How can fertilized embryos maintain their viability after being frozen?

Question

As I understand, one of the reasons we haven’t figured out something like cryogenic sleep is that cells are irreparably damaged during the freezing and thawing process. How do we manage to avoid those problems when freezing and storing embryos for the purposes of IVF?

In: 74

Answer 1

Two reasons.

First, not all cells are killed as easily by freezing as others. Ova are ones that can be frozen.

Two, If you take a dozen ova and half of them die because of the freezing process, you have six viable ova. If I freeze you and half of your brain cells die, you are very dead.