The team of scientists at Fudan University in China announced a major breakthrough in cryogenically freezing brain tissue – a technology which could one day be used to help humans live much longer
Chinese scientists have marked a major breakthrough in brain freezing – a technology that could one day help humans live far beyond their normal lifespan.
The latest experiment used human embryonic stem cells to grow brain samples for three weeks, a period long enough for neurons and neural cells to become functional. These samples were then soaked in different chemical mixtures, such as sugar, antifreeze and chemical solvents.
After cryogenically freezing them in liquid nitrogen for 24 hours, researchers at Shanghai’s Fudan University thawed the samples over two weeks – and found one of the mixtures kept neurons intact and able to send signals as normal.
It marks a significant new step in the competitive and developing field of cryogenics, which has previously struggled to overcome the issue of water crystals forming in brain tissue during the freezing process.
It is hoped one day that cryogenics will be able to live up to the expectations of sci-fi films and enable living humans to be frozen indefinitely, meaning they could potentially be reanimated many years later. A number of celebrities, such as American DJ Steve Aoki, Family Guy creator Seth Macfarlane and Paypal founder Peter Thiel have all previously said that they intend to have their bodies frozen when they die, in the hopes that future scientists will be able to bring them back.
In 2015, two-year-old Matheryn Naovaratpong from Thailand became the youngest person in the world to be frozen after her tragic death of a rare brain cancer. Her parents chose to freeze her head and brain, and said they hoped future advances in cryonics would give her a second chance of life in another body. Rhea Ettinger, the longest-running patient at the Cryonics Institute in Michigan, US, has been in the specialist facility since 1977.
The latest team of scientists in China found one mixture in particular allowed them to freeze the brain tissue samples without any damage occurring. It’s called MEDY after its four chemical ingredients, methylcellulose, ethylene glycol, DMSO, and Y27632. Professor Zhicheng Shao, a Harvard-educated neuroscientist who led the study at Fudan University, wrote in the journal Cell Reports Methods: “MEDY could be used for the cryopreservation of human brain tissue.”
João Pedro Magalhães from the University of Birmingham said great advances in freezing humans could be made with further research – and suggested it could one day even be used to help astronauts travel to far-flung star systems. He told the New Scientist: “We know brain cells are very fragile and sensitive to stress. Thinking decades or centuries ahead, we can imagine patients being cryopreserved when they have a terminal condition or astronauts being cryopreserved in order to travel to other star systems.”