Cryonics

A 14-year old girl who died of cancer has been cryogenically frozen in the US in the hope she could be brought back to life in the future after winning a landmark court case shortly before her death, the BBC reported on November 18. Details are not revealed for legal reasons.

The practice or technique of deep-freezing the bodies of those who have died of an incurable disease, in the hope of a future cure. The concept of cryonics was introduced in 1962 by the Founder of the Cryonics Institute, Robert Ettinger, in his landmark book "The Prospect of Immortality."

Cryonics involves cooling a recently deceased person to liquid nitrogen temperatures in order to keep the body preserved indefinitely. It might seem like an impossible goal to "revive" a "dead" person. However, "dying" is a process rather than an event.

A majority of the body's tissues remain intact at a cellular level even after the heart stops beating. The goal of cryonics is to halt that process as quickly as possible after legal death, giving future physicians the best possible chance of reviving the patien., according to ://www.cryonics.org.

Can Cryonics be performed on living people? Legally, not yet. We hope that one day it will be, under carefully controlled conditions, for terminally ill patients. Has any mammal been cryopreserved and revived?

Not to cryogenic temperatures. Dogs and monkeys have had their blood replaced with protective solution and cooled to below 0ºC, with subsequent rewarming and revival. Nematode worms have been cryopreserved in liquid nitrogen (−196ºC), and subsequently revived.

At the July 2005 Society for Cryobiology Conference, it was announced that a rabbit kidney had been completely vitrified to solid state at −135ºC, rewarmed and transplanted to a rabbit with complete viability. Although a whole mammal has not yet been cryopreserved to cryogenic temperatures and revived, science is moving in that direction.

To understand the technology behind cryonics, think about the news stories you've heard of people who have fallen into an icy lake and have been submerged for up to an hour in the frigid water before being rescued.

The ones who survived did so because the icy water put their body into a sort of suspended animation, slowing down their metabolism and brain function to the point where they needed almost no oxygen. http://science.howstuffworks.com/