Originally posted by kmguru
Recently I read that a lot of people want their bodies frozen so that they can be revived in the future to see how it turned out. Do we have the technology to freeze a person or an animal alive today that can be thawed back to life?
Last I heard, there were some attempts to freeze flesh very quickly, so as to prevent the formation of ice crystals......(ice crystals destroy cells)........
There was also something about a natural antifreeze which is produced by frogs, fish, ect.......which prevents the formation of ice crystals in their cells during extremely cold conditions. The hope of these determined sci-pros is to produce an extract of this chemical which could be injected/transfused--actually, if I were going to attempt it, I'd use a variant of a dialysis machine to .....

.....nay, that wouldn't work either. The antifreeze chemical would have to be present in every cell, not just the bloodstream.......

.. Anyway, the challenge of circulating an antifreeze agent into every cell within the body would be very difficult. The only possibility that comes to mind would be to perhaps use some form of gene therapy that would presumably cause humans to produce the chemical in each cell.
If the formation ice crystals in living tissue could be averted, then it seems that putting someone into cold storage & then reviving them at a later date might be possible, by many accounts.
Freezing flesh with low temperatures is not the be all/end all of solutions though. The main goal is to simply stop bodily processes, or to <i>suspend the bodies cellular animation.</i> There may well exist a way to temporarily suspend all cellular function without using extremely cold temperatures. Perhaps chemically, or even by some kind of energy field that has a similar effect.
Personally, I'd hate to wake up in the 23rd century, with a bad case of freezer burn ! ! ! !!
............later.......hs/hs.....
ps. DAmn ChRiS...err....Cris

, I was beginninning to think that you <I>MUST </I> BE FOREVER lost in the religous realms of sci-forums
