March 26, 2025 • 37 mins
Want to travel to a distant star? Or fast-forward to the future? Jorge chills with scientists to figure out if freezing your body (or just your brain) is the answer.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey, welcome to Science Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio. My
name is Jorge cham and today on the program, we're
going to be asking the question can you survive being
cryogenically frozen? Maybe you have a terminal disease and you
want to preserve your body until scientists can find a cure.
Or maybe you want to travel to the near star,
but you don't want to just stare out the window
for the whole twenty four trillion mile journey. Or maybe
(00:24):
you just want to see what the future is like
and we'd rather take a long nap until things got
more interesting. Well, you can do all those things if
you were able to freeze your body, But is it
really possible? What are scientists doing to make this a reality?
And most important, would you still be the same person
after you get thought out? To answer this question, we're
going to be talking to scientists and to someone who
(00:46):
actually freezes people for a living. It's a story that
involves billionaires, popsicle frogs, and ex Navy seals. So put
on your parkass, turn up your thermostat, because we are
answering the slippery as ice question, can you survive being
cryogenically frozen? I promise you the answer is pretty cool.
(01:07):
Enjoy Hey everyone, all right. Today's topic is a little controversial,
and the reason for that is that there are people
who have frozen their bodies in the hopes that they
might get revived later. There are several facilities in the
United States and in Europe that will freeze you your
whole body or even interest your head for a fee,
and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of humans who
(01:29):
have chosen to do that. Now we're gonna talk to
someone who works in one of these facilities, that is,
someone who freezes people for a living later in the program.
But first I wanted to make sure I understood the
science behind freezing biological matter, what actually happens to yourselves
once the temperature draws below freezing, and why is it
so dangerous. I was also curious to know if there
(01:51):
are any animals in nature that have figured out ways
to survive getting frozen. So I thought that the best
person to talk to us about this would be a
biologist who works in one of the coldest places on Earth.
Reached out to doctor Don Larson, who is an assistant
professor of biology and zoology at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks,
now you'll hear when I play the interview that I
(02:12):
get really surprised at the beginning of my chat with
doctor Larson. That's because I always thought I knew why
freezing biological matter destroys the things that get frozen. I
always thought that it was because when water freezes, it
turns to ice, and ice is less dense than water,
so when that ice forms, it expands and basically rips
the cell apart. But it turns out I've been totally wrong.
(02:35):
The real reason is something completely different. So here's my
chat with doctor Don Larson. Hi, doctor Larson, thanks so
much for talking with us.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Thank you for having me here.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
Now you're in Fairbanks, Alaska. Are you frozen right now?
Speaker 2 (02:51):
No, it's warmed up a little bit here. We just
got done with our last negative forty cold snap. Why
is it hard to survive being frozen? That is a
great question. So people tend to think when animals freeze,
when cells freeze, that there's this ice crushing event that
ice forms either around our cells and crushes it, or
ice goes into the cells and burst them. Freezing is
(03:13):
actually a desiccation event, though, so the first thing they
have to do before they even get all that ice
throughout their body is survived drying out.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
What you just blew my mind. That's totally different from
what I had heard.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
And that's it's very common. I have these conversations with
lots of different people, and everybody always thinks that it's
this mechanical crushing or bursting event. Well, that's like our
natural experience with ice. If we leave something in the freezer,
like a soda, we've all done that, right, what happens?
Those things explode, So it's very natural for us to
take that. Oh, if you put a soda in a freezer,
(03:49):
it bursts. Why won't the same thing happened to a cell?
Speaker 1 (03:52):
Wait, so can you go back a little bit and
just explain again how the dessiccation works. What's actually happening there.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Yeah, water's leaving the cell, so as things freeze, the
water outside the cell freezes, and as water turns to ice,
they're making these little hexagonal structures ice cubes connecting to
each other, and they don't want to interact with anything
that isn't water, So everything that isn't water gets pushed
out of that ice cube that's forming you mean between
(04:19):
the cells? Correct, all the ice is outside the cell,
and as that happens, solutes go up, so the sugars
and salts increase in concentration around that cell. So all
of a sudden, our cells are in salt water. It's
like if you throw a grape in a container of
salt and water. What does it do? It shrivels. It's
(04:40):
a desiccation event.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
Wait, it sucks the water out of the cells. Yes, oh,
and then that kills the cell. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
If there's not enough water in a cell, the cell
membranes will touch on the inside and that will cause
bursting of the cell.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
Okay, if you didn't follow that, that's okay. The main
point is that the real problem with freezing yourself is
that ice forms in the spaces between the cells, and
ice only wants to have water molecules in it, so
it pushes all the salts that are around and concentrates
them very close to the cells, which makes them shrivel
up and collapse. In other words, it's about cells suddenly
(05:18):
being in a two salty environment. Now, the reason I
was excited to talk to doctor Larson is that he
happens to be one of the scientists who in twenty
fourteen found something incredible about a type of frog called
a wood frog.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
So wood frogs are one of the most widely distributed
amphibians in North America. They're all the way down in
the Appalachians and Ohio, very far south, and they go
all the way up to the Arctic Ocean. They're very
far north and fairly far south. Wood frogs have a
unique ability that they can survive with seventy percent of
their body water frozen. This is really cool. We tried
(05:55):
to overwinter some frogs over two different years, so we
thought we would see a lot of die off. Our
wood frogs survive up to seven months frozen, and they
experienced temperatures down to negative sixteen celsius and none of
them died.
Speaker 3 (06:08):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
All the previous literature said, hey, wood frogs can survive
maybe down to negative five degrees celsius for a couple
weeks at most.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
So you were expecting them just to perish during the experiment.
But they survived.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
If we're expecting some loss, we didn't see any. That
was the impressive thing.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
What happens when these frogs freeze? Is it rock solid?
Is it squishy? What is it like?
Speaker 2 (06:31):
It's pretty firm, it's like a frozen filet, frozen fish,
anything like that. You might be able to bend it
a little bit, but if you bend it too much,
you're going to snap something off.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
Wow. Okay, So wood frogs can survive being frozen at
temperatures of minus eighteen degrees celsius or zero degrease fahrenheit
for up to seven months. And they're not the only
animals that can do it. Like your Larsen said that
there are a few other species of frogs that can
do it, some insects and a species of Siberian salamander
(07:02):
which can go down as far as minus forty degrees
celsius or minus forty degrees fahrenheit. But that's about it.
All other animals, even hibernating bears or squirrels, if you
freeze them, they're going to die. Even the fish that
swim in the Arctic Ocean or the penguins that live
in Antarctica, if we actually freeze them, they are not
(07:23):
coming back. So now the question is what's their secret?
How are these frogs surviving?
Speaker 2 (07:29):
They get super sweet.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
I know you like the frogs, doctor Larson, but what
do you mean?
Speaker 2 (07:36):
So what frogs do is they pack their cells with glucose,
sugar and urea, the precursor to urine.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
So what do you mean glucose like just regular sugar,
like table sugar.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
Yes, when they phrase, they increase their glucose concentrations one
hundred times greater, Yes, one hundred There's enough sugar in
that little wood frog liver for it to taste sweet
to us. So these wood frogs actually have quite big livers,
and within that liver we start glycogen glycogens, these long
chains of sugar. It's what makes meat taste sweet. It's
(08:07):
why people eat liver. But they convert all that glycogen
into glucose and then pump it.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
Throughout their body as fast as they can, and that
gets into the cells throughout the body. Right, And then
you said something triggers this mechanism. What is it? Just
like a survival switch.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
Yeah, and this is really unique for any animal that hibernates.
Bears fatten up before winter, right, birds prepare for migration.
Wood frogs wait, they react to winter instead of anticipate it.
And by reacting they use specifically I'm about to freeze
as their trigger. So they don't really do their winter
(08:45):
prep until freezing begins.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
H they're procrastinators like me very much. So how does
increasing the sugar help us?
Speaker 2 (08:55):
So we put that sugar in the cell to equal
out the saltiness and solu concentrations outside the cell. So
the inside of the cell no longer loses water. So
they have to tolerate high levels of sugar in their cell,
but they no longer have that water loss occurring, and
it's that water loss that they're trying to prevent.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
So wood frogs use a kind of anti freeze. They
produce a lot of sugar in the liver and then
the sugar fills up their cells and that creates a
super concentration that prevents the cells from drying up when
the ice forms around them. Now, the obvious next question
is could this work on other animals maybe humans? Well,
(09:37):
that's a fascinating adaptation that the frog has. Do you
think something like that could work for other animals? Like
if I take a rat and I injected with a
bunch of sugar, would it survive being frozen?
Speaker 2 (09:48):
Well, it won't survive the coma, the diabetic coma that
we'd give it first. And again, it's a lot of sugar.
If we in this tiny, little few gram frog. If
we put that much sugar into an adult human, we
would be in a diabetic coma a few times over.
Animals can't tolerate high levels of glucose. It interferes with
how proteins function and different things work in the cell,
(10:08):
and it kills us.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
What do the frogs do to survive that amount of sugar?
How come day don't get diabetic shock?
Speaker 2 (10:14):
Well, and they're very cold at this time. Their body
temperature is right around freezing, so they don't have very
high metabolism, and they don't do a lot when they're frozen. Now,
part of the way it prevents that diabotic shock is
also only making that glucose prior to freezing. And then
also they are a little bit more tolerant to those
high levels of glucose than say, we would be. If
(10:36):
we were to inject the amount of sugar that's just
in a frog, not even like the equivalent amount, just
the amount that's in that animal, it would kill us.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
Well, So being procrastinators saves them. Yes, So for the frogs,
how long can they survive being frozen? Like if I
take a bunch of frogs, freeze them, take them to Antarctica.
Leave them there. You know, one hundred years later can
someone come and defrost those frogs and they'll start hopping around.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
So probably not that long because as ice forms, it
recrystallizes and reforms. This is like freezer burn in your
fridge is the same thing. It's ice crystals moving around.
We know that wood frog can survive at least seven
months frozen. We don't know how much longer pass that.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
All right, So to recap, if you were a wood
frog or a Siberian salamander, or if you have a
high tolerance for extreme amounts of sugar, you could survive
being cryogenically frozen. I assume you are none of those things.
But fortunately scientists have been exploring a different way to
get around the problem. What happens when ice forms inside
(11:40):
of your body, and that's the technique being used right
now by the organizations that freeze people. So when we
come back, we're going to talk to someone who works
at one of these facilities. We're going to ask him
to explain this technology. So freeze don't go anywhere. We'll
be right back. You're listening to science stuff. Welcome back.
(12:04):
So if you do any research into the field of
cryonics or freezing people. You'll probably run into the name Alcore.
It's one of several organizations, some for profit, some nonprofit
in the US and around the world that will freeze
you for a fee. So for two hundred and twenty
thousand dollars, Alcore will freeze your whole body, or for
eighty thousand dollars they'll freeze just your head. Now I
(12:28):
got to talk to someone who actually works at Alcore,
and not just someone who works there. I talk to
the person in charge. James Arrowood is the CEO and
president of Alcore. He's an attorney by training and he
started his position in twenty twenty two. I got to
talk to him about what Alcore does, what technology they
used to freeze people, and about the controversy surrounding the
(12:50):
practice and business of giving people the hope of living
in the future. So here's my interview with James Arrowood.
Speaker 3 (12:58):
Hi, my name is James Errowood. I'm the president and
CEO of al Core Life Extension Foundation. It's a nonprofit
scientific research foundation, laboratory primarily in the space of long
term organ preservation. When I say organs, we do preserve
the whole human body. We preserve us the brain as well.
So people often think it's something real, spooky, but at
(13:19):
the end of the day, it's really what happens at
every medical school in the country every day.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
Would you describe as an industry or a field.
Speaker 3 (13:26):
It's an emerging technology. So if you have a medical
problem that can't be treated today, or if you need
to travel to distant space and you need to pause
metabolic activity in order to essentially live longer or survive
longer periods of time, then chrotus uses ultraical temperatures, just
like you see in nature to kind of pause the
cellular breakdown process that occurs in the body.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
What would you say is a vision or goal for
al core you're aiming for, well.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
In my lifetime, it's really about organ preservation. Look, we
talk about the brain, we talk about the whole body
as kind of an aspirational goal down the road. But
at the end of the day, you have to do
a pinky or you have to do a kidney before
you ever get to reviving the brain. You know, before
you ever the head transplant thing that people fixate on,
which I understand it's morbid and it's sallacious and It
(14:12):
gets a lot of attention, but on the day to
day that's not really what we're doing. We're doing these
regular experiments that involve the molecules of cells and what
that means, and really that's chemistry and it's biochemistry.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
Right, take me a step back. What's the goal here?
We're trying to preserve what would say.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
You'reserve for organ banking in my lifetime, that's what I
care about, because okay, look, if you've ever had a
friend or lost somebody who needed a kidney and or
had to be on an organ transplant waiting list, it's
a crapshoot and it's purely logistics that's the problem. Meaning,
if you have a match in New York and you're
in LA. Okay, so somebody dies in New York, that's
(14:52):
a donor match for you. You've got about six hours
to get yourself into the transplant hospital to get scrubbed
out for surgery. You get the surgeons together, get that
organ on a plane from New York to LA and
hope that it's viable enough by the time they cut
you open. Now, what if your perfect matches in London
and you're in LA. You're not getting it you're done.
(15:13):
It's not going to happen. You're gonna die too far, right,
it's too far. It's a logistics issue that's a little
bit different than what we're talking about. What we're talking
about is imagine a world where organs could be stored
like yoused to wear a steak, meaning it could be
in the freezer for four weeks or six weeks. All right. Well,
in the meantime, particularly with advances in artificial intelligence and supercomputing,
(15:36):
you could probably do neo perfect matches, meaning you can
actually match DNA to DNA kind of thing. And I'm
not smart enough, I'm not a scientist, and we employ
a lot of really good scientists and medical professionals, but
there's ways that you can actually kind of perfectly match
this stuff. The ultimate goal is that you could pause
people metabolically, and that has to do with space travel.
You need that to go to distant space. That's why
(15:57):
all these space guys are into this. If you read
about it, you hear about you know a number of
the world's billionaires, some of them may be confidential members
of Alcore that they're interested in this because you're gonna
have to pause your metabolism meaning aging.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
So billionaires are signing up for this. Notably Peter Thiel
has confirmed that he's an all core member. Now, what
does it mean to be a member?
Speaker 3 (16:20):
Right, crowd preservation member. So you agree that we get
to crowd preserve your body. You become part of the
experiment as it were. Okay, that's and the PaperWorks very explicit,
you know when people are like, oh, you're full of people.
You're doing no for not you have to sign sixty
plus pages okay, of tons of lawyer language and other
language that explicitly says this is experimental. This may never
(16:44):
work for you. So if you are convinced you know
that this is going to work for you, don't sign up.
I mean, it's a lottery ticket. And in terms of
it ever working, we don't know if it's going to work.
We think that the science someday absolutely should work, meaning
you're not violating the laws of physics by doing this.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
Let's say that I want to be a member. What's
the process? Because I have to do it while I'm alive.
Speaker 3 (17:06):
Right, generally speaking, there's some post more on, but really,
ideally you want to know ahead of time, and the
way we do that is it. For instance, you have
a terminal disease or terminal illness and you're a member.
We actually have what's called a watch list, and then
we have a standby team, and our team goes anywhere
in the world and it's medical professionals, it's former Navy seals,
(17:27):
military special forces. What. Yeah, they're training you know, the
logistics man. They're the best in the world at it.
So we're just using the military training to move bodies
and move people around quickly.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
Meaning if I'm in London, I have a terminal disease,
I want to be a member because I want to
believe in your mission.
Speaker 3 (17:41):
You're already signed up.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
Yeah, I'm also thinking, well, I'm going to die anyways,
maybe if I freeze my body there's some glimmer of
hope out there, and there's.
Speaker 3 (17:49):
Value to science. If it's if you never come back,
it's valuable because maybe your grandkids could come back someday
because you were one of the people that you know
help Oh right, right, it's called legacy. It's called legacy. Yeah,
so you want to be legacy part of this. But yeah,
we will send a team out to be bedside. Now,
a lot of hospitals don't know what we do, so
they're they're real hesitant about that. So if we can't
(18:09):
be bedside, we'll actually be in the hospital parking lot.
And as soon as you're declared den we don't declare death.
We don't do medical services. We don't touch somebody until
you know they've been declared dead. And then once their
body's released to us, which ideally is within minutes, then
they start that process. Yeah, there's a whole we have
(18:31):
like a cardiothoracic surgeon. We have what are called T
triple c R eighteen deltas, which is like a trauma surgeon.
But the reason that's relevant is they can access the crowdits.
They know how to access and perfuse the chemical very quickly.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
Right, you're doing that maybe right after the person.
Speaker 3 (18:48):
Yeah, you're starting lines as soon as possible. Yeah, it's
why then it's.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
And then you fly the person to your facility in a.
Speaker 3 (18:56):
Reg's right, that's right. And we're actually exploring opening a
facility and sweed in Europe for European folks. Anytime you
can cut the logistics the distance, then that's going to
help you know better outcomes. But yeah, so you sign up,
you have to sign a whole bunch of papers, you
have to get them notarized, and it's a whole process
because look, when people sign up, you're actually signing up
as an anatomical donation. This is very well, you know,
(19:19):
people don't understand how this works, and I'm trying to
educate the public because I think it's really for decades
the public wasn't understanding and they were really misunderstanding what
was going on.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
So those are the basics of alcore and the way
they pause or cryogenically freeze people is using a phenomenon
called vitrification. Basically, they replace all the water in your
body with a special solution that prevents ice from forming.
Here's how James Arrowood explains it. You used a different word,
vitor fix. What does that mean?
Speaker 3 (19:51):
Okay, So vitrification is the difference between cloudy ice and
clear ice. In vitrification, you're actually removing a bunch of
the water and you're using it almost a jelly. Like
you said, it's kind of a gel like consistency. It's
a very viscous, almost syrapy chemical something called polyethylene glycol
and that's a glycolic sugar that's basically from alcohol. You know,
(20:13):
it's not the good kind that you drink or anything
like that. It's not good for you.
Speaker 1 (20:17):
Wait, meaning you take a kidney or body and you
replace the water with the special goofy chemical.
Speaker 3 (20:23):
Right, the chemical pushes out the water. You have to
kind of what we call step ramp, so you actually
use a chemical at a lower kind of density or
a lower concentration of this chemical and you can kind
of ramp it up. The actual process that we do
is extraordinarily controlled. There's a team of people. There's a
scientist and there's medical people. You know, they're all around
(20:44):
a body, or they're all around ahead, you know, if
it's just the head. And we have computers and graphs
that in real time are showing the concentrations. And we
have these little tiny laser beam modules. I mean, it
is science fiction y in a way, right, And as
laser kind of shoots out into the fluid and measures
the concentration as it's going, and then it ramps up
(21:05):
very slowly to replace the water, so like pushes the
water out and replaces it with this jelly like chemical
that gets more and more concentrated, and it takes hours,
and it's going in through It's almost like when you
get an iv so it's getting perfused through the body
with a whole team of people around you for hours,
(21:26):
and then there's actually ways to tell when the body
has kind of reached a saturation point, so then you
can go into liquid nitrotal.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
Well, well, tell me about this liquid. It's special because
when you cool it, when you put it in the
liquid nitrogen, it doesn't crystallize like water. Right, So this
antifreezer cryer protected agent that mister Arrowood is talking about,
it is one of several special chemicals, usually sugar alcohols
like glycerl or polyethylene glycol that have been used since
(21:54):
the nineteen fifties to freeze things like sperm or even
human embryos for in vitro fertilization or IVF. And the
idea is that if you cool these chemicals down to
really low temperatures in just the right way, they don't
turn into ice, they don't crystallize, they just turn into
an amorphous solid like glass. So technically, if you're someone
(22:16):
who was born from a frozen embryo and in vitro fertilization,
then you have survived being cryogenically frozen. But this stuff
is expensive. How expensive?
Speaker 3 (22:27):
The chemicals we're talking about are unbelievably expensive. So for
your body, how tall are you about?
Speaker 1 (22:33):
I'll succeed. Yeah, yeah, what did.
Speaker 3 (22:36):
You look like? You're probably about one seventy.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
Five I don't know, yeah, exactly that, I'll davor.
Speaker 3 (22:42):
Okay. The point of it is, you're gonna cost me,
meaning Alcor, if we cover recover your body and you
sign up and your whole body patient member, you're going
to cost us probably forty to seventy thousand dollars just
for the price of the chemical, not including any of
the procedure, any of the machines, any of the.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
Staff, or the long term storage or the long.
Speaker 3 (23:06):
Term the liquid nitrogen bleed off rate over two hundred
years per cubic square foot has to be calculated for you,
and it is wild, right, So the costs of this
thing are just unreal. But that's emerging technology, you know
when you think about it, like the first Tesla roadster
was one hundred and fifty thousand dollars and it only
went you know, I don't know, ninety bals or something
(23:26):
per charge. Yeah, that's what science is and that's why
it costs so much. When people sign up, we crowdfund
it because we're not at university. We're not getting money
from the government every day to keep the lights on,
and it's expensive. So it's about two hundred and twenty
thousand dollars for whole body. Most people don't have two
hundred and twenty thousand. I don't have a spare of
two hundred plus thousand to do this. Everybody who signs
(23:49):
up we fund it with life insurance, so I actually
just as sign a portion of life insurance that I
already have that goes to outport to cover the costs.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
Yeah, I know what you're thinking. People are paying hundreds
of thousands of dollars from their life insurance to get
their bodies frozen. That gets controversial. I'll ask mister Arrowood
about this in a second, But first I was curious
to know why we're able to freeze things like human
embryos or sperm, but we can't freeze something more complex,
(24:18):
like a human body or a brain. Here's what he said.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
It's a question of scale. It works at the molecular
cellular level, the embryonic stage level, the egg level, the
sperm level.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
Right, I mean there are people who are alive today
and walking around that were frozen as embryos or eggs.
Speaker 3 (24:37):
Considerable number of people now and the next generation will
be even more. But here's the important thing from my
chair is that those people are not zombies. You can't
tell the difference that anybody knows of. You know, you
got people sitting next to you at the restaurant that
have fully functioning brains that go to university, get degrees.
They're really smart people, and they were born via ibs.
They were at one point in their existence, they were
(25:00):
and liquid nitrogen. Right, Oh, it works. And the hard
part is is as you get to multi cellular structures
that are beyond the embryonic stage, so an organ that
has to function and all these cells have to kind
of line up perfectly. And you know, if you have
a damage in one layer of that organ, well that
damage may you know, destroy the whole function of the organ.
(25:22):
You look at the brain. Your brain they think has
billions or trillions of what are called neural synaptic connections,
these protein bridges almost like webbing. Now, imagine a spider web.
How many fracture points could there be in a spider
web a lot, a lot, any number, and then you
multiply that times a billion, that's your brain. So freezing
the brain or really vitrifying the brain presents any number
(25:45):
of greater challenges than doing an embryo.
Speaker 1 (25:47):
The brain is very fragile, right Like, it's like this
huge webbing of super thin connections that are basically encased
in jelly, right.
Speaker 3 (25:56):
Yes, and you want to keep that jelly in a
motle that's going to cause the least amount of potential
cracking or damage to those structures.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
So things get more complicated as you go from individual
cells to organs, but there has been progress. In twenty
twenty three, a group of scientists and engineers from the
University of Minnesota publish the paper where they showed that
they could take the kidney from a rat, freeze it
using these anti freeze glucose alcohols, keep the kidney in
the freezer for one hundred days, thaw it out, put
(26:28):
it in another rat, and then have that rat survive
the kidney still worked.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
Now.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
Their secret here is pretty cool. The scientists and engineers
mixed in a bunch of iron nanoparticles or iron filings
with the anti freeze and then when it was time
to defrost the kidney, they use basically a magnet to
vibrate those iron filings so that the kidney heated up
and thaw it out evenly. Now, a brain is much
(26:54):
more complicated than a kidney, as mister Arrowood pointed out.
So a little later in the program, we're going to
talk to a neuroscientist who's going to give us his
opinion on whether a brain can be frozen. But first
I wanted to know how mister Aarrowood would respond to
the claims the scientists out there who say that freezing
a human body and having it survive is impossible. Here's
(27:15):
what he said.
Speaker 3 (27:16):
Look, any emerging technology, it requires visionaries. It requires people
who fifty years ago thought what if we could do this,
And of course everybody says, no, no, that's crazy, that
science fiction. And then they go out and do it.
And then all of a sudden you have something that
everybody thought was impossible. And I'll give you an example.
This device right here, this is a cell phone. I mean,
(27:36):
you could watch Star Trek. So the best Hollywood science
fiction writers in the universe could not envision a future
where you could actually send a video in real time
in Pakistan or wherever in real time. So it's those
things that people don't envision that takes one or two visionaries,
usually scientists in the back room somewhere that you often
don't even hear about. So the people that are out
(27:59):
there that say this can never be done, good, don't
ever try it, don't sign up, don't be involved. But
don't sit there and tell me that something I'm doing
or that we're trying to do that doesn't violate the
laws of science or physics can never be done because
that just means you don't have the vision for it.
And that's fine if you've got full disclosure. People sign
up and want to do this, that's a question of
free will. That's a question of signing up for something
(28:21):
knowing what they're doing, knowing why they want to do it.
They want a legacy. They know that they might be
that first heart transplant patient who's only going to live
two weeks if it never works at all. They know that, Okay,
but they did it. That guy who did that, how
many lives did he save? For people who have now
had a heart transplant that are living decades. Somebody had
to take that hit, and that person stood up and said, Okay,
(28:42):
I'm gonna take that hit. This is an adult's ultimate
last wish. It is their free will, last wish to
be preserved in this way and to contribute to the
science in this way.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
All right, when we come back, we're gonna talk to
my friend and neuroscientist, doctor Dwayne Godwin, and he's gonna
tell us whether he thinks the brain is the ultimate
limit of what we can freeze, and whether he would
ever freeze his own brain. So stay with us, you're
listening to science stuff. Will be right back, Welcome back,
(29:19):
all right. So, if you are a special kind of
frog or a Siberian salamander, or have an unnatural tolerance
for high levels of sugar, you can survive being cryogenically frozen.
And scientists have apparently been able to freeze and reactivate
a rad kidney, which is very promising for maybe doing
this with human organs in the future. But the big
(29:39):
obstacle to freezing the whole body seems to be freezing
the brain. So the weigh in on this idea is
my friend, neuroscientist, doctor Dwyane Godwin. Doctor Godwin is a
professor of translational neuroscience at Wake Forest University and doctor
Godwin and I recently wrote a book together called Out
of Your Mind, which is a great introduction to brain signs.
(30:02):
You should check it out. But I asked Dayne to
give us some context about the possibility of freezing brain cells.
This is what he said.
Speaker 4 (30:11):
Maybe it's good to start with what happens to brain
cells when the heart stops, so you know, if someone
dies or if their heart is stopped artificially, you know
what is going on. So what we know about that
is that brain cells can start dying within about three
to five minutes, and there are some exceptions that I'll
get to. Damage starts at about six minutes. What happened
(30:34):
to this brain cells a lot of things. So cells
start to self destruct, so there are things called program
cell death molecules that actually start taking the brain apart.
There's also this aspect of where brain cells will start
to take on water and essentially explode. So about ten
minutes in without oxygen must brain cells have suffered a
(30:57):
catastrophic or really severe minute damage. Now the exception of
that is temperature, because temperature can affect that timeline significantly.
Speaker 3 (31:09):
Where if you cool the brain down.
Speaker 4 (31:11):
You can extend the window of survival by slowing down
all this cellular metabolism.
Speaker 1 (31:16):
But it seems like that's a big problem for this
cryogenics technology. First of all, that once your heart stops,
you only have a few minutes before your brain cells
starts dying. And so any sort of scheme to replace
all the liquids in your body, that's going to be
a challenge, right because your brain is going to start
to die basically.
Speaker 4 (31:32):
Yeah, yeah, So if you think about it, it's a
massive problem. You know, we have eighty six billion neurons,
and it's not like you can just dip our huge
human brains into a vat of these chemicals and it
will preserve them. What has to happen is that you
have to do perfusion where you're actually using the arteries
(31:52):
and veins to actually get the cryopreservative into these cells.
And so that's not going to happen immediately. I died
right now, Even if I were ready, it would be
probably many hours before I would even be in a
position to be able to get perfused with these preservatives
that would store my brain. Yeah, that would mean that
(32:13):
I would have some significant brain damage before I was preserved.
Speaker 1 (32:16):
Yeah, Or like if you were going off into space
on a long journey, you'd have to stop your heart
and you would only have a few minutes before your
brain still start dying.
Speaker 4 (32:24):
That's right, And then you would have to get this
stuff in. That would have to happen almost perfectly for
a brain to survive this process intact.
Speaker 1 (32:33):
Well, let's say that somehow we're able to replace the
water and quickly enough before cells start dying. Do you
think the brain would survive that?
Speaker 4 (32:41):
I think in principle it could. So there are these
things called brain organoids that are essentially a little tiny
brain like things that are made from stem cells. And
there's been some success in freezing those kinds of complex
structures and then bringing them back and demonstrating that they
still have function. So there's some signs that this sort
(33:02):
of thing could be feasible. Whether that means it's practical
is another issue.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
Can you talk to us a little bit about the
fragility of brain connections and brain webs.
Speaker 4 (33:13):
So the other thing about the brain is each individual
synapse is really complex and a little world onto itself.
There are literally thousands of proteins in a single synapse,
so we're not only talking about damage to cells, but
you could also be doing damage to these delicate structures
and proteins that help make up individual synapses. So it's
(33:36):
not really clear that all of that would survive, and
there are tens of thousands of these in a standard neuron.
Generally speaking, it is a very delicate system. So yes,
you could definitely see a scenario where cryopreservation can preserve
maybe ninety nine percent of your brain cells, but there
could still be massive changes based on per of this
(34:00):
delicate balance of proteins at the synapse. So simply having
something that looks like a brain, it doesn't necessarily mean
that you have a functioning brain.
Speaker 1 (34:10):
I see, what about the thawing process. Let's say I
freeze the brain and I thought it out. Can the
brain just kind of kick start back up like a
computer just turned back on?
Speaker 4 (34:19):
Not really. You know, the same concern with suddenly trying
to freeze everything at once and being sure that the
metabolism is adapting appropriately to cryo preservation would be true
in reverse. Sell death and sell stress is very real
and brain cells need time to adapt to this new temperature.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
Yeah, Well, last question, Dwayne, Let's say you are at
the end of your life, would you freeze your brain?
Speaker 4 (34:46):
I don't think so. There was a time when I thought, yeah,
that would be cool. But you know, part of it
is philosophical. What does it mean that I continue?
Speaker 3 (34:55):
Me?
Speaker 4 (34:55):
Continuing means a lot to me. But would I want
to cont you if I thought I was going to
be eighty percent of me? You know, I think that's
what it boils down to. So you know, if you
ask me this question in ten years and the process
is worked out, I might give you a different answer.
But as it is right now, I would say, you know,
we're not quite ready, and you've got to be very
(35:18):
careful because it's possible to get in love with that concept,
the idea of extending our existence, you know, possibly forever.
But one of the things we actually talked about in
the book, what does that do to our society if
all of the old people just hang around forever with
their old ideas about how to do things, is that
actually good for us as a society? You know, I
(35:40):
don't have the answer to that. I'm just simply asking
the question.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
So there you have it. The answer to the question
can you survive being cryogenically frozen is that someone us
already have. If you were born from IVF, then you
were frozen at some point. And it seems possible that
we might be able to freeze organs like kidneys or
livers for things like organ banking and organ transplants. But
the question of whether you can freeze a whole grown
(36:05):
up body seems to hinge on the question of whether
you can ever freeze and successfully thaw out the brain.
It doesn't seem like it's possible right now, but there
are people working on it, so for now, if you
have dreams of traveling to distant stars or living in
the future, you might want to put those dreams on ice.
Thanks for joining us, See you next time You've been
(36:29):
listening to Science Stuff production of iHeartRadio written and produced
by me or Hitcham, executive producer Jerry Rowland, an audio
engineer and mixer Ksey peckrom and you can follow me
on social media. Just search for PhD Comics and the
name of your favorite platform. Be sure to subscribe to
Sign Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
(36:49):
you get your podcasts, and please tell your friends We'll
be back next Wednesday with another episode
Hey, welcome to Science Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio. My
name is Jorge cham and today on the program, we're
going to be asking the question can you survive being
cryogenically frozen? Maybe you have a terminal disease and you
want to preserve your body until scientists can find a cure.
Or maybe you want to travel to the near star,
but you don't want to just stare out the window
for the whole twenty four trillion mile journey. Or maybe
(00:24):
you just want to see what the future is like
and we'd rather take a long nap until things got
more interesting. Well, you can do all those things if
you were able to freeze your body, But is it
really possible? What are scientists doing to make this a reality?
And most important, would you still be the same person
after you get thought out? To answer this question, we're
going to be talking to scientists and to someone who
(00:46):
actually freezes people for a living. It's a story that
involves billionaires, popsicle frogs, and ex Navy seals. So put
on your parkass, turn up your thermostat, because we are
answering the slippery as ice question, can you survive being
cryogenically frozen? I promise you the answer is pretty cool.
(01:07):
Enjoy Hey everyone, all right. Today's topic is a little controversial,
and the reason for that is that there are people
who have frozen their bodies in the hopes that they
might get revived later. There are several facilities in the
United States and in Europe that will freeze you your
whole body or even interest your head for a fee,
and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of humans who
(01:29):
have chosen to do that. Now we're gonna talk to
someone who works in one of these facilities, that is,
someone who freezes people for a living later in the program.
But first I wanted to make sure I understood the
science behind freezing biological matter, what actually happens to yourselves
once the temperature draws below freezing, and why is it
so dangerous. I was also curious to know if there
(01:51):
are any animals in nature that have figured out ways
to survive getting frozen. So I thought that the best
person to talk to us about this would be a
biologist who works in one of the coldest places on Earth.
Reached out to doctor Don Larson, who is an assistant
professor of biology and zoology at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks,
now you'll hear when I play the interview that I
(02:12):
get really surprised at the beginning of my chat with
doctor Larson. That's because I always thought I knew why
freezing biological matter destroys the things that get frozen. I
always thought that it was because when water freezes, it
turns to ice, and ice is less dense than water,
so when that ice forms, it expands and basically rips
the cell apart. But it turns out I've been totally wrong.
(02:35):
The real reason is something completely different. So here's my
chat with doctor Don Larson. Hi, doctor Larson, thanks so
much for talking with us.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Thank you for having me here.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
Now you're in Fairbanks, Alaska. Are you frozen right now?
Speaker 2 (02:51):
No, it's warmed up a little bit here. We just
got done with our last negative forty cold snap. Why
is it hard to survive being frozen? That is a
great question. So people tend to think when animals freeze,
when cells freeze, that there's this ice crushing event that
ice forms either around our cells and crushes it, or
ice goes into the cells and burst them. Freezing is
(03:13):
actually a desiccation event, though, so the first thing they
have to do before they even get all that ice
throughout their body is survived drying out.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
What you just blew my mind. That's totally different from
what I had heard.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
And that's it's very common. I have these conversations with
lots of different people, and everybody always thinks that it's
this mechanical crushing or bursting event. Well, that's like our
natural experience with ice. If we leave something in the freezer,
like a soda, we've all done that, right, what happens?
Those things explode, So it's very natural for us to
take that. Oh, if you put a soda in a freezer,
(03:49):
it bursts. Why won't the same thing happened to a cell?
Speaker 1 (03:52):
Wait, so can you go back a little bit and
just explain again how the dessiccation works. What's actually happening there.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Yeah, water's leaving the cell, so as things freeze, the
water outside the cell freezes, and as water turns to ice,
they're making these little hexagonal structures ice cubes connecting to
each other, and they don't want to interact with anything
that isn't water, So everything that isn't water gets pushed
out of that ice cube that's forming you mean between
(04:19):
the cells? Correct, all the ice is outside the cell,
and as that happens, solutes go up, so the sugars
and salts increase in concentration around that cell. So all
of a sudden, our cells are in salt water. It's
like if you throw a grape in a container of
salt and water. What does it do? It shrivels. It's
(04:40):
a desiccation event.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
Wait, it sucks the water out of the cells. Yes, oh,
and then that kills the cell. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
If there's not enough water in a cell, the cell
membranes will touch on the inside and that will cause
bursting of the cell.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
Okay, if you didn't follow that, that's okay. The main
point is that the real problem with freezing yourself is
that ice forms in the spaces between the cells, and
ice only wants to have water molecules in it, so
it pushes all the salts that are around and concentrates
them very close to the cells, which makes them shrivel
up and collapse. In other words, it's about cells suddenly
(05:18):
being in a two salty environment. Now, the reason I
was excited to talk to doctor Larson is that he
happens to be one of the scientists who in twenty
fourteen found something incredible about a type of frog called
a wood frog.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
So wood frogs are one of the most widely distributed
amphibians in North America. They're all the way down in
the Appalachians and Ohio, very far south, and they go
all the way up to the Arctic Ocean. They're very
far north and fairly far south. Wood frogs have a
unique ability that they can survive with seventy percent of
their body water frozen. This is really cool. We tried
(05:55):
to overwinter some frogs over two different years, so we
thought we would see a lot of die off. Our
wood frogs survive up to seven months frozen, and they
experienced temperatures down to negative sixteen celsius and none of
them died.
Speaker 3 (06:08):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
All the previous literature said, hey, wood frogs can survive
maybe down to negative five degrees celsius for a couple
weeks at most.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
So you were expecting them just to perish during the experiment.
But they survived.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
If we're expecting some loss, we didn't see any. That
was the impressive thing.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
What happens when these frogs freeze? Is it rock solid?
Is it squishy? What is it like?
Speaker 2 (06:31):
It's pretty firm, it's like a frozen filet, frozen fish,
anything like that. You might be able to bend it
a little bit, but if you bend it too much,
you're going to snap something off.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
Wow. Okay, So wood frogs can survive being frozen at
temperatures of minus eighteen degrees celsius or zero degrease fahrenheit
for up to seven months. And they're not the only
animals that can do it. Like your Larsen said that
there are a few other species of frogs that can
do it, some insects and a species of Siberian salamander
(07:02):
which can go down as far as minus forty degrees
celsius or minus forty degrees fahrenheit. But that's about it.
All other animals, even hibernating bears or squirrels, if you
freeze them, they're going to die. Even the fish that
swim in the Arctic Ocean or the penguins that live
in Antarctica, if we actually freeze them, they are not
(07:23):
coming back. So now the question is what's their secret?
How are these frogs surviving?
Speaker 2 (07:29):
They get super sweet.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
I know you like the frogs, doctor Larson, but what
do you mean?
Speaker 2 (07:36):
So what frogs do is they pack their cells with glucose,
sugar and urea, the precursor to urine.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
So what do you mean glucose like just regular sugar,
like table sugar.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
Yes, when they phrase, they increase their glucose concentrations one
hundred times greater, Yes, one hundred There's enough sugar in
that little wood frog liver for it to taste sweet
to us. So these wood frogs actually have quite big livers,
and within that liver we start glycogen glycogens, these long
chains of sugar. It's what makes meat taste sweet. It's
(08:07):
why people eat liver. But they convert all that glycogen
into glucose and then pump it.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
Throughout their body as fast as they can, and that
gets into the cells throughout the body. Right, And then
you said something triggers this mechanism. What is it? Just
like a survival switch.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
Yeah, and this is really unique for any animal that hibernates.
Bears fatten up before winter, right, birds prepare for migration.
Wood frogs wait, they react to winter instead of anticipate it.
And by reacting they use specifically I'm about to freeze
as their trigger. So they don't really do their winter
(08:45):
prep until freezing begins.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
H they're procrastinators like me very much. So how does
increasing the sugar help us?
Speaker 2 (08:55):
So we put that sugar in the cell to equal
out the saltiness and solu concentrations outside the cell. So
the inside of the cell no longer loses water. So
they have to tolerate high levels of sugar in their cell,
but they no longer have that water loss occurring, and
it's that water loss that they're trying to prevent.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
So wood frogs use a kind of anti freeze. They
produce a lot of sugar in the liver and then
the sugar fills up their cells and that creates a
super concentration that prevents the cells from drying up when
the ice forms around them. Now, the obvious next question
is could this work on other animals maybe humans? Well,
(09:37):
that's a fascinating adaptation that the frog has. Do you
think something like that could work for other animals? Like
if I take a rat and I injected with a
bunch of sugar, would it survive being frozen?
Speaker 2 (09:48):
Well, it won't survive the coma, the diabetic coma that
we'd give it first. And again, it's a lot of sugar.
If we in this tiny, little few gram frog. If
we put that much sugar into an adult human, we
would be in a diabetic coma a few times over.
Animals can't tolerate high levels of glucose. It interferes with
how proteins function and different things work in the cell,
(10:08):
and it kills us.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
What do the frogs do to survive that amount of sugar?
How come day don't get diabetic shock?
Speaker 2 (10:14):
Well, and they're very cold at this time. Their body
temperature is right around freezing, so they don't have very
high metabolism, and they don't do a lot when they're frozen. Now,
part of the way it prevents that diabotic shock is
also only making that glucose prior to freezing. And then
also they are a little bit more tolerant to those
high levels of glucose than say, we would be. If
(10:36):
we were to inject the amount of sugar that's just
in a frog, not even like the equivalent amount, just
the amount that's in that animal, it would kill us.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
Well, So being procrastinators saves them. Yes, So for the frogs,
how long can they survive being frozen? Like if I
take a bunch of frogs, freeze them, take them to Antarctica.
Leave them there. You know, one hundred years later can
someone come and defrost those frogs and they'll start hopping around.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
So probably not that long because as ice forms, it
recrystallizes and reforms. This is like freezer burn in your
fridge is the same thing. It's ice crystals moving around.
We know that wood frog can survive at least seven
months frozen. We don't know how much longer pass that.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
All right, So to recap, if you were a wood
frog or a Siberian salamander, or if you have a
high tolerance for extreme amounts of sugar, you could survive
being cryogenically frozen. I assume you are none of those things.
But fortunately scientists have been exploring a different way to
get around the problem. What happens when ice forms inside
(11:40):
of your body, and that's the technique being used right
now by the organizations that freeze people. So when we
come back, we're going to talk to someone who works
at one of these facilities. We're going to ask him
to explain this technology. So freeze don't go anywhere. We'll
be right back. You're listening to science stuff. Welcome back.
(12:04):
So if you do any research into the field of
cryonics or freezing people. You'll probably run into the name Alcore.
It's one of several organizations, some for profit, some nonprofit
in the US and around the world that will freeze
you for a fee. So for two hundred and twenty
thousand dollars, Alcore will freeze your whole body, or for
eighty thousand dollars they'll freeze just your head. Now I
(12:28):
got to talk to someone who actually works at Alcore,
and not just someone who works there. I talk to
the person in charge. James Arrowood is the CEO and
president of Alcore. He's an attorney by training and he
started his position in twenty twenty two. I got to
talk to him about what Alcore does, what technology they
used to freeze people, and about the controversy surrounding the
(12:50):
practice and business of giving people the hope of living
in the future. So here's my interview with James Arrowood.
Speaker 3 (12:58):
Hi, my name is James Errowood. I'm the president and
CEO of al Core Life Extension Foundation. It's a nonprofit
scientific research foundation, laboratory primarily in the space of long
term organ preservation. When I say organs, we do preserve
the whole human body. We preserve us the brain as well.
So people often think it's something real, spooky, but at
(13:19):
the end of the day, it's really what happens at
every medical school in the country every day.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
Would you describe as an industry or a field.
Speaker 3 (13:26):
It's an emerging technology. So if you have a medical
problem that can't be treated today, or if you need
to travel to distant space and you need to pause
metabolic activity in order to essentially live longer or survive
longer periods of time, then chrotus uses ultraical temperatures, just
like you see in nature to kind of pause the
cellular breakdown process that occurs in the body.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
What would you say is a vision or goal for
al core you're aiming for, well.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
In my lifetime, it's really about organ preservation. Look, we
talk about the brain, we talk about the whole body
as kind of an aspirational goal down the road. But
at the end of the day, you have to do
a pinky or you have to do a kidney before
you ever get to reviving the brain. You know, before
you ever the head transplant thing that people fixate on,
which I understand it's morbid and it's sallacious and It
(14:12):
gets a lot of attention, but on the day to
day that's not really what we're doing. We're doing these
regular experiments that involve the molecules of cells and what
that means, and really that's chemistry and it's biochemistry.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
Right, take me a step back. What's the goal here?
We're trying to preserve what would say.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
You'reserve for organ banking in my lifetime, that's what I
care about, because okay, look, if you've ever had a
friend or lost somebody who needed a kidney and or
had to be on an organ transplant waiting list, it's
a crapshoot and it's purely logistics that's the problem. Meaning,
if you have a match in New York and you're
in LA. Okay, so somebody dies in New York, that's
(14:52):
a donor match for you. You've got about six hours
to get yourself into the transplant hospital to get scrubbed
out for surgery. You get the surgeons together, get that
organ on a plane from New York to LA and
hope that it's viable enough by the time they cut
you open. Now, what if your perfect matches in London
and you're in LA. You're not getting it you're done.
(15:13):
It's not going to happen. You're gonna die too far, right,
it's too far. It's a logistics issue that's a little
bit different than what we're talking about. What we're talking
about is imagine a world where organs could be stored
like yoused to wear a steak, meaning it could be
in the freezer for four weeks or six weeks. All right. Well,
in the meantime, particularly with advances in artificial intelligence and supercomputing,
(15:36):
you could probably do neo perfect matches, meaning you can
actually match DNA to DNA kind of thing. And I'm
not smart enough, I'm not a scientist, and we employ
a lot of really good scientists and medical professionals, but
there's ways that you can actually kind of perfectly match
this stuff. The ultimate goal is that you could pause
people metabolically, and that has to do with space travel.
You need that to go to distant space. That's why
(15:57):
all these space guys are into this. If you read
about it, you hear about you know a number of
the world's billionaires, some of them may be confidential members
of Alcore that they're interested in this because you're gonna
have to pause your metabolism meaning aging.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
So billionaires are signing up for this. Notably Peter Thiel
has confirmed that he's an all core member. Now, what
does it mean to be a member?
Speaker 3 (16:20):
Right, crowd preservation member. So you agree that we get
to crowd preserve your body. You become part of the
experiment as it were. Okay, that's and the PaperWorks very explicit,
you know when people are like, oh, you're full of people.
You're doing no for not you have to sign sixty
plus pages okay, of tons of lawyer language and other
language that explicitly says this is experimental. This may never
(16:44):
work for you. So if you are convinced you know
that this is going to work for you, don't sign up.
I mean, it's a lottery ticket. And in terms of
it ever working, we don't know if it's going to work.
We think that the science someday absolutely should work, meaning
you're not violating the laws of physics by doing this.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
Let's say that I want to be a member. What's
the process? Because I have to do it while I'm alive.
Speaker 3 (17:06):
Right, generally speaking, there's some post more on, but really,
ideally you want to know ahead of time, and the
way we do that is it. For instance, you have
a terminal disease or terminal illness and you're a member.
We actually have what's called a watch list, and then
we have a standby team, and our team goes anywhere
in the world and it's medical professionals, it's former Navy seals,
(17:27):
military special forces. What. Yeah, they're training you know, the
logistics man. They're the best in the world at it.
So we're just using the military training to move bodies
and move people around quickly.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
Meaning if I'm in London, I have a terminal disease,
I want to be a member because I want to
believe in your mission.
Speaker 3 (17:41):
You're already signed up.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
Yeah, I'm also thinking, well, I'm going to die anyways,
maybe if I freeze my body there's some glimmer of
hope out there, and there's.
Speaker 3 (17:49):
Value to science. If it's if you never come back,
it's valuable because maybe your grandkids could come back someday
because you were one of the people that you know
help Oh right, right, it's called legacy. It's called legacy. Yeah,
so you want to be legacy part of this. But yeah,
we will send a team out to be bedside. Now,
a lot of hospitals don't know what we do, so
they're they're real hesitant about that. So if we can't
(18:09):
be bedside, we'll actually be in the hospital parking lot.
And as soon as you're declared den we don't declare death.
We don't do medical services. We don't touch somebody until
you know they've been declared dead. And then once their
body's released to us, which ideally is within minutes, then
they start that process. Yeah, there's a whole we have
(18:31):
like a cardiothoracic surgeon. We have what are called T
triple c R eighteen deltas, which is like a trauma surgeon.
But the reason that's relevant is they can access the crowdits.
They know how to access and perfuse the chemical very quickly.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
Right, you're doing that maybe right after the person.
Speaker 3 (18:48):
Yeah, you're starting lines as soon as possible. Yeah, it's
why then it's.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
And then you fly the person to your facility in a.
Speaker 3 (18:56):
Reg's right, that's right. And we're actually exploring opening a
facility and sweed in Europe for European folks. Anytime you
can cut the logistics the distance, then that's going to
help you know better outcomes. But yeah, so you sign up,
you have to sign a whole bunch of papers, you
have to get them notarized, and it's a whole process
because look, when people sign up, you're actually signing up
as an anatomical donation. This is very well, you know,
(19:19):
people don't understand how this works, and I'm trying to
educate the public because I think it's really for decades
the public wasn't understanding and they were really misunderstanding what
was going on.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
So those are the basics of alcore and the way
they pause or cryogenically freeze people is using a phenomenon
called vitrification. Basically, they replace all the water in your
body with a special solution that prevents ice from forming.
Here's how James Arrowood explains it. You used a different word,
vitor fix. What does that mean?
Speaker 3 (19:51):
Okay, So vitrification is the difference between cloudy ice and
clear ice. In vitrification, you're actually removing a bunch of
the water and you're using it almost a jelly. Like
you said, it's kind of a gel like consistency. It's
a very viscous, almost syrapy chemical something called polyethylene glycol
and that's a glycolic sugar that's basically from alcohol. You know,
(20:13):
it's not the good kind that you drink or anything
like that. It's not good for you.
Speaker 1 (20:17):
Wait, meaning you take a kidney or body and you
replace the water with the special goofy chemical.
Speaker 3 (20:23):
Right, the chemical pushes out the water. You have to
kind of what we call step ramp, so you actually
use a chemical at a lower kind of density or
a lower concentration of this chemical and you can kind
of ramp it up. The actual process that we do
is extraordinarily controlled. There's a team of people. There's a
scientist and there's medical people. You know, they're all around
(20:44):
a body, or they're all around ahead, you know, if
it's just the head. And we have computers and graphs
that in real time are showing the concentrations. And we
have these little tiny laser beam modules. I mean, it
is science fiction y in a way, right, And as
laser kind of shoots out into the fluid and measures
the concentration as it's going, and then it ramps up
(21:05):
very slowly to replace the water, so like pushes the
water out and replaces it with this jelly like chemical
that gets more and more concentrated, and it takes hours,
and it's going in through It's almost like when you
get an iv so it's getting perfused through the body
with a whole team of people around you for hours,
(21:26):
and then there's actually ways to tell when the body
has kind of reached a saturation point, so then you
can go into liquid nitrotal.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
Well, well, tell me about this liquid. It's special because
when you cool it, when you put it in the
liquid nitrogen, it doesn't crystallize like water. Right, So this
antifreezer cryer protected agent that mister Arrowood is talking about,
it is one of several special chemicals, usually sugar alcohols
like glycerl or polyethylene glycol that have been used since
(21:54):
the nineteen fifties to freeze things like sperm or even
human embryos for in vitro fertilization or IVF. And the
idea is that if you cool these chemicals down to
really low temperatures in just the right way, they don't
turn into ice, they don't crystallize, they just turn into
an amorphous solid like glass. So technically, if you're someone
(22:16):
who was born from a frozen embryo and in vitro fertilization,
then you have survived being cryogenically frozen. But this stuff
is expensive. How expensive?
Speaker 3 (22:27):
The chemicals we're talking about are unbelievably expensive. So for
your body, how tall are you about?
Speaker 1 (22:33):
I'll succeed. Yeah, yeah, what did.
Speaker 3 (22:36):
You look like? You're probably about one seventy.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
Five I don't know, yeah, exactly that, I'll davor.
Speaker 3 (22:42):
Okay. The point of it is, you're gonna cost me,
meaning Alcor, if we cover recover your body and you
sign up and your whole body patient member, you're going
to cost us probably forty to seventy thousand dollars just
for the price of the chemical, not including any of
the procedure, any of the machines, any of the.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
Staff, or the long term storage or the long.
Speaker 3 (23:06):
Term the liquid nitrogen bleed off rate over two hundred
years per cubic square foot has to be calculated for you,
and it is wild, right, So the costs of this
thing are just unreal. But that's emerging technology, you know
when you think about it, like the first Tesla roadster
was one hundred and fifty thousand dollars and it only
went you know, I don't know, ninety bals or something
(23:26):
per charge. Yeah, that's what science is and that's why
it costs so much. When people sign up, we crowdfund
it because we're not at university. We're not getting money
from the government every day to keep the lights on,
and it's expensive. So it's about two hundred and twenty
thousand dollars for whole body. Most people don't have two
hundred and twenty thousand. I don't have a spare of
two hundred plus thousand to do this. Everybody who signs
(23:49):
up we fund it with life insurance, so I actually
just as sign a portion of life insurance that I
already have that goes to outport to cover the costs.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
Yeah, I know what you're thinking. People are paying hundreds
of thousands of dollars from their life insurance to get
their bodies frozen. That gets controversial. I'll ask mister Arrowood
about this in a second, But first I was curious
to know why we're able to freeze things like human
embryos or sperm, but we can't freeze something more complex,
(24:18):
like a human body or a brain. Here's what he said.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
It's a question of scale. It works at the molecular
cellular level, the embryonic stage level, the egg level, the
sperm level.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
Right, I mean there are people who are alive today
and walking around that were frozen as embryos or eggs.
Speaker 3 (24:37):
Considerable number of people now and the next generation will
be even more. But here's the important thing from my
chair is that those people are not zombies. You can't
tell the difference that anybody knows of. You know, you
got people sitting next to you at the restaurant that
have fully functioning brains that go to university, get degrees.
They're really smart people, and they were born via ibs.
They were at one point in their existence, they were
(25:00):
and liquid nitrogen. Right, Oh, it works. And the hard
part is is as you get to multi cellular structures
that are beyond the embryonic stage, so an organ that
has to function and all these cells have to kind
of line up perfectly. And you know, if you have
a damage in one layer of that organ, well that
damage may you know, destroy the whole function of the organ.
(25:22):
You look at the brain. Your brain they think has
billions or trillions of what are called neural synaptic connections,
these protein bridges almost like webbing. Now, imagine a spider web.
How many fracture points could there be in a spider
web a lot, a lot, any number, and then you
multiply that times a billion, that's your brain. So freezing
the brain or really vitrifying the brain presents any number
(25:45):
of greater challenges than doing an embryo.
Speaker 1 (25:47):
The brain is very fragile, right Like, it's like this
huge webbing of super thin connections that are basically encased
in jelly, right.
Speaker 3 (25:56):
Yes, and you want to keep that jelly in a
motle that's going to cause the least amount of potential
cracking or damage to those structures.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
So things get more complicated as you go from individual
cells to organs, but there has been progress. In twenty
twenty three, a group of scientists and engineers from the
University of Minnesota publish the paper where they showed that
they could take the kidney from a rat, freeze it
using these anti freeze glucose alcohols, keep the kidney in
the freezer for one hundred days, thaw it out, put
(26:28):
it in another rat, and then have that rat survive
the kidney still worked.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
Now.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
Their secret here is pretty cool. The scientists and engineers
mixed in a bunch of iron nanoparticles or iron filings
with the anti freeze and then when it was time
to defrost the kidney, they use basically a magnet to
vibrate those iron filings so that the kidney heated up
and thaw it out evenly. Now, a brain is much
(26:54):
more complicated than a kidney, as mister Arrowood pointed out.
So a little later in the program, we're going to
talk to a neuroscientist who's going to give us his
opinion on whether a brain can be frozen. But first
I wanted to know how mister Aarrowood would respond to
the claims the scientists out there who say that freezing
a human body and having it survive is impossible. Here's
(27:15):
what he said.
Speaker 3 (27:16):
Look, any emerging technology, it requires visionaries. It requires people
who fifty years ago thought what if we could do this,
And of course everybody says, no, no, that's crazy, that
science fiction. And then they go out and do it.
And then all of a sudden you have something that
everybody thought was impossible. And I'll give you an example.
This device right here, this is a cell phone. I mean,
(27:36):
you could watch Star Trek. So the best Hollywood science
fiction writers in the universe could not envision a future
where you could actually send a video in real time
in Pakistan or wherever in real time. So it's those
things that people don't envision that takes one or two visionaries,
usually scientists in the back room somewhere that you often
don't even hear about. So the people that are out
(27:59):
there that say this can never be done, good, don't
ever try it, don't sign up, don't be involved. But
don't sit there and tell me that something I'm doing
or that we're trying to do that doesn't violate the
laws of science or physics can never be done because
that just means you don't have the vision for it.
And that's fine if you've got full disclosure. People sign
up and want to do this, that's a question of
free will. That's a question of signing up for something
(28:21):
knowing what they're doing, knowing why they want to do it.
They want a legacy. They know that they might be
that first heart transplant patient who's only going to live
two weeks if it never works at all. They know that, Okay,
but they did it. That guy who did that, how
many lives did he save? For people who have now
had a heart transplant that are living decades. Somebody had
to take that hit, and that person stood up and said, Okay,
(28:42):
I'm gonna take that hit. This is an adult's ultimate
last wish. It is their free will, last wish to
be preserved in this way and to contribute to the
science in this way.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
All right, when we come back, we're gonna talk to
my friend and neuroscientist, doctor Dwayne Godwin, and he's gonna
tell us whether he thinks the brain is the ultimate
limit of what we can freeze, and whether he would
ever freeze his own brain. So stay with us, you're
listening to science stuff. Will be right back, Welcome back,
(29:19):
all right. So, if you are a special kind of
frog or a Siberian salamander, or have an unnatural tolerance
for high levels of sugar, you can survive being cryogenically frozen.
And scientists have apparently been able to freeze and reactivate
a rad kidney, which is very promising for maybe doing
this with human organs in the future. But the big
(29:39):
obstacle to freezing the whole body seems to be freezing
the brain. So the weigh in on this idea is
my friend, neuroscientist, doctor Dwyane Godwin. Doctor Godwin is a
professor of translational neuroscience at Wake Forest University and doctor
Godwin and I recently wrote a book together called Out
of Your Mind, which is a great introduction to brain signs.
(30:02):
You should check it out. But I asked Dayne to
give us some context about the possibility of freezing brain cells.
This is what he said.
Speaker 4 (30:11):
Maybe it's good to start with what happens to brain
cells when the heart stops, so you know, if someone
dies or if their heart is stopped artificially, you know
what is going on. So what we know about that
is that brain cells can start dying within about three
to five minutes, and there are some exceptions that I'll
get to. Damage starts at about six minutes. What happened
(30:34):
to this brain cells a lot of things. So cells
start to self destruct, so there are things called program
cell death molecules that actually start taking the brain apart.
There's also this aspect of where brain cells will start
to take on water and essentially explode. So about ten
minutes in without oxygen must brain cells have suffered a
(30:57):
catastrophic or really severe minute damage. Now the exception of
that is temperature, because temperature can affect that timeline significantly.
Speaker 3 (31:09):
Where if you cool the brain down.
Speaker 4 (31:11):
You can extend the window of survival by slowing down
all this cellular metabolism.
Speaker 1 (31:16):
But it seems like that's a big problem for this
cryogenics technology. First of all, that once your heart stops,
you only have a few minutes before your brain cells
starts dying. And so any sort of scheme to replace
all the liquids in your body, that's going to be
a challenge, right because your brain is going to start
to die basically.
Speaker 4 (31:32):
Yeah, yeah, So if you think about it, it's a
massive problem. You know, we have eighty six billion neurons,
and it's not like you can just dip our huge
human brains into a vat of these chemicals and it
will preserve them. What has to happen is that you
have to do perfusion where you're actually using the arteries
(31:52):
and veins to actually get the cryopreservative into these cells.
And so that's not going to happen immediately. I died
right now, Even if I were ready, it would be
probably many hours before I would even be in a
position to be able to get perfused with these preservatives
that would store my brain. Yeah, that would mean that
(32:13):
I would have some significant brain damage before I was preserved.
Speaker 1 (32:16):
Yeah, Or like if you were going off into space
on a long journey, you'd have to stop your heart
and you would only have a few minutes before your
brain still start dying.
Speaker 4 (32:24):
That's right, And then you would have to get this
stuff in. That would have to happen almost perfectly for
a brain to survive this process intact.
Speaker 1 (32:33):
Well, let's say that somehow we're able to replace the
water and quickly enough before cells start dying. Do you
think the brain would survive that?
Speaker 4 (32:41):
I think in principle it could. So there are these
things called brain organoids that are essentially a little tiny
brain like things that are made from stem cells. And
there's been some success in freezing those kinds of complex
structures and then bringing them back and demonstrating that they
still have function. So there's some signs that this sort
(33:02):
of thing could be feasible. Whether that means it's practical
is another issue.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
Can you talk to us a little bit about the
fragility of brain connections and brain webs.
Speaker 4 (33:13):
So the other thing about the brain is each individual
synapse is really complex and a little world onto itself.
There are literally thousands of proteins in a single synapse,
so we're not only talking about damage to cells, but
you could also be doing damage to these delicate structures
and proteins that help make up individual synapses. So it's
(33:36):
not really clear that all of that would survive, and
there are tens of thousands of these in a standard neuron.
Generally speaking, it is a very delicate system. So yes,
you could definitely see a scenario where cryopreservation can preserve
maybe ninety nine percent of your brain cells, but there
could still be massive changes based on per of this
(34:00):
delicate balance of proteins at the synapse. So simply having
something that looks like a brain, it doesn't necessarily mean
that you have a functioning brain.
Speaker 1 (34:10):
I see, what about the thawing process. Let's say I
freeze the brain and I thought it out. Can the
brain just kind of kick start back up like a
computer just turned back on?
Speaker 4 (34:19):
Not really. You know, the same concern with suddenly trying
to freeze everything at once and being sure that the
metabolism is adapting appropriately to cryo preservation would be true
in reverse. Sell death and sell stress is very real
and brain cells need time to adapt to this new temperature.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
Yeah, Well, last question, Dwayne, Let's say you are at
the end of your life, would you freeze your brain?
Speaker 4 (34:46):
I don't think so. There was a time when I thought, yeah,
that would be cool. But you know, part of it
is philosophical. What does it mean that I continue?
Speaker 3 (34:55):
Me?
Speaker 4 (34:55):
Continuing means a lot to me. But would I want
to cont you if I thought I was going to
be eighty percent of me? You know, I think that's
what it boils down to. So you know, if you
ask me this question in ten years and the process
is worked out, I might give you a different answer.
But as it is right now, I would say, you know,
we're not quite ready, and you've got to be very
(35:18):
careful because it's possible to get in love with that concept,
the idea of extending our existence, you know, possibly forever.
But one of the things we actually talked about in
the book, what does that do to our society if
all of the old people just hang around forever with
their old ideas about how to do things, is that
actually good for us as a society? You know, I
(35:40):
don't have the answer to that. I'm just simply asking
the question.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
So there you have it. The answer to the question
can you survive being cryogenically frozen is that someone us
already have. If you were born from IVF, then you
were frozen at some point. And it seems possible that
we might be able to freeze organs like kidneys or
livers for things like organ banking and organ transplants. But
the question of whether you can freeze a whole grown
(36:05):
up body seems to hinge on the question of whether
you can ever freeze and successfully thaw out the brain.
It doesn't seem like it's possible right now, but there
are people working on it, so for now, if you
have dreams of traveling to distant stars or living in
the future, you might want to put those dreams on ice.
Thanks for joining us, See you next time You've been
(36:29):
listening to Science Stuff production of iHeartRadio written and produced
by me or Hitcham, executive producer Jerry Rowland, an audio
engineer and mixer Ksey peckrom and you can follow me
on social media. Just search for PhD Comics and the
name of your favorite platform. Be sure to subscribe to
Sign Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
(36:49):
you get your podcasts, and please tell your friends We'll
be back next Wednesday with another episode
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