Science and fiction of frozen survival
- Siberia, 24,000 years ago. A microorganism of the Bdelloidea species, a highly resistant rotiferous animal, was frozen in the cold waters of the Alayeza River. Recently, scientists have thawed the animal and, in addition to staying alive, have been able to reproduce asexually.
According to Stas Malavin, of the Russian Institute of Physicochemical and Biological Problems of Soil Sciences: “The bottom line is that a multi-cellular organism can freeze and stay for thousands of years and come back to life, the dream of many science fiction writers.”
In the literature, the novel Fiasco by Stansilaw Lem, in the movies, Cocoon by Ron Howard or the superhero of the comics Jean Grey are some of the examples of this dream. And in all of them, it's human beings who rise again after they freeze.
The maintenance of the freezing of humans and large mammals is known as the Chryonics. In 1773, Benjamin Franklin wrote in a letter that maybe in the future it would be possible to keep humans frozen for centuries. Almost two centuries later, the first man to freeze in 1967, James Bedford died at the age of 73, hoping to reinvent himself in the future. Walt Disney, however, isn't chryonized, even though he's opened up this myth. Baseball player Ted Williams, frozen in 2002, is the most popular person in the world of chryonized. But the process of crionization is not yet reversible and, therefore, the results of the crionica are still in fiction.
Cryobiology is the science that studies the effects of low temperatures on living things. Some 4,500 years ago they began to study these effects of the cold in Egypt, and Hippocrates himself made attempts at implementation. Today we know that many bacteria, small invertebrate animals such as bdelloid, some frog species, human embryos or many plants (and seeds) have the ability to remain frozen. One of the most well-known applications of cryobiology is the World Seed Bank of Svalbard. Millions of seeds are retained on this Norwegian island to conserve plant species that could be lost in the event of natural disasters or sudden climatic changes.
The Society of Cryobiological Sciences decided in 1982 to completely separate its path from the Crionica and established in its statutes that “any practice of freezing dead human beings with the intention of resuscitating in the future” is outside its scope of investigation.
Microbiologists believe that the discovery of Siberia can lead to breakthroughs, but their preferences are clear. It is more important to preserve better and longer the seeds that guarantee food and biodiversity than to resurrect an 83-year-old retired baseball player.
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