Hi all- I work with artificial insemination and have recently wondered how sperm/ eggs/ embryos be frozen in liquid nitrogen (for years!) and then later thawed (in about 60 seconds) where it’s then back to functioning like normal, but you can’t freeze a living person and then unfreeze them again? At what developmental point can you stop freezing biological material before it won’t work again? (No political motive here, just questioning the science behind it, please please no arguing)
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Freezing (and successfully thawing) a single cell is just easy compared to trying to do that for an entire tissue of thousands of connected cells, let alone an entire organ of multiple tissues, not even an entire organism of many organs.
And sperm and eggs (but especially sperm) are, notably, extremely simple sorts of cells, having no other functional role in the organism that generated them other than being gametes. Granted, that is a complex task requiring specialized cellular machinery, but it is a once-and-done task rather than an ongoing metabolic process.
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