11. Freeze Me When I Die

When you die, would you want to be frozen so that one day you might be brought back to life? Listener Elspeth wants to know if that’s even possible. So Hannah and Dara embark on a quest to explore the chiling science of ‘cryobiology’: preserving living things at really low temperatures.

It turns out there are already thousands of people alive who were once suspended in antifreeze and stored in liquid nitrogen - when they were just a small clump of cells! There’s even a frog which can turn into a ‘frogsicle’ for months on end. But re-animating full size humans is a challenge no one has solved…yet. Will some miraculous nanotechnology of a distant future solve the problem?

Contributors:

Professor João Pedro de Magalhães: University of Birmingham
Hayley Campbell: Author and broadcaster
Professor Joyce Harper: UCL
Dr Hanane Hadj-Moussa: The Babraham Institute, Cambridge
Garrett Smyth: Cryonics UK

Producer: Ilan Goodman
Executive Producer: Alexandra Feachem
A BBC Studios Audio Production