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According to the British "Daily Mail" reported on May 15, Chinese scientists have broken through the key cryonics technology, so that the freezing and thawing process of the brain is not destroyed, which may make the resurrection of the cryonics for decades a reality, so far thousands of customers have been frozen in multiple cryonics laboratories around the world, the first person frozen in 1967 has been "sleeping" in the liquid nitrogen tank for 57 years, when will it wake up?
Chinese scientists have made a breakthrough in cryonics: the most important brain has been protected
The "Daily Mail" reported that human beings have always had a dream of eternal life, while making breakthroughs in medicine, a group of scientists have moved "crooked thoughts", and the physical opening of "cryonics" will freeze the rich who cannot cure the disease at present, but the damage of the human body in low temperature is also an unsolvable problem, but the technology that Chinese scientists have broken through a few days ago will solve the problems in the freezing and thawing process, and it is expected that the cryonics technology will be truly practical!
Cell Paper: A Breakthrough for Chinese Scientists
The paper, titled "Effective cryopreservation of human brain tissue and neural organoids," was published in the May 13 issue of Cell, and was written by Professor Zhicheng Shao, a neuroscientist at Harvard University who is currently working at Fudan University in Shanghai, China, and has developed a novel called MEDY A complex chemical mixture that protects neurons from damage when frozen.
According to the paper, the brain is the most critical organ of the human body, and a large number of brain slices and other samples are needed to study brain diseases, but brain preservation has been a problem for a long time, one is the high cost of long-term storage, and the other is the problem of damage to brain neurons during the preservation process, which makes some studies have to use fresh brain tissue, which greatly limits their application in biomedical research.
The paper said that in the field of medical research, most of the preservation technologies that require organs and tissues have made breakthroughs, such as embryonic stem cells, gametes, embryos, glioblastoma organoids, endometrial organs and other cryopreservation technologies have made breakthroughs and made great contributions to scientific research, but the complex structure of the brain as a nerve cell is easily destroyed in freezing, which not only causes a significant increase in the cost of preservation, but also leads to a high threshold for brain research.
Professor Shaw has developed a method for cryopserving various brain organoids or human brain tissues using a compound using methylcellulose, ethylene glycol, DMSO, and Y27632 (known as MEDY) without destroying nerve cell structure or functional activity after cryopreservation, thawing, and study.
According to the paper, after the use of this cryoprotectant, the sample remained active after one and a half years of cryopreservation, and immunostaining showed that the progenitor cells and neurons were well preserved, and most of the progenitor cells were proliferating after thawing, and the test results showed that MEDY effectively protected the brain tissue from being destroyed during the freezing process.
According to the paper, MEDY can be applied to multiple brain region-specific organoids, including dorsal/ventral forebrain, spinal cord, optic vesicular brain, and brain organoids derived from epilepsy patients. In addition, MEDY can also cryopreserve human brain tissue samples, and the pathological features can still be preserved after thawing. Transcriptome analysis showed that MEDY could protect synaptic function and inhibit the endoplasmic reticulum-mediated apoptosis pathway. MEDY is capable of storing a wide range of neural organoids and living brain tissues at scale and reliably, and will facilitate a wide range of research, medical applications, and drug screening.
Cold Text: Describes a fiery future
If there is no foreshadowing at the beginning of this article, it is estimated that many netizens will not know what this technology means, because it seems that this is a brain tissue research technology, I don't know if you have found such a description:
The translated meaning of this sentence is: "Immunostaining shows that progenitor cells and neurons are well maintained and most progenitor cells proliferate after thawing", and the validation time in the paper is one and a half years, and the neurons are not maintained well after thawing and can proliferate after thawing, which means that the brain tissue remains viable! If it is used for cryonics, the possibility of resurrection in the future will be greatly increased!
The difficulty of cryonics is not great, the use of liquid nitrogen to freeze the human body, as long as the leaked liquid nitrogen is replenished in time, it can be stored for thousands or even tens of thousands of years is no problem, but if this is the case, it is undoubtedly a corpse that is preserved, because in the process of freezing, a large amount of water in the body will expand after freezing, causing the cells to rupture, and finally a large amount of cell fluid will flow out after thawing and completely die.
Therefore, the most urgent need for cryonics is to avoid such embarrassing problems, otherwise what to do when frozen? How much is this different from freezing a piece of meat? Of course, the experts who engage in freezing are not fools, and in the early days of cryonics, a compound called dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) was used to protect the human body, and this liquid would be used instead of blood throughout the body, and the arteries would enter and exit the veins to ensure that all tissues in the human body were filled with this protective agent.
This compound is a small molecule that penetrates into the cell and lowers the freezing point of water, and hydration occurs in the cell, which increases the viscosity of the solution, thereby reducing the formation of ice crystals, and enters extremely low temperatures (such as the temperature of liquid nitrogen), and the high concentration of refrigerant solidifies in an ultra-low temperature environment to form an irregular vitrified solid, which preserves the normal molecular and ion distribution in the liquid state, so it can play a protective role when vitrification occurs in the cell, simply put, it prevents the formation of ice crystals in the cell during the cooling process, This reduces the damage to cells and tissues during the cooling process.
Unfortunately, dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) is not a suitable blood substitute, it is toxic, the human body needs to be protected to access, and it may interact with the hydrophobic group of the protein, resulting in protein denaturation, and it has also been shown to be vascular, hepatorenal toxicity, and it has also been shown to be vasculotoxic and hepatorenal toxic.
Therefore, it seems that the human body treated with dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) seems to be a fairly advanced corpse embalming treatment technology, and the effect is not much different from formalin! After the 1990s, cryonics used glycerin, ethylene-glycerin and other vitrified human body protection, which is much more reliable than dimethyl sulfoxide. But these compounds do not seem to have as much effect on protecting brain tissue neurons as the human body, just imagine, the brain was good before the human body was frozen, and it was thawed after freezing for decades, and as a result, the whole body was "alive", but the brain died, is there any point in such freezing?
Therefore, the compound called "MEDY" invented by Chinese scientists seems to have opened up a shortcut for the violence of human cryonics, which can really keep the brain tissue that is frozen and thawed alive, and the key is to be able to come back to life after thawing, otherwise all measures of freezing are no different from ordinary cold storage for storing pork.
Cryonics: The market is quite extensive
Despite the various problems of cryonics technology, cryonics is still developing rapidly, and the reason is very simple, everyone wants to leave a possibility of resurrection after death! As a wealthy person, the hundreds of thousands of dollars frozen are just a pocket money, so many wealthy people choose to enter the freezing work after the treatment is ineffective to preserve the body, hoping to resurrect it one day.
You read that right, freezing only the human body is frozen after complete death, because this is not only a scientific issue, but also a legal issue, the laws of most countries do not legally deprive a citizen of the right to life, unless he commits a heinous crime and is sentenced to death, and the current cryonics does not 100% guarantee that the frozen human body can be resurrected, so the cryonics operation can only be carried out after the complete death of the human body, and its main steps are as follows:
If you are interested, you can take a look, the flower growers will not be introduced one by one, the process is about the same, the process is so troublesome, the cost will not be less, at present, there are three most well-known cryonics companies in the world, and the quotations are also different:
- KrioRus of Russia: $23,000 for the brain and $28,000 for the human body;
- American Society of Cryonics: $155,000 for total body cryonics;
- Alcor Life Extension Fund (Alcor): $80,000 for brain cryopy and $200,000 for whole body cryopics;
- Shandong Yinfeng Institute of Life Sciences, China: Fees unknown
According to the 21st Century Economic Herald reported at the end of 2022, the number of frozen people in the world is currently close to 500, including 10 Chinese. It is necessary to mention that in addition to the human body, there are hundreds of pet cats and dogs, etc., because there are many wealthy owners who choose to freeze their pets that accompany them all their lives, hoping to resurrect them one day.
Frozen Man Resurrection in Sight: When Will the First Frozen Man Wake Up?
The first person to cryonize was James Bedford, a professor of psychology in the United States, who died of stomach cancer on January 12, 1967. Dr. Ettinger and his assistant Robert Edtinger. Nelson had a cryonics pact and paid $100,000 for it as a cryonics fund, so after his death, Robert Murphy had been refrigerated. Nelson immediately came to the door and disposed of the professor's body according to the cryonics process developed by Dr. Ettinger, except for the facilities at the time, the process was basically the same as the current treatment, and after the treatment, Professor Bedford was sealed into a liquid nitrogen tank, intending to "thaw and resurrect" in 2017, when cancer can be treated 50 years later.
Professor Bedford's "experience" is quite complicated, because after Robert Bedford. Although Nelson took several orders for cryonics, he was sued for fraud and was eventually awarded $400,000 in damages, and almost went bankrupt, after which the cryonics tanks were placed in a warehouse until May 25, 1991, when Alcor's cryonics experts took over the Bedford tanks, and according to the results of the examination at the time, the professor's body was very well preserved, after which the professor was better preserved in Alcor.
Horizontally on the right is the professor's tank of liquid nitrogen
January 12, 2017, was supposed to be the day of Bedford's "awakening", but there is no technology to treat the spread of gastric cancer, let alone resurrect the frozen human body, so Professor Bedford is still "lying" in the storage area of Alcor's cryotank.
The question arises: can a frozen human body be resurrected?
Although there is no technology to resurrect a frozen human body, so it is still too early to discuss resurrection, but it does not prevent us from discussing the possibility of resurrection from a scientific point of view! Judging from the current cryonics resurrection operation, the problem of "resurrection after death" must be solved first, and there is really a pretty good case:
In a 2019 Nature paper, the team found that neurons and some brain cells in the pig brain restarted normal metabolic functions, such as consuming sugar and producing carbon dioxide, and the immune system appeared to be functioning after feeding a pig that had been dead for four hours into the simulated blood.
In the latest case announced on August 3, 2022, it went one step further than the last time, and the function of vital organs throughout the body was restored 1 hour after the pig's death, including heart contraction and liver and kidney activity, and in one case, the head and neck of the dead pig began to move, indicating that there may be some degree of "resurrection". And there are also cases of similar animals and even human bodies "resurrected" in the news of various countries around the world:
- In the laboratory, scientists have successfully thawed and resurrected small organisms such as nematodes and leeched rotifers that have been frozen for many years.
- Baby girls have frozen to death in Canada for hours before thawing and surviving.
- There was an experiment in which a monkey was successfully frozen for several hours and then recovered.
- Dogs, pigs, and rats have been successfully cooled down (with only a very weak heartbeat after cooling) for several hours before recovering
Isn't it exciting to have such cases? But in fact, we have to think about the question, how to live? Is it to restore the heartbeat, brain function and metabolic function to be considered alive? Or do you need to restore the higher functions of the brain, such as the human body to resume activities, live independently, and even fully recover memory, which is no different from before?
- The first result: there is no resurrection, but still death;
- The second result: alive, but in a vegetative state;
- The third result: alive, moved, but amnesia;
- The fourth result: alive, moved, and regained memory, no different from before;
As far as the current freezing process is concerned, the first result is highly probable, because the human body has completely died, for example, after death, the heartbeat and breathing have all stopped, and the brain has died of hypoxia, even if the body function is restored in this state, it is still vegetative (and the possibility of recovery of the body is extremely low), and it may need to be maintained by a ventilator, what is the point of resurrecting such a person?
Because the most important position of the human body is the brain, which is in charge of high-level thinking activities, low-level human body function maintenance, such as digestion and breathing, etc., if the future is to be cryonics and resurrection, it is necessary to modify the cryonics process, such as processing the cryonics program within a few minutes after the heartbeat and breathing stop, but this time is far from enough, because it takes several hours to replace the protective solution, and there is a large wave of processes to be operated in the future, and it is too late for half a day, and in this process, the human brain is already dead and does not die again, can it be resurrected?
The only way is to replace the blood of the whole body into a cryoprotective liquid while the person is still alive, and at this time to maintain the supply of oxygen and nutrients to the brain, according to modern brain death standards, the person is still alive at this time; When the body is replaced, the brain directly begins to replace the protective fluid, and within a few minutes, it is directly frozen.
But this situation is not allowed by the law, even if it is invented by Chinese scientists, MEDY is not good, because the person is still alive before the cryonics, and the resurrection rate cannot be guaranteed by cryonics, so from the perspective of modern law, this operation is illegal, and there is no difference between the crime of intentional homicide, so as far as the current human resurrection business is concerned, it is indeed no different from fraud, and there should be another warrior to sue these companies that cheat people and cheat money, and let them go bankrupt!
Therefore, Professor Bedford couldn't survive, not only because the method of treatment was wrong, because Professor Bedford was treated with methyl sulfoxide (DMSO), a poisonous liquid that had already killed the professor's body; Another reason is that from a scientific point of view, it is impossible to resurrect this method of freezing after death, but only to freeze a piece of meat in a different way.