Eli5: how do organs about to be transplanted stay alive from the moment they are extracted til they are implanted
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There are various methods, but typically they involve cold temperatures. See keeping living cells near the freezing point of water (but not over) sends the cells into a hibernation like state. They will slow down the rate at which they consume their supplied energy. This means that the organ can still be alive for hours outside of the body.
We can actually see this in whole humans too. Extreme hypothermia can lower someone’s heart rate and breathing rate to near undetectable levels. Which is why doctors who are treating suspected hypothermia deaths can’t pronounce the patient as dead until they reach a certain temperature and it’s certain that their body is truly dead.
I had an instructor for wilderness first aid that was a medic on an antartic expedition. One day he flew out to rescue someone who fell down a crevasse (a deep crack in ice). It took hours for them to reach him safely to extract him. He had a major head injury, but had survived well past when a warm person would’ve died because his hypothermia essentially slowed his biological clock waaaay down. So they extracted him and airlifted him out. Unfortunately while warming him up in the helicopter, the patient passed, but it was remarkable he survived that long either way.
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