I just read a new that said something in the lines of “A 46,000-year-old worm found in Siberian permafrost was brought back to life, and started having babies”. How does this happen? Why is it so hard to do this with humans and other animals? Thanks in advance!
In: 3
This organism is so simple that you can stop it (low temperature) and then it just keeps going when the temperature is back to normal. That’s not possible with complex life forms like mammals, birds, reptiles, etc.
The worm wasn’t alive. It was frozen solid which somehow preserved all of its essential parts, and when it was thawed out, those parts started working again. There’s a certain type of frog that freezes solid every winter and then thaws out in the spring and carries on like nothing happened. But this frog produces a certain chemical that prevents large ice crystals from forming in its cells. When most animals freeze, the water in their cells forms ice crystals that literally burst the cell walls. So if they’re thawed out, all their cells are dead or at least no longer functioning and the thawed out animal doesn’t recover.
The type of worm that was thawed out has a simple body type with a simple nervous system, muscles, digestive tract, etc., at least when compared to humans, mammals, etc. When it froze, it just kinda stopped doing whatever worms do. Its simpler systems could withstand any damage done by ice crystals and it could keep functioning when it was thawed out. We don’t have the ability to do that with more complex creatures – there’s literally just too many moving (and non-moving) parts and they’re more easily damaged by ice forming. Basically, if you freeze and thaw a human, you end up with a thawed out mushy mess. But if you thaw out a frozen worm, you end up with a thawed out mushy working system.
Welcome to Cryptobiosis. Most things that can do it are able to expel up to 95% of their water from their bodys, turn everything off and literally “chill” until conditions return to survivable.
Humans don’t survive freezing coz the fluid in our cells expands when it freezes and breaks the cells walls, so when you’re thawed, your mushy ( like badly frozen peas)
Theoretically, anything living could be frozen and later thawed to no apparent ill effect. So long as the ice that forms inside them does so “correctly”, ie, freezing without forming sharp ice crystals that can burst cells. Freezing like this is easier to do the faster and more completely you freeze something, and as smaller things can freeze faster than larger things.
So, in the case of this worm, it got frozen inside the ice fast enough to not be damaged and was thus preserved entirely.
This is doable with larger creatures as well. By injecting special chemicals that prevent ice crystals from forming, small rodents (such as hamsters and rats) have been frozen solid and later thawed to no apparent ill effect. Even larger creatures, such as humans, are too big to have the chemical diffuse throughout our bodies enough to prevent ice crystal formation, so this wouldn’t work on us.
I worked with a medical examiner once who always said “you’re not truly dead until you’re WARM and dead” then explained that freezing slows down biological processes (heartbeat, respiration, circulation” so much that it may APPEAR to be death, but in reality it’s not.
Latest Answers