11. Freeze Me When I Die

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I'm Hannah Fry.

And I'm Dara O'Brien.

And this is Curious Cases.

The show where we take your quirkiest questions, your crunchiest conundrums, and then we solve them.

With the power of science.

I mean, do we always solve them?

I mean, the hit rate's pretty low.

But it is with science.

It is with science.

All right, Darren, what have we got this week?

Well, we have a chilling question sent in as ever to curiouscases at bbc.co.uk.

We welcome all your questions.

All about the science of freezing.

Listen to this.

Hello, I'm Elspeth.

I'm 13 years old and I live in York.

And I was wondering, can living organisms be frozen and then unfrozen again in the future with the possibility of still being alive or being able to be reanimated.

So maybe like a disease that we don't have a cure for yet, if you get frozen with the hope of being cured or like astronauts visiting outer space, I would never ever want to be frozen.

I think it would just be so weird and I'd hate it.

Not for me at all, but like some people are into it.

Does Elspeth know that you're not awake when you're frozen?

I mean, she's very much not into it herself.

I agree.

But it's an excellent question.

It is a great question.

Yeah, and topical as well.

Because as you know, this week they're throwing out Walt Disney.

Are they?

No, but your face.

There is...

I didn't know he'd been frozen.

See, this is the myth always that I heard at the time.

This is going back to the 70s and 80s, that Walt Disney

had himself frozen so that in the future, science could cure whatever it was.

I didn't even know what killed Walt Disney, but whatever it was, that he would be...

Probably the cold.

Yeah, I I mean, ultimately, that was the bit that did for him.

But

there's no evidence for it.

It was just this amazing urban myth that Walt Disney had frozen himself, which is not far from what people have tried to do, but for some reason it pinned on Walt Disney.

As if in the castle, in the Snow White's castle, in the middle of it, there is one room with liquid nitrogen spilling out.

And just Walt Disney's head

in a tank.

It was always vague whether it was the head of the whole thing.

Basically, I'm suspicious of this whole thing, but I'm happy to have the needle move.

Yeah, that it might be possible.

I mean, okay, the thing is, is that you know that like freezing some stuff is possible.

Yeah, do you know how I know that?

Because I have a freezer.

And occasionally I reanimate some peas.

They're never what they once were.

Look, I accept that they're 80% of the pee they were, but they're still pretty good.

They're possible.

Yeah.

Sticking with the kitchen, you know, one of the first ever uses of the microwave was to defrost frozen hamsters.

I'm sorry.

All right, so this is is like so much more complex.

It's like 1950s.

There's a group of scientists who are experimenting with cryogenics and they freeze hamsters and then they were bringing them back to life successfully, but they were like heating up a spoon and then holding on the hamster's tummy and it would work, they would come back to life, but I don't think it was particularly, you know, comfortable.

And so this was like a humane way to slowly thaw them.

And it worked.

They'd like run around.

Oh my God.

It's not enough for me to live for 18 months as a hamster.

I want another nine months out of this life.

I want to see 2026.

Yeah, why?

Why shouldn't hamsters dream of three years, even four, into the fourth year, not the full four years, into the fourth year?

Absolutely.

That's the immortality for a hamster.

Let's see if those hamster dreams can come true, shall we?

Joining us in the studio is Jao Pedro Magales.

Pedro is a professor at the University of Birmingham where he studies aging and cryobiology.

Very quickly, what's cryobiology, Pedro?

So cryobiology is the study of biological materials and biological samples at freezing temperature, so below zero.

Fantastic.

Nice.

I mean, sort of say what you see.

Yes, really.

We are also joined in the studio by Haley Campbell, a journalist and broadcaster, and author of a book all about people who work with dead bodies, including people who work in cryonics.

Thank you for joining us.

All right, so what's cryonics then?

Cryonics is the freezing of dead people so that they can be reanimated in the future.

It's basically Fry in Futurama Futurama or Austin Powers.

Okay, so they were documentaries, is what you're saying.

Yeah, absolutely true documentaries.

But I mean, it does actually happen, though.

People do actually do this.

Well, people have been frozen, but no one has yet been reanimated.

Okay.

And then, so, are there companies that offer this as a service?

There are.

There's one called Alcor, which is based in Arizona.

There's another one called the Cryonics Institute, which is in Detroit, which is the oldest one.

And then there's one called Tomorrow Bio, which is in Switzerland.

So how many people how many people in total then have been frozen so there are only about 500 people are actually frozen right now in cryostats it's more a case of people signing up for something that they hope to do in the future so there's a lot more sign-ups there's um 4 000 members so people who've signed up see i presume you could just so it makes big big promises the idea that i will and then we will we will make various promises one of which is that we'll be able to thaw you but also that whatever was whether heart disease or cancer whatever there will be some miraculous cure that not only can we bring you back but the thing is they aren't making promises this is what i thought going in when i went to the cryonics institute because i thought i would be well i'll be blunt i thought i'd meet crazy people who tell me that bodies could be reanimated but what they were telling me was that they don't actually know if any of this will work.

But they know that if you're buried, you will be eaten

by worms and you will rot and nothing will happen.

Or you'll be, you know, put put in a fire and and that will be the end of your body that way but they see themselves as the experimental group they know what's happening in the control group and they don't promise that you will come back they're just like it's a maybe the guy who invented it robert ettinger who wrote a book about it the prospect of immortality he wrote this in 1965 and it was just like this might work it could be an idea and the whole book is really heavy on the science of freezing and really light on like how it might be reversed and how a body might come back to life.

So it's all just people kind of shrugging at each other going, I don't know.

But if you're a scientist and you say it definitely won't work, you're not telling the truth.

And if you're a scientist and you say it definitely will, you're also not telling the truth.

The point is that no one knows.

Okay, well look, this seems like the end game of all of this.

There is nonetheless some actual proper science, provable, repeatable results that's happening now.

Something that's very, very striking is that we all of us may already know somebody who was once frozen.

Here's Joyce Harper, professor of reproductive science at UCL who has a very personal take on this.

I have a vested interest in this topic because my twins were born from frozen embryos.

So they were frozen when they were three-day cells and a few months after that they were thawed and then put back in my womb and then they grow into my sons.

So when the embryo is ready to be frozen what happens is the embryologist puts the embryo through some special solutions because when we freeze something, what we're worried about is the water forming ice crystals and then splitting the cells or destroying the cells.

So we have to use special cryoprotectants that will replace the water in the cells.

What people normally use now is a process which is much quicker called vitrification, but it freezes the embryo very quickly.

So it just takes a few minutes.

Embryos have been stored for decades now.

It's been a very successful procedure.

As I said, I had mine frozen 18 years ago.

Globally, the number of embryos, I don't think anyone could estimate it, but it will be millions.

There'll be millions of embryos frozen around the world.

So Pedro,

this works?

Absolutely.

I mean, we've brought embryos back to life that were cryopreserved for 30 years.

So if someone tells you that nobody has been cryopreserved and brought back to life, you could argue, although with some caveats, that some people are alive now to have been cryopreserved, although admittedly at a time when they were tiny microscopic embryos.

We talked about the process there.

Joyce mentioned about cells being split or destroyed by the water.

So what has to happen?

So the major problem when you go at low temperatures, particularly below zero, right, is that ice forms.

And you have these ice crystals which are sharp and they can damage cells and molecular components and they can kill the cells.

So in order to minimize our formation, you tend to use this substance called cryoprotectants, which is essentially anti-freeze substances like glycerol and ethylene, glycol.

And so you add these substances in order to minimize ice formation in order to cryopreserve cells and small tissues.

And so when we freeze embryos, do we push the water out from embryos and replace it with this?

One way is, yes, it's just called vitrification, where you replace the water with cryoprotectants.

So you have a very high concentration of cryoprotectants, so it doesn't freeze anymore.

It doesn't become, it actually doesn't become solid anymore.

It's a glass-like consistency.

So that's one way of cryopreserving embryos, right?

So hold on, you put loads of antifreeze inside the cells, turn them into this glass-like thing, and then when they come back, what do you do with the antifreeze?

Once you are going to rewarm your sample, you essentially wash out or you remove the cryoprotectants and you replace it with water or solution, whatever you're using to grow those type of cells.

So that's been going on for 30 years, yes.

So you're injecting cells with antifreeze.

Yes, that's been going on for quite a long time.

I mean glycerol, which was the first cryoprotectant, was discovered, I think, in the late 40s, here in London, actually.

So why can't you do bigger organs then?

Why can't you just inject the heart with antifreeze?

It's a physics problem.

If you have a larger organ, it's going to take longer for it to cool down.

Because it takes longer for the temperature to cool down, then you have to use higher concentrations of cryoprotectants, and that's going to cause more damage at the higher temperature.

And then when you do it, it doesn't work anymore.

Exactly.

So we can do it for cells.

We can't do it for large organs.

Are we even on the way to being able to do it for large organs?

There has been some advances.

You can vitrify rabbit kidneys.

Of course, rabbits are smaller than humans, so their kidneys are also smaller.

But you can vitrify rabbit kidneys, you can rewarm them, and then you can implant them back into rabbits, and they will function.

I was telling Dara about hamsters earlier, about frozen hamsters, because that's something that people have done, right?

People have done that decades ago.

It's not been replicated to my knowledge, but yes, hamsters also hibernate, which I think is another factor to do that.

Oh, look, I mean, there are animals.

I mean, we have a tortoise, you know, and we just took him in a drinks fridge for four months.

Are you supposed to do that?

Yeah, I think so.

He's recovered very well from it.

When he wants to get out, is he like banging on the door?

I mean, he's gone through a few of the bottles.

We go in like

there's empties clanking around like

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We are getting somewhere here though, because we can successfully actually freeze small cells.

And then the point you make about hibernation is an interesting one about lowering the temperature.

Because

there is actually another pretty cool example that involves a whole animal.

Because here is Dr.

Hanan Haj Musa from the Babraham Institute in Cambridge to tell us about a frog with a special power.

So during my PhD and master's I worked on examining the mechanisms of how animals can survive extreme environments.

My absolute favorite and a popular pick is the wood frog.

You can find them all across North America, all the way up to northern Canada and Alaska.

And as soon as temperatures start to drop below zero, the wood frog will kind of turn on its adaptations that it has.

Within 24 hours, typically less, they're frozen solid.

No heartbeat, no breathing, no measurable brain activity.

They literally turn into froxicles and they can stay solid for weeks and months.

The wood frog has a few mechanisms up its sleeve.

So as soon as the winter temperatures start to drop, their bodies start to shut down.

It's called metabolic rate depression.

Whatever process they can shut down they shut down but they also need to freeze and they do this by dehydrating their cells.

So they pull out all the water from their cells or most of the water and then they are able to deposit it in their abdomen and in this way they can freeze the water as a big block of ice in their abdomen and this keeps it safe from damaging their cells and to protect their cells even more they're able to pump their cells with ridiculous ridiculous amount of sugars.

So they fill their cells with glucose and it protects their organs and cells from getting frostbite when they thaw.

And it's really cool.

It's wild.

Well, that's the answer then, Pejo, isn't it?

Surely, just to get all of the water into sort of your abdomen,

fill your veins and vessels with

sugar.

Done.

Yes.

So you can use certain sugars to, like trailos, in cryopreservation.

So sugars are already used used in some cryopreservation protocols.

We are aware of that.

However, I think there's other intrinsic adaptations of the cells of the wood frog that our cells don't have.

So it's not that simple.

Okay, all right.

So let's say then, let's say you've got like an 80-year-old man, right?

They don't need to be a man.

Let's just

imagine I didn't say that.

They mostly are though.

I think they're mostly men.

They are mostly men.

And they don't have any one religious or political leaning.

but I was told they're mostly men, but also it's men signing up their families.

So you get a lot of women that way.

Right, I see.

No, no women leading the charge, no?

No, but there are a lot of people in their twenties and thirties who see a kind of future in technology.

So there is a kind of change coming, but traditionally it has been men.

Okay, all right, so let's say then you've got an 80-year-old man

and he's just died of a heart attack and he's frozen using the best methods that we have right now.

What kind of future technology would you need to be able to thaw him and then just undo the heart attack?

So you'd have to figure out a way of, when you rewarm that individual, of preventing cell death from the crypotectins and from the ice.

And then there would still be damage, which would have some sort of molecular scale nanotechnology repair that we simply don't have now.

And of course you'd have to fix the disease that killed him and you'd have to fix aging itself, which we're not not going to do anytime soon of my many many questions uh

here's the one that stands out first which is you seem to be doubling up the problem though here you seem to be going right we're going to let you die of something then freeze you so that if we so we now the dual problem of unfreezing you and then somehow unheart attacking you at the same time okay would it Would it be to be so much less appealing to them the idea that we take you when you're relatively

and then go with the promise of immortality dip you in nickel nitrogen i imagine there's a lot of paperwork involved in that there would be and it would be because i can see what people go but it seems to me as if this sounds awful like i'm putting in this in in the way when you save a game but if you save a game at a point that you're about to die and then every time you restart the game you're right at the point where you're about to die surely the much more sensible and obviously to these people deeply less appealing option would be to go well look come in now come in now we've got we've got like like hand solar and carbonite.

We're going to put you into a machine and just totally freeze you.

Would that not be, would that work better?

Yes, that would work better.

Yes.

I think biological, from a biological and cryo-preservation and damage perspective, yes,

that would be better.

And for example, when animal studies are done, that's what is done.

I think for humans, it raises a lot of ethical questions, a lot of legal questions as well.

But also, there are various ways to die that are better than other ones.

Like your example of the heart attack is one of the worst ways to die because that was unplanned.

You could be in a supermarket, you know.

Whereas, if you had a terminal cancer diagnosis, you could be in a deathbed and people could be waiting for the second you die.

And that's when they start to freeze you.

That's as close as they've got right now.

But it would raise certain marketing issues if they said

we're taking you now.

This is the best time for you to go.

Look, I mean, every time you wait, you are slightly more difficult to revivify.

That's true.

And the cryonics institute actually

they freeze animals as well, dogs and cats and iguanas and parrots, and and they said that the animals get a better perfusion with the antifreeze stuff than humans do because the vet is on the corner of the block, so they go straight from being euthanized to going to the cryonics facility.

But humans can't do that yet.

The thing is, okay, if we're if we're talking about fantasy nano machines that can fix cell damage at the molecular level and all of this stuff, why not just extend the fantasy a bit further?

Can't you just take out the sort of consciousness of somebody and implant them into a much better body?

Like, I would like to come back as the rock, you know?

How fun would that be to like live a new life as the rock?

But the rock is already living life as the rock.

I think it's to be actually the rock.

But you know, you know, just walk around and feel so powerful.

But then again, I guess you haven't really got much to lose if you're dead already, right?

Because actually, quite a lot of people do sign up for this.

We have, we got to speak to one guy who from the UK was an an earlier doctor.

Have you listened to this?

Hello, my name is Garrett Smythe, and I suppose I'm the first person in the UK to have signed up for cryonics, which is quite a few years ago now.

And there's an organisation of which I just am a voluntary helper called Cryonics UK, which exists to educate the public and do research into cryonics, and in the process, get people frozen and sent over to wherever they're stored, be it Switzerland or the USA.

We're going to be able to affect people's lifespan in a large way.

Life extension drugs and procedures will come about one day.

And it occurred to me I might not live long enough to see that.

I mean I'm aging faster than they're making the breakthroughs.

And it would be so upsetting to die just before they made the great breakthrough and everybody lived to 300 and I died at, you know, 72.

So I wanted, I joined Alcor in order to be suspended and hopefully kept in good enough condition that I'll still be around when aging is conquered and they can fix the other things that have happened to me along the way.

I think a lot of this is not people wanting to have immortality, but people wanting youth.

So it's different coming back as a 70-year-old man versus a 20-year-old.

Congratulations, you can live another 230 years as a 70-year-old man.

Was that what you wanted?

No,

I wanted the rock fantasy that was mentioned earlier on.

Yeah, much better.

But within these businesses, do they speak optimistically about this?

Yeah, most people I spoke to, they weren't doing this because they feared death.

They were doing it because they had this optimistic idea of the future.

They want more of life.

The ideal would be to just extend this one, but they haven't figured that out yet either.

So this was just one option.

I think, given, I mean, as someone who works on aging and longevity, the point is that, of course, nobody wants to live a long time in a period of decrepitude and pain and suffering.

But if you could turn a 70-year-old into a 20-year-old, if you could become young again, then the vast majority of people would like to live longer as a 20-year-old or a 25-year-old.

I was an idiot when I was a 20-year-old.

With the knowledge of a 70-year-old, but the body of a 20-year-old.

Now, with an older queen,

if you could go back with all of your knowledge now.

Very true.

I want to know a bit more about the practicalities of this, though.

So talk us through the process.

What actually happens?

Well, if you're on your deathbed and the people come and they wait, they wait for you to die.

They put you in this ice bath and then they have this heart-lung resuscitator that they put above your chest.

It essentially looks like a toilet plunger suspended and it that keeps your heart moving and so they're essentially using the structure inside your body to

you know cool everything down.

They're using the structure that's there And they transport that body in the ice bath to either Detroit or Switzerland or Arizona.

And from there, it basically goes through a process of embalming, but they're not using embalming fluid.

But it is the same process.

It's an embalmer who does it in Detroit.

She used to work in a funeral home.

But what it actually does is it shrinks the person because they're trying to take the water out of the cells so that they don't break.

They explained it.

Because it's mummified.

They look mummified, but the the way it was explained to me is it's like they take a grape and they make a raisin.

Oh,

this is horrible.

Because you know the way we keep turning raisins back into grapes.

We can't even do that.

Then they put you in this sort of sleeping bag thing and attach you to a backboard.

And then in the cryonics Institute, it's this massive warehouse with all of these pulleys and chains across the ceiling.

And they keep you in this, it's like a cooling box, and you're there for about 48 hours.

So you're brought down in temperature gradually.

It's all done by a computer.

And then when you're at the temperature that you need to be, you're taken out of this box and you are suspended in the air.

And then you travel through the warehouse and then you are plopped head down.

into a cryostat which is essentially a big thermos.

It's got layers of insulation, it's got a big cork at the top and it's full of liquid nitrogen.

But you're stored head down like a bat because they figure if

you know there's a leak, the last thing to thought will be your brain because that's the most important thing.

That's the blueprint of who you are.

They can get you a new toe in the future, but they can't get you a new brain.

Oh, in the future.

Oh, it's incredible.

Do people share these vats, or are they?

Yeah, you can fit six to eight people.

Depends on the size of the vat.

Sometimes there are animals in there.

You know, the bigger animals go in.

Are there family vats, or is it?

Could you be in with the strangers?

It's all strangers, unless, well, it depends on what time you arrive because they're not going to remove people from their vat.

So it's just, you know, as you come in.

So you're raisinified in your sleeping bag and you spend your eternal rest in a vat next to seven strangers.

Yeah, whoever it is.

I mean, there are people in there who know each other.

Robert Ettinger, who's the guy who wrote the book in the 60s, The Prospect of Immortality, the very first patient in the Cryonics institute was his mother.

And then that was followed a few people along by his first wife.

And then there was his second wife, a few other people along.

He didn't die until he was the 106th person to go into a tank.

I mean, that 105 were his wives.

Well, like in the multiple wives thing is interesting because in the book, he even has a theory for what you should do in the future when we're all reanimated and all of your multiple wives come with you.

And his thing was that in the future, they will also have sorted out monogamy.

That will be a thing of the past.

We'll be into polyamory now.

Oh, the future.

Oh, it's going to be me.

I'm so sad I'm going to miss that.

It sounds so good.

It sounds like everything you talked needed to be done will be solved by the future.

Extraordinary.

Were you tempted when you were there?

Were you like, yeah, I could see myself hanging upside down as a human raisin?

Not even in the slightest.

Absolutely not.

Actually, the woman who does all of the embalming, she's not even signed up either.

And the reason she's not signed up is not because she doesn't believe in the technology, because she does.

She just doesn't think it's worth coming back.

How about you, Pedro?

So I'm not signed up for cryonics,

I think the chances of it working are very, very, very low.

But you could ask the question, but what if you were a billionaire?

If I were a billionaire, I think it would be a different question, because I wouldn't have anything to lose.

Wow, Dara.

I mean, it's a gamble with with no downside, really, because you're already dead.

What is significantly more interesting is the fact that we already do it to a certain extent, and that we could possibly, the aim of creating a library of transplant donations would be an astonishing thing if we could do that.

Absolutely.

But I want to emphasize is that we understand it.

I mean, there are problems we don't fully understand, like Alzheimer's disease or aging.

For cryopreserving larger organs, we understand it.

We have to minimize cryopotechnocysticity, minimize ice formation, and so on.

So, it's more of an engineering problem.

And that makes me more confident.

And one of the things that I would predict is that we are going to develop human biostasis, reversible biostasis, long before we cure diseases of aging.

So, and that raises the question.

So, once we have human biostasis, people can be cryopreserved when they know they have a terminal condition and it's safe and it works.

What are we going to have?

Are we going to have massive

storage of patients with incurable diseases?

what what is it going to happen how bizarre if in the magical future the people who went into biostasis are woken up at the same time as the people who turned into raisins

and they go oh no my oh i just went to sleep uh until i solved my thing what what are you why do you look like oh my god that is bizarre that would seem unfair are you convinced would you

i have to say i mean i was quite

skeptical about it but but the way you describe it is um

i mean i still don't want it for me frankly but it sounds like there is going to be a point where this is a real conversation that we're having at like proper scientific discussion because at the moment I think it's just upside-down raisins um thank you very much to my guests Haley Campbell and Pedro Margelez

okay then Elspeth I hope we've answered your question uh that yes it is possible to freeze things and not kill them in the process, but maybe not humans yet.

Yeah, but in the magical future, Elspeth, all the problems will be solved and then we'll be able to do it.

And maybe raisins will become grapes again.

What a future that would be.

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