The boy is 10 years old, but born 30 years ago.
For about 20 years, his tiny body has been frozen in liquid nitrogen. Now he is slowly thawed and placed on the operating table, where doctors remove the brain tumor that is no longer incurable. The operation succeeds and the boy goes on with his life as if it had never been shut down.
People have dreamed of cheating death for centuries, and some scientists believe it will one day be possible to cure all diseases. The American organization alcor therefore offers to freeze people until their disease can be cured, as in the example presented above.
There are even researchers who think that the cells of our body do not have to wear out at all, so that we do not get sick but can live forever.
There are already medical treatments that can considerably extend the life of animals, and animals have even been frozen and thawed alive again.
But whether the promising results can also be achieved with humans is by no means certain, and there are also ethical dilemmas. Because the chance of a cure in the future is greatest if the patient is frozen alive.
200 people frozen
Alcor was founded in 1972 by American aerospace engineer Fred Chamberlain. He is long dead, but not gone. He lies frozen in a cylinder filled with liquid nitrogen in the hope that one day he will thaw and be brought back to life.
Cryonics, as we call the freezing of humans, draws inspiration from animals, such as the Canadian forest frog. When the water freezes in winter, the frog’s entire abdominal cavity becomes a clump of ice and its internal organs freeze – heart and breathing stop completely. But when the ice melts in the spring sun, the animal breathes in just as easily.
Some 200 people have already been frozen in Alcor’s metal cylinders in Scottsdale, Arizona, after dying of an incurable disease.
As soon as the decision to freeze is made, a whole team of doctors and specialists arrives to watch over the dying for up to a week. As soon as the heart stops beating and the patient is pronounced dead, the experts get to work.
The body cells are still alive and the patient would theoretically regain consciousness if the heart was restarted. The experts maintain the situation by artificially continuing blood and breathing while preparing the body for the freezing process.
When freezing, the fluid in the body usually forms sharp ice crystals that damage the cells, and to prevent this, doctors replace the blood with a type of antifreeze, which also supplies the body with oxygen.
They then place the patient in an ice bath and progressively cool the body in dry ice and then in liquid nitrogen until the temperature reaches -196°C after almost a week.
In that cold, all chemical reactions and biological processes have stopped, and the state of the body remains unchanged for hundreds or even thousands of years.
Alcor promises its customers to keep the body frozen indefinitely, but nothing else. The company makes no secret of the fact that there is still no way to thaw a frozen body and bring it back to life.
A major challenge is that all parts of the body must thaw at the same rate, otherwise the tissue will burst due to the temperature differences. A body that is simply taken out of the liquid nitrogen will thaw much faster on the outside than on the inside.
In 2017 however, the University of Minnesota developed an entirely new freezing and thawing procedure that can solve this problem.
Before freezing, the tissue is placed in a bath of magnetic iron nanoparticles. The particles are so small that they can penetrate even the smallest cracks and cavities, firmly adhering to all surfaces of the tissue, both inside and out.
To thaw the tissue, it is placed in a magnetic field that heats all the nanoparticles at the same rate. Because the nanoparticles are almost everywhere, the tissue will thaw evenly.
The researchers demonstrated the method on a 4 millimeter thick vein, which was frozen and thawed again without damage. It’s one of the largest pieces of tissue ever thawed intact, and while it’s a long way to an entire human body, the magnetic nanoparticles offer hope.
Nanobots repair the body
But when a body is thawed, it will still be as lifeless as when it was frozen. So to conquer death, the disease that killed someone must also be curable.
In time, scientists will probably develop new, effective treatments for cancer and dementia, for example. However, death can have a variety of causes, so some patients will have to wait a long time in the freezer.
In addition, the temporary death will have caused damage to the brain and other organs and cells, which will have to recover. And there are no viable solutions for this yet, but who knows, nanorobots may offer opportunities.
Nanorobots often consist of only a few molecules, such as proteins or DNA, arranged in such a way that they form gripping arms that can, for example, grasp a blood clot. In clinical medicine, they mainly deliver drugs to certain cells.
Nanorobots and new drugs could even win the life-or-death race, making freezing obsolete because people are cured – or even don’t get sick at all.
Controversial, self-taught aging researcher Aubrey de Gray says he has found seven biomedical strategies that he believes allow us to live forever.
Two of them involve ways to activate the immune system to find and destroy damaged cells. Two other strategies clean up the cells or make them produce less harmful waste products.
Aubrey de Gray has no concrete idea of how to put these strategies into practice, but other researchers do.
Live people in the freezer
Researchers are working to slow down free radicals: by-products of the cells’ ‘power plants’, which pollute the cells. Animal experiments show that medicines can reduce the energy production of the cells and thus their pollution so much that the animals live 25 to 60 percent longer.
In 2019 molecular biologist Maria Blasco developed a method to lengthen the telomeres in mice. These are the ends of the chromosomes, which shorten slightly with each cell division.
When telomeres reach a certain length, cells become sick and the whole body gradually weakens, which may be one of the main reasons why we age.
Blasco’s test mice with extended telomeres lived 24 percent longer, were leaner, had lower cholesterol levels and were less likely to develop cancer and diabetes.
Now animal experiments are not just applicable to humans, and even if disease and aging are one day eradicated, there are of course ethical and practical problems with freezing people.
For example, the chance of a future cure is greatest if people with an incurable disease are frozen before they die from their disease. And putting living people in the freezer isn’t easy, of course.
But the main question is whether we can continue to postpone death in practice by eliminating one cause of death after another.
The human body is not built for eternal life. According to skeptics, every body part has a natural expiration date. Exceeding this can cause diseases that we have never known before.
However, the 200 people in Alcor’s freezers are betting that science will one day conquer death. The chances are small, but the jackpot is the opposite: eternal life.
