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!
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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.
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