Alex of The Rich color is from the Temple of Consort
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Freezing the human body for the future is a common setting in science fiction works.
In reality, although there is no Captain America super serum, "Frozen Man" actually exists.
They also hope to break the shackles of time, replace the "stop" button of life with the "pause" button, and resurrect it one day in the future.
Of course, the frozen man is certainly not packed in the freezer layer (Doge) of the refrigerator, nor is he lying on the bottom of the sea like the US team, but is packed in a liquid nitrogen jar like below.
The temperature of liquid nitrogen is controlled at about minus 196 ° C. Inside the jar is a complete human body, but there is also a separate head (yes).
The owners of these bodies and heads felt that in thirty or fifty years the technology might be developed enough to bring them back to life.
So you might as well plan ahead and store yourself first, even if you only have a head:
Because within 4 to 6 minutes of clinical death, brain cells do not die in large quantities. In the distant future, if you can really "resurrect", it will be good to connect with a new body or robot.
("I think, therefore I am" well~)
However, although there were frozen people in 1966, unfortunately, more than 50 years have passed, and they have not yet waited for the opportunity to be reborn, and some even worse.
The current situation of the first batch of frozen people
The concept of cryonics was formally introduced in 1962, and experiments soon began.
The earliest method of preservation was to dry and cold the remains, and then put it into a dewar bottle containing liquid nitrogen.
In order to better preserve the head and make it the coldest and most stable, the person will be placed upside down with his head down.
Although there is a vacuum protective layer on the outside of the bottle, eventually liquid nitrogen may be vaporized due to room temperature transfer, so it should be replenished at regular intervals.
The world's first case of human freezing was a middle-aged woman from Los Angeles.
Her body was put directly into a liquid nitrogen bottle after 2 months of embalming. But a year later, her relatives took her to the ground.
Immediately after, the world's first truly frozen man was arranged: James Bedford, an American billionaire who was not willing to die of cancer.
Why is he the first person? Mainly more scientifically handled, James Bedford was frozen immediately after death, and the blood was pumped away and infused with cryoprotective fluid.
The man in charge of freezing James Bedford was named Nelson, and he "took a lot of orders" and made a lot of frozen people.
However, one of the bottles containing three people broke down, and when Nelson opened it, he found that the people inside had already thawed.
Another father had Nelson freeze his six-year-old son, and the bottles were kept and maintained by the father himself. Perhaps because the freezing speed was too fast, the boy's body eventually cracked, so it was thawed and buried.
For a variety of reasons, including his own irresponsibility, Nelson's frozen people, except for James Bedford, all failed, and eventually he declared bankruptcy.
In another place, in a cemetery in New Jersey, USA, some people are also doing this business, but they are basically "completely destroyed".
Mainly because the bottle used was poorly designed, the vacuum layer did not work, resulting in the remains being repeatedly frozen and thawed, sticking to the bottle wall.
To the death, the staff had to wear ventilators to scrape out the wreckage and bury it.
In addition to the above reasons, there are also some frozen people who ultimately fail because their families regret that they are unwilling to pay for maintenance, or they are ordered to stop by the court for freezing against the will of the deceased.
As mentioned earlier, James Bedford was the only one of the first to be frozen (before 1973), mainly because he has been carefully kept and maintained by his family.
About 15 years later, James Bedford was taken over by the founder of Alcor and is still in freezing to this day (originally scheduled to thaw in 2017).
Alcor is one of the few cryonics companies in the world, founded in 1972.
Alcor has developed specialized processes and equipment to do this, charging $200,000 (about 1.35 million yuan) for full body freezing and only freezing the brain for $80,000 (about 540,000 yuan), and has frozen a total of 200+ customers so far.
Is it true science or a black joke?
Although hundreds of people around the world have undergone cryonics and thousands have signed post-mortem freezing agreements, the technology has sparked a lot of controversy.
There is an argument that the freezer technique is just a strange intersection of scientific thinking and wishful thinking.
It is said to be somewhat scientific because humans have mastered the technology of cryopreserving embryos and small tissues; It is mysterious because the human body is much more complex than individual tissues and embryos, and the scene of freezing corpses is somewhat frightening.
It is true that there are bears, snakes, forest frogs and other animals in nature that can hibernate, during which time their breathing, metabolism and heart rate will slow down, and their body temperature will sometimes even drop to the same level as the outside temperature. When the spring flowers bloom, they are back alive and jumping.
But everyone knows that people cannot hibernate. Because compared with hibernating animals, the human body lacks some functions:
The human heart will have a contractile response to calcium, below a certain temperature, the heart can not remove excess calcium, too much calcium will lead to cardiac arrest. Specifically, when the core temperature drops below 28 ° C, the heart stops working; The hearts of hibernating animals continue to beat even at 1°C.
In addition, the whole human body is particularly difficult to preserve, because our head (most) structure is fragile, and organs such as the heart cannot be cryopreserved.
Without oxygen at room temperature, the brain dies within minutes. While the body may be reactivated, people who are "alive" tend to be in a permanent vegetative state.
Although the current freezing technology is much more advanced, under the laws of nature, the tissues and organs of the human body will quickly decompose and deteriorate after death, and even change when frozen. This can be associated with the food in the refrigerator freezer, which will still spoil over time.
And if you want to "resurrect", in addition to the freezing process, you need to thaw, which is also a very difficult problem.
Just like Alcor, in a chance, it found that on the surface, these frozen people only have some cracks in their skin.
Once the thaw is complete, the situation becomes quite bad - the flesh is cracked from the skin to the internal organs, the bones, blood vessels, intestines, heart and other organs are broken and broken... Basically nothing is complete.
One of them thawed more slowly and had fewer rifts, but eventually its internal organs were the most damaged.
(The picture is too bloody, so I won't put it here)
At the time, Alcor said:
Repairing these damages may require very, very advanced medical techniques to be done at a molecular level.
This makes the hope of the frozen man's resurrection even more slim.
Speaking of which, emergency freezing to save living organisms is more reliable**.
The therapy, dubbed Cryonic, promises to buy patients more time to operate.
In 1999, someone excreted the dog's blood, injected it into a cold, salty liquid, and then changed back to warm blood an hour later, and the dog basically survived after an electric shock, and there was no brain damage.
In 2006, a Japanese man named Mitsutaka Uchikoshi was killed in the mountains, and the low temperature made him "dormant", lying for 24 days and being found in the hospital, he miraculously came back to life without any sequelae.
In 2016, doctors at the University of Maryland in the United States began studying emergency freezing to save the lives of people who suffered knife or gunshot wounds.
Due to rapid blood loss, these patients go into cardiac arrest, leaving the surgeon with only a few minutes to stop the bleeding and to recover the heartbeat as soon as possible. In this case, the patient survival rate is only between 2% and 5%.
So the researchers hope to slow down the metabolic process by freezing and buy more time for surgery.
Since 2019, 10 patients have undergone cryo-operated surgery. The researchers used cold normal saline to control the human body temperature below 10 ° C, so that the human body entered a "dormant" state.
△ Source: CNET; During surgery
However, the full results of the trial will not be available until 2023.
There are already 12 frozen people in China
Over the years, the mainland has also frozen people, the youngest of whom is only 13 years old.
The first case of frozen people in the mainland was the children's literature writer Du Hong, who was also one of the editors and reviewers of "The Three-Body Problem". In 2015, Du Hong died of illness, and her head was saved by Alcor income, and the cost was 120,000 US dollars (about 810,000 yuan).
Her family signed an agreement with Alcor that 50 years later, science and technology would thaw her head and rebuild her body to help her come back to life.
In 2017, the mainland had the first person to freeze the local exhibition Wenlian. Researchers at the Shandong Yinfeng Life Science Research Institute are responsible for freezing her body.
Although the prospects for cryosloving are unclear, as mentioned earlier, people have mastered the technology of freezing embryos and small tissues.
The world's longest human frozen-age embryo has been on record for 28 years: frozen in 1992, thawed in 2020, and finally managed to become a cute baby girl.
△ Source: Insider, photographed by the mother of baby girl Molly
Admittedly, freezing embryos and freezing people are not the same thing, but technology has been evolving. Some of the forward ideas seem mysterious now, but maybe they will come true one day in the future.
Just like when Verne wrote about the Nautilus in the twenty thousand miles under the sea, everyone didn't know what a submarine was; Today, manned submarines have become something that everyone knows.
Perhaps the bridge section of the resurrection of the Chinese and American teams after 70 years of freezing under the sea can also be reflected in reality on his day.
Reference Links:
1、https://bigthink.com/the-future/cryonics-horror-stories/
2、https://www.cnet.com/pictures/frozen-in-time-inside-alcor-life-extension-the-facility-preserving-the-dead-through-cryonics/14/
3、https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcor_Life_Extension_Foundation
4、 www.cnet.com/science/suspended-animation-induced-in-humans-for-the-first-time/
5、https://www.cnet.com/science/biology/features/chasing-ghosts-unlocking-the-mysteries-of-human-hibernation/
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