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?
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Simplified answer: while there is some risk, smaller tissues/cells/etc are a lot easier to freeze and reanimate without significant damage.
The freezing process tends to introduce irreparable damage due to crystal formation. If you can control the freezing process, and/or introduce anti-freeze agents, you can pretty much mitigate this. However, larger biological samples are a lot harder to do this with. Plenty of insects and some amphibians can actually survive this, and earlier experiments with cryogenics actually showed small rodents could be reliably frozen/thawed and still live full life with little to no lasting damage. Legitimately, they did experiments where they essentially froze hamsters or mice solid and thawed them, and they were fine.
It doesn’t scale far past that, as cooling down evenly/in a controlled way, and properly infusing with anti-freeze agents and the like becomes increasingly difficult. Hence why we can’t freeze people. Freezing smaller things is still completely viable, however. We regularly do it with human cells and bacteria.
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