Global worming?
Scientists recently revived microscopic creatures frozen for 46,000 years within the Siberian permafrost.
The traditional nematodes, higher often known as roundworms, are capable of shut their bodies down in unsuitable environments — a process called anabiosis.
After discovering them in a frozen squirrel burrow in 2018, scientists simply put the worms in water to awake them of their shut-down state.
When asked if humans frozen in time might be resurrected by similar means, one cryonics expert identified the differences in cryopreservation of humans and animals — but said technology may pave the way in which for “Encino Man” to make his triumphant return in 50-70 years.
“I don’t think that human metabolism might be radically restructured in order that we also go into anabiosis like animals. It’s probably easier to create recent, artificial bodies,” Valeriya Udalova — CEO of KrioRus, a Russian cryogenics company that claims to carry 94 frozen corpses at its base within the country’s capital — told MailOnline in a recent interview.
Udalova noted worms aren’t the one species that may undergo anabiosis, as the method extends to frogs and Siberian anglerfish.
But humans, she says, don’t have the identical capabilities.
At KrioRus, surgeons drain humans of blood before connecting them to a recent circulatory machine stuffed with “cryoprotectant solutions” to guard cells and tissues.
Deep-freezing procedures ideally begin inside just minutes of somebody being declared legally dead.
Bodies are frozen to 321°F.
Udalova explained that for humans to be resurrected, there would need to be major strides in medicine in addition to tissue engineering — something she thinks could occur in 50-70 years.
“Cryobiological laboratories are few, there aren’t any large ones in any respect,” she explained. “Even the famous laboratory ‘XXI Century Medicine’ is a small organization.”
She continued: “But even in such a deplorable situation, remarkable experiments have already been made, for instance, on reversible cryopreservation of a rat kidney using gas persufflation with nanoparticles and induction heating.”
Current technology is insufficient since cryoprotectant agents have “toxic” effects on the brain and body parts, in line with Dr. João Pedro de Magalhães, a Portuguese microbiologist.
“It can take huge scientific advances in areas like tissue engineering and regenerative medicine to make cryopreserved individuals alive and healthy again,” de Magalhães told Gizmodo in 2018.
But when successful, the method might be an “alternative to death.”
“Patients with terminal diseases, including children, could opt to be placed on cryostasis until a cure were discovered,” he explained.
“In a way, we’d have an alternative choice to death, which has profound philosophical, ethical and medical implications.”
