By cryonics is understood the technology of deep freezing of a living organism with the purpose of its subsequent defrosting and revitalization, if necessary - for curing diseases.

In particular, thanks to cryonics today, wealthy patients with deadly diseases hope to live up to a brighter future, when they can be unfrozen and healed.

Although all this sounds like science fiction, cryonics has brilliant prospects and already demonstrates serious successes.

Nevertheless, in our days, the freezing of a person is irreversible - the return to life has not been worked out yet, and it is unclear whether it will be possible to do this.

The roots of the idea.

The idea of ??freezing and thawing people is present in mass culture for a very long time.

Back in the 1960s, the American physics teacher Robert Ettinger, author of the book Perspectives of Immortality, presented the idea of ??cryonics to the general public. He also in 1976 founded the first institute dealing with this unusual scientific problem.

In his book, Oettinger justified the need to freeze mortally sick people in order to reanimate them and cure them in the future. In this way, it would be possible to return to life a practically dead person, if not a dead person at all.

Cryonics in 2016.

In our time this is a very serious scientific field, in which millions of dollars are invested and which is in the sphere of attention of powerful people.

There is a small circle of officially registered companies that are engaged in cryonics and offer customers, their relatives and pets a perspective of immortality according to Oettinger.

For a lot of money, of course. One of the largest cryonics companies in the US offers this procedure for $ 200,000, plus an annual fee.

In the world there are only four companies that are able to freeze the bodies of people with the prospect of revitalization in the future. Three of them work in the States, and the fourth one in Russia (CryoRus). It is reported that this year the first customers will be able to accept a new cryonics company in Australia.

As of 2015, 250 people were frozen, and about 1500 stood in line.

How it works?.

In an ideal world, a cryonic company must gain access to the client's body immediately after cardiac arrest, while his brain is still alive.

This will "restart" the heart and lungs, although the person is in a state of clinical death.

After delivery to the company, the client's body temperature is reduced to 0 ° C with an ice bath, although breathing and palpitation are artificially maintained. To prevent blood clots, heparin, and with it a number of other necessary drugs.

Then the blood is completely removed from the body, and the vascular bed is filled with cryoprotectants - substances that protect cells from damage caused by deep cold. This is necessary for vitrification, or vitrification.

After the introduction of cryoprotectants, the temperature is lowered to -130 ° C with nitrogen. And in this state it must remain until the dawn of a bright future.

The technology of deep freezing without tissue damage is relatively safe and was practiced on living organisms for dozens of years. But, of course, this is only half way: the thawing and revitalization of humans and large animals is still problematic.

Anticryonic rhetoric.

Cryonics among the scientific community has never bathed in the rays of glory, and in the 1970s its already weak authority was hit hard.

The cryogenic society of California, headed by former television artist Robert Nelson (Robert Nelson), then hit the front page.

Nelson's organization, due to lack of money and the inability to maintain life support for bodies, unceremoniously thawed and threw out nine of its clients. Scandal then turned grandiose.

But the problem is not even in this plane.

The problem in the practical feasibility of ideas. Most scientists and medical workers still are skeptical about the idea of ??cryonics.

A well-known expert in the field of neuroscience, Michael Hendricks, said about cryonics: "This is a false hope for definitely impossible manipulations with a dead tissue offered by the cryonic industry. Those who profit from this hope deserve our anger and contempt ".

Despite the lack of much support from the "official" science, cryonics continues to rivet the attention of society and excite the minds of those who want to believe in the possibility of immortality. And, I must say, the latest achievements of cryonics support this faith.

Rats of Lazarus.

Today the concept of death is very different from what the ancient.

A man is dead when his brain died, and not when his heart stopped beating.

But even this can not be considered a point in the question. In the distant 1955, James Lovelock (James Lovelock) cooled the body of rats below 0 ° C, until the brain activity ceased completely. The most surprising thing is that after that he managed to reanimate the animals.

So after this can be considered a death?.

"Thawed" pigs.

And more recently, a stunning experiment was conducted with the cooling of the body of pigs.

In 2006, animals were injected into deep hypothermia (10 ° C) for 60 minutes, after which most successfully returned to life.

Four years earlier, scientists injected into the aorta of Yorkshire pigs a solution with a high potassium content cooled to 4 ° C, after which they were animated. The ability to learn from "thawed" pigs was not compromised, and this was confirmed by tests.

Ice bath in traumatology.

In 2015, the Presbyterian Hospital UPMC (Pittsburgh, USA) introduced a revolutionary method of treatment for patients with severe injuries, including gunshot and stab wounds.

The bottom line is this: a team of doctors quickly replaces the patient's blood with a chilled saline solution, causing an almost complete cessation of cellular activity, including brain work.

At a low temperature, oxygen consumption is reduced, so the brain tissue can live in this state for much longer.

This condition is called induced hypothermia. It gives surgeons more time for the operation, after which the blood is returned back to the vascular system, and the patient is resuscitated by traditional means.

Miraculous survival.

In real life, there are situations when people drowning in icy water miraculously remain alive.

In the literature, a reliable fact of the girl's survival is described, which was completely immersed in ice water for 66 minutes. After an hour under water doctors have nothing to do, but in this case, the girl was able to reanimate. Moreover, her personality and memories did not suffer.

And this is not the only case when, thanks to the cold, a person "experienced a clinical death". In 1999, 29-year-old Anna Begenholm spent 80 minutes in an ice trap after an accident on skis. Her body temperature dropped to 13.7 ° C, but the woman did not just survive, but completely recovered.

Such cases have generated in the American paramedics the saying "Nobody is dead until warm and dead" (literally - Nobody has died until he is dead and warm). In practice, it means that people with prolonged cardiac arrest and hypothermia must persist in trying to resuscitate.

And the whole brain!.

In early 2016, 21CM decided to conduct an experiment with deep freezing of the rabbit's brain.

This is a temperature of -135 ° C, which was achieved thanks to aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation. In this, it would seem, there is nothing new, but researchers for the first time in history thawed the brain without damage.

The team returned the brain to room temperature and studied its structure under an electron microscope, without detecting any visible disturbances in the cellular structure.

At that moment, cryonics from science fiction turned into a distant, but still realistic perspective of medicine.

On the other hand, doctors have long used frozen human eggs, spermatozoa and embryos that are perfectly preserved and after many years give rise to a new life.

Technical problems of cryonics.

Experts say that freezing with subsequent cell recovery is not easy.

In the process of thawing, numerous problems arise that modern science is unable to solve.

In every large organ, such as a human kidney, there are many zones that require different conditions to preserve their structure. To this end, it is planned to use vitrification, which already allows the rabbit's kidney to be preserved, but the human kidney is still far away.

Another problem is that frozen human tissues become brittle and can simply break down.

Although vitrification solves this problem at the cellular level, the vitrified human flesh still remains fragile, and scientists can not do anything about it.

Be that as it may, the concept itself has the right to exist. Another thing is that many years will pass before scientists can defrost a person without consequences for his body and brain.

medbe. en.