eli5 Why can human embryo’s be frozen but not human adult?
In: Biology
My actual eli5:
Embryos are super tiny with a few simple parts. You can freeze/defrost it fast enough that nothing breaks.
Adults have tons of complex parts that would break if you froze them, and unfreezing them would break more since it takes so long, and they all have to be working at once or it doesn’t work.
I would then take a bit of an ice cube out of a freezer, and sit it on the counter next to some frozen piece of meat. In ten minutes I’d show them the water from the sliver of ice cube that already melted, and then knock the frozen meat off of the counter to get a good thud. Maybe even show them in an hour how only a small part of the outside is even remotely defrosted. No good, you see, because everything in an adult has to be working at once. We can’t magically make it unfreeze all at once. That is one dead adult we’re eating for dinner. (Bonus points if you’re a cannibal and you actually used a frozen adult for this).
Simple small thing, ok. Big complex thing, not ok.
It skips some details, but, it gets the job done.
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