is it? Just like a survival switch.
Yeah, and this is really unique for any animal that hibernates. Bears fatten up before winter, right, birds prepare for migration. Wood frogs wait, they react to winter instead of anticipate it. And by reacting they use specifically I'm about to freeze as their trigger. So they don't really do their winter prep until freezing begins.
H they're procrastinators like me very much. So how does increasing the sugar help us?
So we put that sugar in the cell to equal out the saltiness and solu concentrations outside the cell. So the inside of the cell no longer loses water. So they have to tolerate high levels of sugar in their cell, but they no longer have that water loss occurring, and it's that water loss that they're trying to prevent.
So wood frogs use a kind of anti freeze. They produce a lot of sugar in the liver and then the sugar fills up their cells and that creates a super concentration that prevents the cells from drying up when the ice forms around them. Now, the obvious next question is could this work on other animals maybe humans? Well, that's a fascinating adaptation that the frog has. Do you think something like that could work for other animals? Like if I take a rat and I injected with a bunch of sugar, would it survive being frozen?
Well, it won't survive the coma, the diabetic coma that we'd give it first. And again, it's a lot of sugar. If we in this tiny, little few gram frog. If we put that much sugar into an adult human, we would be in a diabetic coma a few times over. Animals can't tolerate high levels of glucose. It interferes with how proteins function and different things work in the cell, and it kills us.
What do the frogs do to survive that amount of sugar? How come day don't get diabetic shock?
Well, and they're very cold at this time. Their body temperature is right around freezing, so they don't have very high metabolism, and they don't do a lot when they're frozen. Now, part of the way it prevents that diabotic shock is also only making that glucose prior to freezing. And then also they are a little bit more tolerant to those high levels of glucose than say, we would be. If we were to inject the amount of sugar that's just in a frog, not even like the equivalent amount, just the amount that's in that animal, it would kill us.
Well, So being procrastinators saves them. Yes, So for the frogs, how long can they survive being frozen? Like if I take a bunch of frogs, freeze them, take them to Antarctica. Leave them there. You know, one hundred years later can someone come and defrost those frogs and they'll start hopping around.
So probably not that long because as ice forms, it recrystallizes and reforms. This is like freezer burn in your fridge is the same thing. It's ice crystals moving around. We know that wood frog can survive at least seven months frozen. We don't know how much longer pass that.
All right, So to recap, if you were a wood frog or a Siberian salamander, or if you have a high tolerance for extreme amounts of sugar, you could survive being cryogenically frozen. I assume you are none of those things. But fortunately scientists have been exploring a different way to get around the problem. What happens when ice forms inside of your body, and that's the technique being used right now by the organizations that freeze people. So when we come back, we're going to talk to someone who works at one of these facilities. We're going to ask him to explain this technology. So freeze don't go anywhere. We'll be right back. You're listening to science stuff. Welcome back. So if you do any research into the field of cryonics or freezing people. You'll probably run into the name Alcore. It's one of several organizations, some for profit, some nonprofit in the US and around the world that will freeze you for a fee. So for two hundred and twenty thousand dollars, Alcore will freeze your whole body, or for eighty thousand dollars they'll freeze just your head. Now I got to talk to someone who actually works at Alcore, and not just someone who works there. I talk to the person in charge. James Arrowood is the CEO and president of Alcore. He's an attorney by training and he started his position in twenty twenty two. I got to talk to him about what Alcore does, what technology they used to freeze people, and about the controversy surrounding the practice and business of giving people the hope of living in the future. So here's my interview with James Arrowood.
Hi, my name is James Errowood. I'm the president and CEO of al Core Life Extension Foundation. It's a nonprofit scientific research foundation, laboratory primarily in the space of long term organ preservation. When I say organs, we do preserve the whole human body. We preserve us the brain as well. So people often think it's something real, spooky, but at the end of the day, it's really what happens at every medical school in the country every day.
Would you describe as an industry or a field.
It's an emerging technology. So if you have a medical problem that can't be treated today, or if you need to travel to distant space and you need to pause metabolic activity in order to essentially live longer or survive longer periods of time, then chrotus uses ultraical temperatures, just like you see in nature to kind of pause the cellular breakdown process that occurs in the body.
What would you say is a vision or goal for al core you're aiming for, well.
In my lifetime, it's really about organ preservation. Look, we talk about the brain, we talk about the whole body as kind of an aspirational goal down the road. But at the end of the day, you have to do a pinky or you have to do a kidney before you ever get to reviving the brain. You know, before you ever the head transplant thing that people fixate on, which I understand it's morbid and it's sallacious and It gets a lot of attention, but on the day to day that's not really what we're doing. We're doing these regular experiments that involve the molecules of cells and what that means, and really that's chemistry and it's biochemistry.
Right, take me a step back. What's the goal here? We're trying to preserve what would say.
You'reserve for organ banking in my lifetime, that's what I care about, because okay, look, if you've ever had a friend or lost somebody who needed a kidney and or had to be on an organ transplant waiting list, it's a crapshoot and it's purely logistics that's the problem. Meaning, if you have a match in New York and you're in LA. Okay, so somebody dies in New York, that's a donor match for you. You've got about six hours to get yourself into the transplant hospital to get scrubbed out for surgery. You get the surgeons together, get that organ on a plane from New York to LA and hope that it's viable enough by the time they cut you open. Now, what if your perfect matches in London and you're in LA. You're not getting it you're done. It's not going to happen. You're gonna die too far, right, it's too far. It's a logistics issue that's a little bit different than what we're talking about. What we're talking about is imagine a world where organs could be stored like yoused to wear a steak, meaning it could be in the freezer for four weeks or six weeks. All right. Well, in the meantime, particularly with advances in artificial intelligence and supercomputing, you could probably do neo perfect matches, meaning you can actually match DNA to DNA kind of thing. And I'm not smart enough, I'm not a scientist, and we employ a lot of really good scientists and medical professionals, but there's ways that you can actually kind of perfectly match this stuff. The ultimate goal is that you could pause people metabolically, and that has to do with space travel. You need that to go to distant space. That's why all these space guys are into this. If you read about it, you hear about you know a number of the world's billionaires, some of them may be confidential members of Alcore that they're interested in this because you're gonna have to pause your metabolism meaning aging.
So billionaires are signing up for this. Notably Peter Thiel has confirmed that he's an all core member. Now, what does it mean to be a member?
Right, crowd preservation member. So you agree that we get to crowd preserve your body. You become part of the experiment as it were. Okay, that's and the PaperWorks very explicit, you know when people are like, oh, you're full of people. You're doing no for not you have to sign sixty plus pages okay, of tons of lawyer language and other language that explicitly says this is experimental. This may never work for you. So if you are convinced you know that this is going to work for you, don't sign up. I mean, it's a lottery ticket. And in terms of it ever working, we don't know if it's going to work. We think that the science someday absolutely should work, meaning you're not violating the laws of physics by doing this.
Let's say that I want to be a member. What's the process? Because I have to do it while I'm alive.
Right, generally speaking, there's some post more on, but really, ideally you want to know ahead of time, and the way we do that is it. For instance, you have a terminal disease or terminal illness and you're a member. We actually have what's called a watch list, and then we have a standby team, and our team goes anywhere in the world and it's medical professionals, it's former Navy seals, military special forces. What. Yeah, they're training you know, the logistics man. They're the best in the world at it. So we're just using the military training to move bodies and move people around quickly.
Meaning if I'm in London, I have a terminal disease, I want to be a member because I want to believe in your mission.
You're already signed up.
Yeah, I'm also thinking, well, I'm going to die anyways, maybe if I freeze my body there's some glimmer of hope out there, and there's.
Value to science. If it's if you never come back, it's valuable because maybe your grandkids could come back someday because you were one of the people that you know help Oh right, right, it's called legacy. It's called legacy. Yeah, so you want to be legacy part of this. But yeah, we will send a team out to be bedside. Now, a lot of hospitals don't know what we do, so they're they're real hesitant about that. So if we can't be bedside, we'll actually be in the hospital parking lot. And as soon as you're declared den we don't declare death. We don't do medical services. We don't touch somebody until you know they've been declared dead. And then once their body's released to us, which ideally is within minutes, then they start that process. Yeah, there's a whole we have like a cardiothoracic surgeon. We have what are called T triple c R eighteen deltas, which is like a trauma surgeon. But the reason that's relevant is they can access the crowdits. They know how to access and perfuse the chemical very quickly.
Right, you're doing that maybe right after the person.
Yeah, you're starting lines as soon as possible. Yeah, it's why then it's.
And then you fly the person to your facility in a.
Reg's right, that's right. And we're actually exploring opening a facility and sweed in Europe for European folks. Anytime you can cut the logistics the distance, then that's going to help you know better outcomes. But yeah, so you sign up, you have to sign a whole bunch of papers, you have to get them notarized, and it's a whole process because look, when people sign up, you're actually signing up as an anatomical donation. This is very well, you know, people don't understand how this works, and I'm trying to educate the public because I think it's really for decades the public wasn't understanding and they were really misunderstanding what was going on.
So those are the basics of alcore and the way they pause or cryogenically freeze people is using a phenomenon called vitrification. Basically, they replace all the water in your body with a special solution that prevents ice from forming. Here's how James Arrowood explains it. You used a different word, vitor fix. What does that mean?
Okay, So vitrification is the difference between cloudy ice and clear ice. In vitrification, you're actually removing a bunch of the water and you're using it almost a jelly. Like you said, it's kind of a gel like consistency. It's a very viscous, almost syrapy chemical something called polyethylene glycol and that's a glycolic sugar that's basically from alcohol. You know, it's not the good kind that you drink or anything like that. It's not good for you.
Wait, meaning you take a kidney or body and you replace the water with the special goofy chemical.
Right, the chemical pushes out the water. You have to kind of what we call step ramp, so you actually use a chemical at a lower kind of density or a lower concentration of this chemical and you can kind of ramp it up. The actual process that we do is extraordinarily controlled. There's a team of people. There's a scientist and there's medical people. You know, they're all around a body, or they're all around ahead, you know, if it's just the head. And we have computers and graphs that in real time are showing the concentrations. And we have these little tiny laser beam modules. I mean, it is science fiction y in a way, right, And as laser kind of shoots out into the fluid and measures the concentration as it's going, and then it ramps up very slowly to replace the water, so like pushes the water out and replaces it with this jelly like chemical that gets more and more concentrated, and it takes hours, and it's going in through It's almost like when you get an iv so it's getting perfused through the body with a whole team of people around you for hours, and then there's actually ways to tell when the body has kind of reached a saturation point, so then you can go into liquid nitrotal.
Well, well, tell me about this liquid. It's special because when you cool it, when you put it in the liquid nitrogen, it doesn't crystallize like water. Right, So this antifreezer cryer protected agent that mister Arrowood is talking about, it is one of several special chemicals, usually sugar alcohols like glycerl or polyethylene glycol that have been used since the nineteen fifties to freeze things like sperm or even human embryos for in vitro fertilization or IVF. And the idea is that if you cool these chemicals down to really low temperatures in just the right way, they don't turn into ice, they don't crystallize, they just turn into an amorphous solid like glass. So technically, if you're someone who was born from a frozen embryo and in vitro fertilization, then you have survived being cryogenically frozen. But this stuff is expensive. How expensive?
The chemicals we're talking about are unbelievably expensive. So for your body, how tall are you about?
I'll succeed. Yeah, yeah, what did.
You look like? You're probably about one seventy.
Five I don't know, yeah, exactly that, I'll davor.
Okay. The point of it is, you're gonna cost me, meaning Alcor, if we cover recover your body and you sign up and your whole body patient member, you're going to cost us probably forty to seventy thousand dollars just for the price of the chemical, not including any of the procedure, any of the machines, any of the.
Staff, or the long term storage or the long.
Term the liquid nitrogen bleed off rate over two hundred years per cubic square foot has to be calculated for you, and it is wild, right, So the costs of this thing are just unreal. But that's emerging technology, you know when you think about it, like the first Tesla roadster was one hundred and fifty thousand dollars and it only went you know, I don't know, ninety bals or something per charge. Yeah, that's what science is and that's why it costs so much. When people sign up, we crowdfund it because we're not at university. We're not getting money from the government every day to keep the lights on, and it's expensive. So it's about two hundred and twenty thousand dollars for whole body. Most people don't have two hundred and twenty thousand. I don't have a spare of two hundred plus thousand to do this. Everybody who signs up we fund it with life insurance, so I actually just as sign a portion of life insurance that I already have that goes to outport to cover the costs.
Yeah, I know what you're thinking. People are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars from their life insurance to get their bodies frozen. That gets controversial. I'll ask mister Arrowood about this in a second, But first I was curious to know why we're able to freeze things like human embryos or sperm, but we can't freeze something more complex, like a human body or a brain. Here's what he said.
It's a question of scale. It works at the molecular cellular level, the embryonic stage level, the egg level, the sperm level.
Right, I mean there are people who are alive today and walking around that were frozen as embryos or eggs.
Considerable number of people now and the next generation will be even more. But here's the important thing from my chair is that those people are not zombies. You can't tell the difference that anybody knows of. You know, you got people sitting next to you at the restaurant that have fully functioning brains that go to university, get degrees. They're really smart people, and they were born via ibs. They were at one point in their existence, they were and liquid nitrogen. Right, Oh, it works. And the hard part is is as you get to multi cellular structures that are beyond the embryonic stage, so an organ that has to function and all these cells have to kind of line up perfectly. And you know, if you have a damage in one layer of that organ, well that damage may you know, destroy the whole function of the organ. You look at the brain. Your brain they think has billions or trillions of what are called neural synaptic connections, these protein bridges almost like webbing. Now, imagine a spider web. How many fracture points could there be in a spider web a lot, a lot, any number, and then you multiply that times a billion, that's your brain. So freezing the brain or really vitrifying the brain presents any number of greater challenges than doing an embryo.
The brain is very fragile, right Like, it's like this huge webbing of super thin connections that are basically encased in jelly, right.
Yes, and you want to keep that jelly in a motle that's going to cause the least amount of potential cracking or damage to those structures.
So things get more complicated as you go from individual cells to organs, but there has been progress. In twenty twenty three, a group of scientists and engineers from the University of Minnesota publish the paper where they showed that they could take the kidney from a rat, freeze it using these anti freeze glucose alcohols, keep the kidney in the freezer for one hundred days, thaw it out, put it in another rat, and then have that rat survive the kidney still worked.
Now.
Their secret here is pretty cool. The scientists and engineers mixed in a bunch of iron nanoparticles or iron filings with the anti freeze and then when it was time to defrost the kidney, they use basically a magnet to vibrate those iron filings so that the kidney heated up and thaw it out evenly. Now, a brain is much more complicated than a kidney, as mister Arrowood pointed out. So a little later in the program, we're going to talk to a neuroscientist who's going to give us his opinion on whether a brain can be frozen. But first I wanted to know how mister Aarrowood would respond to the claims the scientists out there who say that freezing a human body and having it survive is impossible. Here's what he said.
Look, any emerging technology, it requires visionaries. It requires people who fifty years ago thought what if we could do this, And of course everybody says, no, no, that's crazy, that science fiction. And then they go out and do it. And then all of a sudden you have something that everybody thought was impossible. And I'll give you an example. This device right here, this is a cell phone. I mean, you could watch Star Trek. So the best Hollywood science fiction writers in the universe could not envision a future where you could actually send a video in real time in Pakistan or wherever in real time. So it's those things that people don't envision that takes one or two visionaries, usually scientists in the back room somewhere that you often don't even hear about. So the people that are out there that say this can never be done, good, don't ever try it, don't sign up, don't be involved. But don't sit there and tell me that something I'm doing or that we're trying to do that doesn't violate the laws of science or physics can never be done because that just means you don't have the vision for it. And that's fine if you've got full disclosure. People sign up and want to do this, that's a question of free will. That's a question of signing up for something knowing what they're doing, knowing why they want to do it. They want a legacy. They know that they might be that first heart transplant patient who's only going to live two weeks if it never works at all. They know that, Okay, but they did it. That guy who did that, how many lives did he save? For people who have now had a heart transplant that are living decades. Somebody had to take that hit, and that person stood up and said, Okay, I'm gonna take that hit. This is an adult's ultimate last wish. It is their free will, last wish to be preserved in this way and to contribute to the science in this way.
All right, when we come back, we're gonna talk to my friend and neuroscientist, doctor Dwayne Godwin, and he's gonna tell us whether he thinks the brain is the ultimate limit of what we can freeze, and whether he would ever freeze his own brain. So stay with us, you're listening to science stuff. Will be right back, Welcome back, all right. So, if you are a special kind of frog or a Siberian salamander, or have an unnatural tolerance for high levels of sugar, you can survive being cryogenically frozen. And scientists have apparently been able to freeze and reactivate a rad kidney, which is very promising for maybe doing this with human organs in the future. But the big obstacle to freezing the whole body seems to be freezing the brain. So the weigh in on this idea is my friend, neuroscientist, doctor Dwyane Godwin. Doctor Godwin is a professor of translational neuroscience at Wake Forest University and doctor Godwin and I recently wrote a book together called Out of Your Mind, which is a great introduction to brain signs. You should check it out. But I asked Dayne to give us some context about the possibility of freezing brain cells. This is what he said.
Maybe it's good to start with what happens to brain cells when the heart stops, so you know, if someone dies or if their heart is stopped artificially, you know what is going on. So what we know about that is that brain cells can start dying within about three to five minutes, and there are some exceptions that I'll get to. Damage starts at about six minutes. What happened to this brain cells a lot of things. So cells start to self destruct, so there are things called program cell death molecules that actually start taking the brain apart. There's also this aspect of where brain cells will start to take on water and essentially explode. So about ten minutes in without oxygen must brain cells have suffered a catastrophic or really severe minute damage. Now the exception of that is temperature, because temperature can affect that timeline significantly.
Where if you cool the brain down.
You can extend the window of survival by slowing down all this cellular metabolism.
But it seems like that's a big problem for this cryogenics technology. First of all, that once your heart stops, you only have a few minutes before your brain cells starts dying. And so any sort of scheme to replace all the liquids in your body, that's going to be a challenge, right because your brain is going to start to die basically.
Yeah, yeah, So if you think about it, it's a massive problem. You know, we have eighty six billion neurons, and it's not like you can just dip our huge human brains into a vat of these chemicals and it will preserve them. What has to happen is that you have to do perfusion where you're actually using the arteries and veins to actually get the cryopreservative into these cells. And so that's not going to happen immediately. I died right now, Even if I were ready, it would be probably many hours before I would even be in a position to be able to get perfused with these preservatives that would store my brain. Yeah, that would mean that I would have some significant brain damage before I was preserved.
Yeah, Or like if you were going off into space on a long journey, you'd have to stop your heart and you would only have a few minutes before your brain still start dying.
That's right, And then you would have to get this stuff in. That would have to happen almost perfectly for a brain to survive this process intact.
Well, let's say that somehow we're able to replace the water and quickly enough before cells start dying. Do you think the brain would survive that?
I think in principle it could. So there are these things called brain organoids that are essentially a little tiny brain like things that are made from stem cells. And there's been some success in freezing those kinds of complex structures and then bringing them back and demonstrating that they still have function. So there's some signs that this sort of thing could be feasible. Whether that means it's practical is another issue.
Can you talk to us a little bit about the fragility of brain connections and brain webs.
So the other thing about the brain is each individual synapse is really complex and a little world onto itself. There are literally thousands of proteins in a single synapse, so we're not only talking about damage to cells, but you could also be doing damage to these delicate structures and proteins that help make up individual synapses. So it's not really clear that all of that would survive, and there are tens of thousands of these in a standard neuron. Generally speaking, it is a very delicate system. So yes, you could definitely see a scenario where cryopreservation can preserve maybe ninety nine percent of your brain cells, but there could still be massive changes based on per of this delicate balance of proteins at the synapse. So simply having something that looks like a brain, it doesn't necessarily mean that you have a functioning brain.
I see, what about the thawing process. Let's say I freeze the brain and I thought it out. Can the brain just kind of kick start back up like a computer just turned back on?
Not really. You know, the same concern with suddenly trying to freeze everything at once and being sure that the metabolism is adapting appropriately to cryo preservation would be true in reverse. Sell death and sell stress is very real and brain cells need time to adapt to this new temperature.
Yeah, Well, last question, Dwayne, Let's say you are at the end of your life, would you freeze your brain?
I don't think so. There was a time when I thought, yeah, that would be cool. But you know, part of it is philosophical. What does it mean that I continue?
Me?
Continuing means a lot to me. But would I want to cont you if I thought I was going to be eighty percent of me? You know, I think that's what it boils down to. So you know, if you ask me this question in ten years and the process is worked out, I might give you a different answer. But as it is right now, I would say, you know, we're not quite ready, and you've got to be very careful because it's possible to get in love with that concept, the idea of extending our existence, you know, possibly forever. But one of the things we actually talked about in the book, what does that do to our society if all of the old people just hang around forever with their old ideas about how to do things, is that actually good for us as a society? You know, I don't have the answer to that. I'm just simply asking the question.
So there you have it. The answer to the question can you survive being cryogenically frozen is that someone us already have. If you were born from IVF, then you were frozen at some point. And it seems possible that we might be able to freeze organs like kidneys or livers for things like organ banking and organ transplants. But the question of whether you can freeze a whole grown up body seems to hinge on the question of whether you can ever freeze and successfully thaw out the brain. It doesn't seem like it's possible right now, but there are people working on it, so for now, if you have dreams of traveling to distant stars or living in the future, you might want to put those dreams on ice. Thanks for joining us, See you next time You've been listening to Science Stuff production of iHeartRadio written and produced by me or Hitcham, executive producer Jerry Rowland, an audio engineer and mixer Ksey peckrom and you can follow me on social media. Just search for PhD Comics and the name of your favorite platform. Be sure to subscribe to Sign Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts, and please tell your friends We'll be back next Wednesday with another episode
