How come it’s possible to cryopreserve things like sperm and very young embryos, and to later thaw them out so that they can live, but it’s impossible to do that for older humans or anything that consists of more than a few cells?

Question

I mean, sure, there is mummification and and some bodies being naturally preserved due to coldness or dryness, but I’m talking more about the idea of cryonics- the idea that you could stop a biological organism’s entire metabolism in some kind of suspended animation and then later thaw them out and be able to continue living. Most of this is just science fiction though and greatly exaggerated. All of the people who have gotten their bodies cryopreserved as adults are people who have died and it’s essentially just mummification instead of suspended animation.

In: Biology

Answer 1

Because we are too thicc…

Seriously tho, think of trying to heat up a big chunk of frozen food. If you heat it up too fast, the middle will be cold. If you heat it at a lower temperature, but for too long it will dry out. It’s like that for cryo, but in reverse.

We just haven’t found the sweet spot to freezing larger tissues at an even rate.