eli5: how come when your organs are in your body, they need to be 98 degrees, but in an organ transplant the organ is cooled?

Question

eli5: how come when your organs are in your body, they need to be 98 degrees, but in an organ transplant the organ is cooled?

In: 274

Answer 1

So you’re comparing a state in which an organ needs to be actively working to a state where it should not be actively working.

So normally, organs have an ideal temperature that they “work” at. There’s a lot of reasons for this from enzymes, biochemical reactions, etc. to amount of blood required to deliver oxygen for these organs to continue functioning, all which are temperature sensitive.

When you are taking organs out of the body, you are depriving them of blood (and thus oxygen) to carry out all of these metabolic functions. The cells in these organs will slowly start to accumulate waste products, break down, and die as they try to continue these metabolic and chemical reactions without oxygen.

What freezing does is slows down these chemical reactions almost to a halt. Enzymes, proteins, reactions require energy (usually in the form of heat) to work. This reduces the requirement of oxygen and lets organs become viable for a lot longer outside of the body without a blood supply.