Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Science Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio. My
Speaker 1: name is Jorge cham and today on the program, we're
Speaker 1: going to be asking the question can you survive being
Speaker 1: cryogenically frozen? Maybe you have a terminal disease and you
Speaker 1: want to preserve your body until scientists can find a cure.
Speaker 1: Or maybe you want to travel to the near star,
Speaker 1: but you don't want to just stare out the window
Speaker 1: for the whole twenty four trillion mile journey. Or maybe
Speaker 1: you just want to see what the future is like
Speaker 1: and we'd rather take a long nap until things got
Speaker 1: more interesting. Well, you can do all those things if
Speaker 1: you were able to freeze your body, But is it
Speaker 1: really possible? What are scientists doing to make this a reality?
Speaker 1: And most important, would you still be the same person
Speaker 1: after you get thought out? To answer this question, we're
Speaker 1: going to be talking to scientists and to someone who
Speaker 1: actually freezes people for a living. It's a story that
Speaker 1: involves billionaires, popsicle frogs, and ex Navy seals. So put
Speaker 1: on your parkass, turn up your thermostat, because we are
Speaker 1: answering the slippery as ice question, can you survive being
Speaker 1: cryogenically frozen? I promise you the answer is pretty cool.
Speaker 1: Enjoy Hey everyone, all right. Today's topic is a little controversial,
Speaker 1: and the reason for that is that there are people
Speaker 1: who have frozen their bodies in the hopes that they
Speaker 1: might get revived later. There are several facilities in the
Speaker 1: United States and in Europe that will freeze you your
Speaker 1: whole body or even interest your head for a fee,
Speaker 1: and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of humans who
Speaker 1: have chosen to do that. Now we're gonna talk to
Speaker 1: someone who works in one of these facilities, that is,
Speaker 1: someone who freezes people for a living later in the program.
Speaker 1: But first I wanted to make sure I understood the
Speaker 1: science behind freezing biological matter, what actually happens to yourselves
Speaker 1: once the temperature draws below freezing, and why is it
Speaker 1: so dangerous. I was also curious to know if there
Speaker 1: are any animals in nature that have figured out ways
Speaker 1: to survive getting frozen. So I thought that the best
Speaker 1: person to talk to us about this would be a
Speaker 1: biologist who works in one of the coldest places on Earth.
Speaker 1: Reached out to doctor Don Larson, who is an assistant
Speaker 1: professor of biology and zoology at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks,
Speaker 1: now you'll hear when I play the interview that I
Speaker 1: get really surprised at the beginning of my chat with
Speaker 1: doctor Larson. That's because I always thought I knew why
Speaker 1: freezing biological matter destroys the things that get frozen. I
Speaker 1: always thought that it was because when water freezes, it
Speaker 1: turns to ice, and ice is less dense than water,
Speaker 1: so when that ice forms, it expands and basically rips
Speaker 1: the cell apart. But it turns out I've been totally wrong.
Speaker 1: The real reason is something completely different. So here's my
Speaker 1: chat with doctor Don Larson. Hi, doctor Larson, thanks so
Speaker 1: much for talking with us.
Speaker 2: Thank you for having me here.
Speaker 1: Now you're in Fairbanks, Alaska. Are you frozen right now?
Speaker 2: No, it's warmed up a little bit here. We just
Speaker 2: got done with our last negative forty cold snap. Why
Speaker 2: is it hard to survive being frozen? That is a
Speaker 2: great question. So people tend to think when animals freeze,
Speaker 2: when cells freeze, that there's this ice crushing event that
Speaker 2: ice forms either around our cells and crushes it, or
Speaker 2: ice goes into the cells and burst them. Freezing is
Speaker 2: actually a desiccation event, though, so the first thing they
Speaker 2: have to do before they even get all that ice
Speaker 2: throughout their body is survived drying out.
Speaker 1: What you just blew my mind. That's totally different from
Speaker 1: what I had heard.
Speaker 2: And that's it's very common. I have these conversations with
Speaker 2: lots of different people, and everybody always thinks that it's
Speaker 2: this mechanical crushing or bursting event. Well, that's like our
Speaker 2: natural experience with ice. If we leave something in the freezer,
Speaker 2: like a soda, we've all done that, right, what happens?
Speaker 2: Those things explode, So it's very natural for us to
Speaker 2: take that. Oh, if you put a soda in a freezer,
Speaker 2: it bursts. Why won't the same thing happened to a cell?
Speaker 1: Wait, so can you go back a little bit and
Speaker 1: just explain again how the dessiccation works. What's actually happening there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, water's leaving the cell, so as things freeze, the
Speaker 2: water outside the cell freezes, and as water turns to ice,
Speaker 2: they're making these little hexagonal structures ice cubes connecting to
Speaker 2: each other, and they don't want to interact with anything
Speaker 2: that isn't water, So everything that isn't water gets pushed
Speaker 2: out of that ice cube that's forming you mean between
Speaker 2: the cells? Correct, all the ice is outside the cell,
Speaker 2: and as that happens, solutes go up, so the sugars
Speaker 2: and salts increase in concentration around that cell. So all
Speaker 2: of a sudden, our cells are in salt water. It's
Speaker 2: like if you throw a grape in a container of
Speaker 2: salt and water. What does it do? It shrivels. It's
Speaker 2: a desiccation event.
Speaker 1: Wait, it sucks the water out of the cells. Yes, oh,
Speaker 1: and then that kills the cell. Yeah.
Speaker 2: If there's not enough water in a cell, the cell
Speaker 2: membranes will touch on the inside and that will cause
Speaker 2: bursting of the cell.
Speaker 1: Okay, if you didn't follow that, that's okay. The main
Speaker 1: point is that the real problem with freezing yourself is
Speaker 1: that ice forms in the spaces between the cells, and
Speaker 1: ice only wants to have water molecules in it, so
Speaker 1: it pushes all the salts that are around and concentrates
Speaker 1: them very close to the cells, which makes them shrivel
Speaker 1: up and collapse. In other words, it's about cells suddenly
Speaker 1: being in a two salty environment. Now, the reason I
Speaker 1: was excited to talk to doctor Larson is that he
Speaker 1: happens to be one of the scientists who in twenty
Speaker 1: fourteen found something incredible about a type of frog called
Speaker 1: a wood frog.
Speaker 2: So wood frogs are one of the most widely distributed
Speaker 2: amphibians in North America. They're all the way down in
Speaker 2: the Appalachians and Ohio, very far south, and they go
Speaker 2: all the way up to the Arctic Ocean. They're very
Speaker 2: far north and fairly far south. Wood frogs have a
Speaker 2: unique ability that they can survive with seventy percent of
Speaker 2: their body water frozen. This is really cool. We tried
Speaker 2: to overwinter some frogs over two different years, so we
Speaker 2: thought we would see a lot of die off. Our
Speaker 2: wood frogs survive up to seven months frozen, and they
Speaker 2: experienced temperatures down to negative sixteen celsius and none of
Speaker 2: them died.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: All the previous literature said, hey, wood frogs can survive
Speaker 2: maybe down to negative five degrees celsius for a couple
Speaker 2: weeks at most.
Speaker 1: So you were expecting them just to perish during the experiment.
Speaker 1: But they survived.
Speaker 2: If we're expecting some loss, we didn't see any. That
Speaker 2: was the impressive thing.
Speaker 1: What happens when these frogs freeze? Is it rock solid?
Speaker 1: Is it squishy? What is it like?
Speaker 2: It's pretty firm, it's like a frozen filet, frozen fish,
Speaker 2: anything like that. You might be able to bend it
Speaker 2: a little bit, but if you bend it too much,
Speaker 2: you're going to snap something off.
Speaker 1: Wow. Okay, So wood frogs can survive being frozen at
Speaker 1: temperatures of minus eighteen degrees celsius or zero degrease fahrenheit
Speaker 1: for up to seven months. And they're not the only
Speaker 1: animals that can do it. Like your Larsen said that
Speaker 1: there are a few other species of frogs that can
Speaker 1: do it, some insects and a species of Siberian salamander
Speaker 1: which can go down as far as minus forty degrees
Speaker 1: celsius or minus forty degrees fahrenheit. But that's about it.
Speaker 1: All other animals, even hibernating bears or squirrels, if you
Speaker 1: freeze them, they're going to die. Even the fish that
Speaker 1: swim in the Arctic Ocean or the penguins that live
Speaker 1: in Antarctica, if we actually freeze them, they are not
Speaker 1: coming back. So now the question is what's their secret?
Speaker 1: How are these frogs surviving?
Speaker 2: They get super sweet.
Speaker 1: I know you like the frogs, doctor Larson, but what
Speaker 1: do you mean?
Speaker 2: So what frogs do is they pack their cells with glucose,
Speaker 2: sugar and urea, the precursor to urine.
Speaker 1: So what do you mean glucose like just regular sugar,
Speaker 1: like table sugar.
Speaker 2: Yes, when they phrase, they increase their glucose concentrations one
Speaker 2: hundred times greater, Yes, one hundred There's enough sugar in
Speaker 2: that little wood frog liver for it to taste sweet
Speaker 2: to us. So these wood frogs actually have quite big livers,
Speaker 2: and within that liver we start glycogen glycogens, these long
Speaker 2: chains of sugar. It's what makes meat taste sweet. It's
Speaker 2: why people eat liver. But they convert all that glycogen
Speaker 2: into glucose and then pump it.
Speaker 1: Throughout their body as fast as they can, and that
Speaker 1: gets into the cells throughout the body. Right, And then
Speaker 1: you said something triggers this mechanism. What is it? Just
Speaker 1: like a survival switch.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this is really unique for any animal that hibernates.
Speaker 2: Bears fatten up before winter, right, birds prepare for migration.
Speaker 2: Wood frogs wait, they react to winter instead of anticipate it.
Speaker 2: And by reacting they use specifically I'm about to freeze
Speaker 2: as their trigger. So they don't really do their winter
Speaker 2: prep until freezing begins.
Speaker 1: H they're procrastinators like me very much. So how does
Speaker 1: increasing the sugar help us?
Speaker 2: So we put that sugar in the cell to equal
Speaker 2: out the saltiness and solu concentrations outside the cell. So
Speaker 2: the inside of the cell no longer loses water. So
Speaker 2: they have to tolerate high levels of sugar in their cell,
Speaker 2: but they no longer have that water loss occurring, and
Speaker 2: it's that water loss that they're trying to prevent.
Speaker 1: So wood frogs use a kind of anti freeze. They
Speaker 1: produce a lot of sugar in the liver and then
Speaker 1: the sugar fills up their cells and that creates a
Speaker 1: super concentration that prevents the cells from drying up when
Speaker 1: the ice forms around them. Now, the obvious next question
Speaker 1: is could this work on other animals maybe humans? Well,
Speaker 1: that's a fascinating adaptation that the frog has. Do you
Speaker 1: think something like that could work for other animals? Like
Speaker 1: if I take a rat and I injected with a
Speaker 1: bunch of sugar, would it survive being frozen?
Speaker 2: Well, it won't survive the coma, the diabetic coma that
Speaker 2: we'd give it first. And again, it's a lot of sugar.
Speaker 2: If we in this tiny, little few gram frog. If
Speaker 2: we put that much sugar into an adult human, we
Speaker 2: would be in a diabetic coma a few times over.
Speaker 2: Animals can't tolerate high levels of glucose. It interferes with
Speaker 2: how proteins function and different things work in the cell,
Speaker 2: and it kills us.
Speaker 1: What do the frogs do to survive that amount of sugar?
Speaker 1: How come day don't get diabetic shock?
Speaker 2: Well, and they're very cold at this time. Their body
Speaker 2: temperature is right around freezing, so they don't have very
Speaker 2: high metabolism, and they don't do a lot when they're frozen. Now,
Speaker 2: part of the way it prevents that diabotic shock is
Speaker 2: also only making that glucose prior to freezing. And then
Speaker 2: also they are a little bit more tolerant to those
Speaker 2: high levels of glucose than say, we would be. If
Speaker 2: we were to inject the amount of sugar that's just
Speaker 2: in a frog, not even like the equivalent amount, just
Speaker 2: the amount that's in that animal, it would kill us.
Speaker 1: Well, So being procrastinators saves them. Yes, So for the frogs,
Speaker 1: how long can they survive being frozen? Like if I
Speaker 1: take a bunch of frogs, freeze them, take them to Antarctica.
Speaker 1: Leave them there. You know, one hundred years later can
Speaker 1: someone come and defrost those frogs and they'll start hopping around.
Speaker 2: So probably not that long because as ice forms, it
Speaker 2: recrystallizes and reforms. This is like freezer burn in your
Speaker 2: fridge is the same thing. It's ice crystals moving around.
Speaker 2: We know that wood frog can survive at least seven
Speaker 2: months frozen. We don't know how much longer pass that.
Speaker 1: All right, So to recap, if you were a wood
Speaker 1: frog or a Siberian salamander, or if you have a
Speaker 1: high tolerance for extreme amounts of sugar, you could survive
Speaker 1: being cryogenically frozen. I assume you are none of those things.
Speaker 1: But fortunately scientists have been exploring a different way to
Speaker 1: get around the problem. What happens when ice forms inside
Speaker 1: of your body, and that's the technique being used right
Speaker 1: now by the organizations that freeze people. So when we
Speaker 1: come back, we're going to talk to someone who works
Speaker 1: at one of these facilities. We're going to ask him
Speaker 1: to explain this technology. So freeze don't go anywhere. We'll
Speaker 1: be right back. You're listening to science stuff. Welcome back.
Speaker 1: So if you do any research into the field of
Speaker 1: cryonics or freezing people. You'll probably run into the name Alcore.
Speaker 1: It's one of several organizations, some for profit, some nonprofit
Speaker 1: in the US and around the world that will freeze
Speaker 1: you for a fee. So for two hundred and twenty
Speaker 1: thousand dollars, Alcore will freeze your whole body, or for
Speaker 1: eighty thousand dollars they'll freeze just your head. Now I
Speaker 1: got to talk to someone who actually works at Alcore,
Speaker 1: and not just someone who works there. I talk to
Speaker 1: the person in charge. James Arrowood is the CEO and
Speaker 1: president of Alcore. He's an attorney by training and he
Speaker 1: started his position in twenty twenty two. I got to
Speaker 1: talk to him about what Alcore does, what technology they
Speaker 1: used to freeze people, and about the controversy surrounding the
Speaker 1: practice and business of giving people the hope of living
Speaker 1: in the future. So here's my interview with James Arrowood.
Speaker 3: Hi, my name is James Errowood. I'm the president and
Speaker 3: CEO of al Core Life Extension Foundation. It's a nonprofit
Speaker 3: scientific research foundation, laboratory primarily in the space of long
Speaker 3: term organ preservation. When I say organs, we do preserve
Speaker 3: the whole human body. We preserve us the brain as well.
Speaker 3: So people often think it's something real, spooky, but at
Speaker 3: the end of the day, it's really what happens at
Speaker 3: every medical school in the country every day.
Speaker 1: Would you describe as an industry or a field.
Speaker 3: It's an emerging technology. So if you have a medical
Speaker 3: problem that can't be treated today, or if you need
Speaker 3: to travel to distant space and you need to pause
Speaker 3: metabolic activity in order to essentially live longer or survive
Speaker 3: longer periods of time, then chrotus uses ultraical temperatures, just
Speaker 3: like you see in nature to kind of pause the
Speaker 3: cellular breakdown process that occurs in the body.
Speaker 1: What would you say is a vision or goal for
Speaker 1: al core you're aiming for, well.
Speaker 3: In my lifetime, it's really about organ preservation. Look, we
Speaker 3: talk about the brain, we talk about the whole body
Speaker 3: as kind of an aspirational goal down the road. But
Speaker 3: at the end of the day, you have to do
Speaker 3: a pinky or you have to do a kidney before
Speaker 3: you ever get to reviving the brain. You know, before
Speaker 3: you ever the head transplant thing that people fixate on,
Speaker 3: which I understand it's morbid and it's sallacious and It
Speaker 3: gets a lot of attention, but on the day to
Speaker 3: day that's not really what we're doing. We're doing these
Speaker 3: regular experiments that involve the molecules of cells and what
Speaker 3: that means, and really that's chemistry and it's biochemistry.
Speaker 1: Right, take me a step back. What's the goal here?
Speaker 1: We're trying to preserve what would say.
Speaker 3: You'reserve for organ banking in my lifetime, that's what I
Speaker 3: care about, because okay, look, if you've ever had a
Speaker 3: friend or lost somebody who needed a kidney and or
Speaker 3: had to be on an organ transplant waiting list, it's
Speaker 3: a crapshoot and it's purely logistics that's the problem. Meaning,
Speaker 3: if you have a match in New York and you're
Speaker 3: in LA. Okay, so somebody dies in New York, that's
Speaker 3: a donor match for you. You've got about six hours
Speaker 3: to get yourself into the transplant hospital to get scrubbed
Speaker 3: out for surgery. You get the surgeons together, get that
Speaker 3: organ on a plane from New York to LA and
Speaker 3: hope that it's viable enough by the time they cut
Speaker 3: you open. Now, what if your perfect matches in London
Speaker 3: and you're in LA. You're not getting it you're done.
Speaker 3: It's not going to happen. You're gonna die too far, right,
Speaker 3: it's too far. It's a logistics issue that's a little
Speaker 3: bit different than what we're talking about. What we're talking
Speaker 3: about is imagine a world where organs could be stored
Speaker 3: like yoused to wear a steak, meaning it could be
Speaker 3: in the freezer for four weeks or six weeks. All right. Well,
Speaker 3: in the meantime, particularly with advances in artificial intelligence and supercomputing,
Speaker 3: you could probably do neo perfect matches, meaning you can
Speaker 3: actually match DNA to DNA kind of thing. And I'm
Speaker 3: not smart enough, I'm not a scientist, and we employ
Speaker 3: a lot of really good scientists and medical professionals, but
Speaker 3: there's ways that you can actually kind of perfectly match
Speaker 3: this stuff. The ultimate goal is that you could pause
Speaker 3: people metabolically, and that has to do with space travel.
Speaker 3: You need that to go to distant space. That's why
Speaker 3: all these space guys are into this. If you read
Speaker 3: about it, you hear about you know a number of
Speaker 3: the world's billionaires, some of them may be confidential members
Speaker 3: of Alcore that they're interested in this because you're gonna
Speaker 3: have to pause your metabolism meaning aging.
Speaker 1: So billionaires are signing up for this. Notably Peter Thiel
Speaker 1: has confirmed that he's an all core member. Now, what
Speaker 1: does it mean to be a member?
Speaker 3: Right, crowd preservation member. So you agree that we get
Speaker 3: to crowd preserve your body. You become part of the
Speaker 3: experiment as it were. Okay, that's and the PaperWorks very explicit,
Speaker 3: you know when people are like, oh, you're full of people.
Speaker 3: You're doing no for not you have to sign sixty
Speaker 3: plus pages okay, of tons of lawyer language and other
Speaker 3: language that explicitly says this is experimental. This may never
Speaker 3: work for you. So if you are convinced you know
Speaker 3: that this is going to work for you, don't sign up.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's a lottery ticket. And in terms of
Speaker 3: it ever working, we don't know if it's going to work.
Speaker 3: We think that the science someday absolutely should work, meaning
Speaker 3: you're not violating the laws of physics by doing this.
Speaker 1: Let's say that I want to be a member. What's
Speaker 1: the process? Because I have to do it while I'm alive.
Speaker 3: Right, generally speaking, there's some post more on, but really,
Speaker 3: ideally you want to know ahead of time, and the
Speaker 3: way we do that is it. For instance, you have
Speaker 3: a terminal disease or terminal illness and you're a member.
Speaker 3: We actually have what's called a watch list, and then
Speaker 3: we have a standby team, and our team goes anywhere
Speaker 3: in the world and it's medical professionals, it's former Navy seals,
Speaker 3: military special forces. What. Yeah, they're training you know, the
Speaker 3: logistics man. They're the best in the world at it.
Speaker 3: So we're just using the military training to move bodies
Speaker 3: and move people around quickly.
Speaker 1: Meaning if I'm in London, I have a terminal disease,
Speaker 1: I want to be a member because I want to
Speaker 1: believe in your mission.
Speaker 3: You're already signed up.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm also thinking, well, I'm going to die anyways,
Speaker 1: maybe if I freeze my body there's some glimmer of
Speaker 1: hope out there, and there's.
Speaker 3: Value to science. If it's if you never come back,
Speaker 3: it's valuable because maybe your grandkids could come back someday
Speaker 3: because you were one of the people that you know
Speaker 3: help Oh right, right, it's called legacy. It's called legacy. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so you want to be legacy part of this. But yeah,
Speaker 3: we will send a team out to be bedside. Now,
Speaker 3: a lot of hospitals don't know what we do, so
Speaker 3: they're they're real hesitant about that. So if we can't
Speaker 3: be bedside, we'll actually be in the hospital parking lot.
Speaker 3: And as soon as you're declared den we don't declare death.
Speaker 3: We don't do medical services. We don't touch somebody until
Speaker 3: you know they've been declared dead. And then once their
Speaker 3: body's released to us, which ideally is within minutes, then
Speaker 3: they start that process. Yeah, there's a whole we have
Speaker 3: like a cardiothoracic surgeon. We have what are called T
Speaker 3: triple c R eighteen deltas, which is like a trauma surgeon.
Speaker 3: But the reason that's relevant is they can access the crowdits.
Speaker 3: They know how to access and perfuse the chemical very quickly.
Speaker 1: Right, you're doing that maybe right after the person.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you're starting lines as soon as possible. Yeah, it's
Speaker 3: why then it's.
Speaker 1: And then you fly the person to your facility in a.
Speaker 3: Reg's right, that's right. And we're actually exploring opening a
Speaker 3: facility and sweed in Europe for European folks. Anytime you
Speaker 3: can cut the logistics the distance, then that's going to
Speaker 3: help you know better outcomes. But yeah, so you sign up,
Speaker 3: you have to sign a whole bunch of papers, you
Speaker 3: have to get them notarized, and it's a whole process
Speaker 3: because look, when people sign up, you're actually signing up
Speaker 3: as an anatomical donation. This is very well, you know,
Speaker 3: people don't understand how this works, and I'm trying to
Speaker 3: educate the public because I think it's really for decades
Speaker 3: the public wasn't understanding and they were really misunderstanding what
Speaker 3: was going on.
Speaker 1: So those are the basics of alcore and the way
Speaker 1: they pause or cryogenically freeze people is using a phenomenon
Speaker 1: called vitrification. Basically, they replace all the water in your
Speaker 1: body with a special solution that prevents ice from forming.
Speaker 1: Here's how James Arrowood explains it. You used a different word,
Speaker 1: vitor fix. What does that mean?
Speaker 3: Okay, So vitrification is the difference between cloudy ice and
Speaker 3: clear ice. In vitrification, you're actually removing a bunch of
Speaker 3: the water and you're using it almost a jelly. Like
Speaker 3: you said, it's kind of a gel like consistency. It's
Speaker 3: a very viscous, almost syrapy chemical something called polyethylene glycol
Speaker 3: and that's a glycolic sugar that's basically from alcohol. You know,
Speaker 3: it's not the good kind that you drink or anything
Speaker 3: like that. It's not good for you.
Speaker 1: Wait, meaning you take a kidney or body and you
Speaker 1: replace the water with the special goofy chemical.
Speaker 3: Right, the chemical pushes out the water. You have to
Speaker 3: kind of what we call step ramp, so you actually
Speaker 3: use a chemical at a lower kind of density or
Speaker 3: a lower concentration of this chemical and you can kind
Speaker 3: of ramp it up. The actual process that we do
Speaker 3: is extraordinarily controlled. There's a team of people. There's a
Speaker 3: scientist and there's medical people. You know, they're all around
Speaker 3: a body, or they're all around ahead, you know, if
Speaker 3: it's just the head. And we have computers and graphs
Speaker 3: that in real time are showing the concentrations. And we
Speaker 3: have these little tiny laser beam modules. I mean, it
Speaker 3: is science fiction y in a way, right, And as
Speaker 3: laser kind of shoots out into the fluid and measures
Speaker 3: the concentration as it's going, and then it ramps up
Speaker 3: very slowly to replace the water, so like pushes the
Speaker 3: water out and replaces it with this jelly like chemical
Speaker 3: that gets more and more concentrated, and it takes hours,
Speaker 3: and it's going in through It's almost like when you
Speaker 3: get an iv so it's getting perfused through the body
Speaker 3: with a whole team of people around you for hours,
Speaker 3: and then there's actually ways to tell when the body
Speaker 3: has kind of reached a saturation point, so then you
Speaker 3: can go into liquid nitrotal.
Speaker 1: Well, well, tell me about this liquid. It's special because
Speaker 1: when you cool it, when you put it in the
Speaker 1: liquid nitrogen, it doesn't crystallize like water. Right, So this
Speaker 1: antifreezer cryer protected agent that mister Arrowood is talking about,
Speaker 1: it is one of several special chemicals, usually sugar alcohols
Speaker 1: like glycerl or polyethylene glycol that have been used since
Speaker 1: the nineteen fifties to freeze things like sperm or even
Speaker 1: human embryos for in vitro fertilization or IVF. And the
Speaker 1: idea is that if you cool these chemicals down to
Speaker 1: really low temperatures in just the right way, they don't
Speaker 1: turn into ice, they don't crystallize, they just turn into
Speaker 1: an amorphous solid like glass. So technically, if you're someone
Speaker 1: who was born from a frozen embryo and in vitro fertilization,
Speaker 1: then you have survived being cryogenically frozen. But this stuff
Speaker 1: is expensive. How expensive?
Speaker 3: The chemicals we're talking about are unbelievably expensive. So for
Speaker 3: your body, how tall are you about?
Speaker 1: I'll succeed. Yeah, yeah, what did.
Speaker 3: You look like? You're probably about one seventy.
Speaker 1: Five I don't know, yeah, exactly that, I'll davor.
Speaker 3: Okay. The point of it is, you're gonna cost me,
Speaker 3: meaning Alcor, if we cover recover your body and you
Speaker 3: sign up and your whole body patient member, you're going
Speaker 3: to cost us probably forty to seventy thousand dollars just
Speaker 3: for the price of the chemical, not including any of
Speaker 3: the procedure, any of the machines, any of the.
Speaker 1: Staff, or the long term storage or the long.
Speaker 3: Term the liquid nitrogen bleed off rate over two hundred
Speaker 3: years per cubic square foot has to be calculated for you,
Speaker 3: and it is wild, right, So the costs of this
Speaker 3: thing are just unreal. But that's emerging technology, you know
Speaker 3: when you think about it, like the first Tesla roadster
Speaker 3: was one hundred and fifty thousand dollars and it only
Speaker 3: went you know, I don't know, ninety bals or something
Speaker 3: per charge. Yeah, that's what science is and that's why
Speaker 3: it costs so much. When people sign up, we crowdfund
Speaker 3: it because we're not at university. We're not getting money
Speaker 3: from the government every day to keep the lights on,
Speaker 3: and it's expensive. So it's about two hundred and twenty
Speaker 3: thousand dollars for whole body. Most people don't have two
Speaker 3: hundred and twenty thousand. I don't have a spare of
Speaker 3: two hundred plus thousand to do this. Everybody who signs
Speaker 3: up we fund it with life insurance, so I actually
Speaker 3: just as sign a portion of life insurance that I
Speaker 3: already have that goes to outport to cover the costs.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I know what you're thinking. People are paying hundreds
Speaker 1: of thousands of dollars from their life insurance to get
Speaker 1: their bodies frozen. That gets controversial. I'll ask mister Arrowood
Speaker 1: about this in a second, But first I was curious
Speaker 1: to know why we're able to freeze things like human
Speaker 1: embryos or sperm, but we can't freeze something more complex,
Speaker 1: like a human body or a brain. Here's what he said.
Speaker 3: It's a question of scale. It works at the molecular
Speaker 3: cellular level, the embryonic stage level, the egg level, the
Speaker 3: sperm level.
Speaker 1: Right, I mean there are people who are alive today
Speaker 1: and walking around that were frozen as embryos or eggs.
Speaker 3: Considerable number of people now and the next generation will
Speaker 3: be even more. But here's the important thing from my
Speaker 3: chair is that those people are not zombies. You can't
Speaker 3: tell the difference that anybody knows of. You know, you
Speaker 3: got people sitting next to you at the restaurant that
Speaker 3: have fully functioning brains that go to university, get degrees.
Speaker 3: They're really smart people, and they were born via ibs.
Speaker 3: They were at one point in their existence, they were
Speaker 3: and liquid nitrogen. Right, Oh, it works. And the hard
Speaker 3: part is is as you get to multi cellular structures
Speaker 3: that are beyond the embryonic stage, so an organ that
Speaker 3: has to function and all these cells have to kind
Speaker 3: of line up perfectly. And you know, if you have
Speaker 3: a damage in one layer of that organ, well that
Speaker 3: damage may you know, destroy the whole function of the organ.
Speaker 3: You look at the brain. Your brain they think has
Speaker 3: billions or trillions of what are called neural synaptic connections,
Speaker 3: these protein bridges almost like webbing. Now, imagine a spider web.
Speaker 3: How many fracture points could there be in a spider
Speaker 3: web a lot, a lot, any number, and then you
Speaker 3: multiply that times a billion, that's your brain. So freezing
Speaker 3: the brain or really vitrifying the brain presents any number
Speaker 3: of greater challenges than doing an embryo.
Speaker 1: The brain is very fragile, right Like, it's like this
Speaker 1: huge webbing of super thin connections that are basically encased
Speaker 1: in jelly, right.
Speaker 3: Yes, and you want to keep that jelly in a
Speaker 3: motle that's going to cause the least amount of potential
Speaker 3: cracking or damage to those structures.
Speaker 1: So things get more complicated as you go from individual
Speaker 1: cells to organs, but there has been progress. In twenty
Speaker 1: twenty three, a group of scientists and engineers from the
Speaker 1: University of Minnesota publish the paper where they showed that
Speaker 1: they could take the kidney from a rat, freeze it
Speaker 1: using these anti freeze glucose alcohols, keep the kidney in
Speaker 1: the freezer for one hundred days, thaw it out, put
Speaker 1: it in another rat, and then have that rat survive
Speaker 1: the kidney still worked.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: Their secret here is pretty cool. The scientists and engineers
Speaker 1: mixed in a bunch of iron nanoparticles or iron filings
Speaker 1: with the anti freeze and then when it was time
Speaker 1: to defrost the kidney, they use basically a magnet to
Speaker 1: vibrate those iron filings so that the kidney heated up
Speaker 1: and thaw it out evenly. Now, a brain is much
Speaker 1: more complicated than a kidney, as mister Arrowood pointed out.
Speaker 1: So a little later in the program, we're going to
Speaker 1: talk to a neuroscientist who's going to give us his
Speaker 1: opinion on whether a brain can be frozen. But first
Speaker 1: I wanted to know how mister Aarrowood would respond to
Speaker 1: the claims the scientists out there who say that freezing
Speaker 1: a human body and having it survive is impossible. Here's
Speaker 1: what he said.
Speaker 3: Look, any emerging technology, it requires visionaries. It requires people
Speaker 3: who fifty years ago thought what if we could do this,
Speaker 3: And of course everybody says, no, no, that's crazy, that
Speaker 3: science fiction. And then they go out and do it.
Speaker 3: And then all of a sudden you have something that
Speaker 3: everybody thought was impossible. And I'll give you an example.
Speaker 3: This device right here, this is a cell phone. I mean,
Speaker 3: you could watch Star Trek. So the best Hollywood science
Speaker 3: fiction writers in the universe could not envision a future
Speaker 3: where you could actually send a video in real time
Speaker 3: in Pakistan or wherever in real time. So it's those
Speaker 3: things that people don't envision that takes one or two visionaries,
Speaker 3: usually scientists in the back room somewhere that you often
Speaker 3: don't even hear about. So the people that are out
Speaker 3: there that say this can never be done, good, don't
Speaker 3: ever try it, don't sign up, don't be involved. But
Speaker 3: don't sit there and tell me that something I'm doing
Speaker 3: or that we're trying to do that doesn't violate the
Speaker 3: laws of science or physics can never be done because
Speaker 3: that just means you don't have the vision for it.
Speaker 3: And that's fine if you've got full disclosure. People sign
Speaker 3: up and want to do this, that's a question of
Speaker 3: free will. That's a question of signing up for something
Speaker 3: knowing what they're doing, knowing why they want to do it.
Speaker 3: They want a legacy. They know that they might be
Speaker 3: that first heart transplant patient who's only going to live
Speaker 3: two weeks if it never works at all. They know that, Okay,
Speaker 3: but they did it. That guy who did that, how
Speaker 3: many lives did he save? For people who have now
Speaker 3: had a heart transplant that are living decades. Somebody had
Speaker 3: to take that hit, and that person stood up and said, Okay,
Speaker 3: I'm gonna take that hit. This is an adult's ultimate
Speaker 3: last wish. It is their free will, last wish to
Speaker 3: be preserved in this way and to contribute to the
Speaker 3: science in this way.
Speaker 1: All right, when we come back, we're gonna talk to
Speaker 1: my friend and neuroscientist, doctor Dwayne Godwin, and he's gonna
Speaker 1: tell us whether he thinks the brain is the ultimate
Speaker 1: limit of what we can freeze, and whether he would
Speaker 1: ever freeze his own brain. So stay with us, you're
Speaker 1: listening to science stuff. Will be right back, Welcome back,
Speaker 1: all right. So, if you are a special kind of
Speaker 1: frog or a Siberian salamander, or have an unnatural tolerance
Speaker 1: for high levels of sugar, you can survive being cryogenically frozen.
Speaker 1: And scientists have apparently been able to freeze and reactivate
Speaker 1: a rad kidney, which is very promising for maybe doing
Speaker 1: this with human organs in the future. But the big
Speaker 1: obstacle to freezing the whole body seems to be freezing
Speaker 1: the brain. So the weigh in on this idea is
Speaker 1: my friend, neuroscientist, doctor Dwyane Godwin. Doctor Godwin is a
Speaker 1: professor of translational neuroscience at Wake Forest University and doctor
Speaker 1: Godwin and I recently wrote a book together called Out
Speaker 1: of Your Mind, which is a great introduction to brain signs.
Speaker 1: You should check it out. But I asked Dayne to
Speaker 1: give us some context about the possibility of freezing brain cells.
Speaker 1: This is what he said.
Speaker 4: Maybe it's good to start with what happens to brain
Speaker 4: cells when the heart stops, so you know, if someone
Speaker 4: dies or if their heart is stopped artificially, you know
Speaker 4: what is going on. So what we know about that
Speaker 4: is that brain cells can start dying within about three
Speaker 4: to five minutes, and there are some exceptions that I'll
Speaker 4: get to. Damage starts at about six minutes. What happened
Speaker 4: to this brain cells a lot of things. So cells
Speaker 4: start to self destruct, so there are things called program
Speaker 4: cell death molecules that actually start taking the brain apart.
Speaker 4: There's also this aspect of where brain cells will start
Speaker 4: to take on water and essentially explode. So about ten
Speaker 4: minutes in without oxygen must brain cells have suffered a
Speaker 4: catastrophic or really severe minute damage. Now the exception of
Speaker 4: that is temperature, because temperature can affect that timeline significantly.
Speaker 3: Where if you cool the brain down.
Speaker 4: You can extend the window of survival by slowing down
Speaker 4: all this cellular metabolism.
Speaker 1: But it seems like that's a big problem for this
Speaker 1: cryogenics technology. First of all, that once your heart stops,
Speaker 1: you only have a few minutes before your brain cells
Speaker 1: starts dying. And so any sort of scheme to replace
Speaker 1: all the liquids in your body, that's going to be
Speaker 1: a challenge, right because your brain is going to start
Speaker 1: to die basically.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, So if you think about it, it's a
Speaker 4: massive problem. You know, we have eighty six billion neurons,
Speaker 4: and it's not like you can just dip our huge
Speaker 4: human brains into a vat of these chemicals and it
Speaker 4: will preserve them. What has to happen is that you
Speaker 4: have to do perfusion where you're actually using the arteries
Speaker 4: and veins to actually get the cryopreservative into these cells.
Speaker 4: And so that's not going to happen immediately. I died
Speaker 4: right now, Even if I were ready, it would be
Speaker 4: probably many hours before I would even be in a
Speaker 4: position to be able to get perfused with these preservatives
Speaker 4: that would store my brain. Yeah, that would mean that
Speaker 4: I would have some significant brain damage before I was preserved.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Or like if you were going off into space
Speaker 1: on a long journey, you'd have to stop your heart
Speaker 1: and you would only have a few minutes before your
Speaker 1: brain still start dying.
Speaker 4: That's right, And then you would have to get this
Speaker 4: stuff in. That would have to happen almost perfectly for
Speaker 4: a brain to survive this process intact.
Speaker 1: Well, let's say that somehow we're able to replace the
Speaker 1: water and quickly enough before cells start dying. Do you
Speaker 1: think the brain would survive that?
Speaker 4: I think in principle it could. So there are these
Speaker 4: things called brain organoids that are essentially a little tiny
Speaker 4: brain like things that are made from stem cells. And
Speaker 4: there's been some success in freezing those kinds of complex
Speaker 4: structures and then bringing them back and demonstrating that they
Speaker 4: still have function. So there's some signs that this sort
Speaker 4: of thing could be feasible. Whether that means it's practical
Speaker 4: is another issue.
Speaker 1: Can you talk to us a little bit about the
Speaker 1: fragility of brain connections and brain webs.
Speaker 4: So the other thing about the brain is each individual
Speaker 4: synapse is really complex and a little world onto itself.
Speaker 4: There are literally thousands of proteins in a single synapse,
Speaker 4: so we're not only talking about damage to cells, but
Speaker 4: you could also be doing damage to these delicate structures
Speaker 4: and proteins that help make up individual synapses. So it's
Speaker 4: not really clear that all of that would survive, and
Speaker 4: there are tens of thousands of these in a standard neuron.
Speaker 4: Generally speaking, it is a very delicate system. So yes,
Speaker 4: you could definitely see a scenario where cryopreservation can preserve
Speaker 4: maybe ninety nine percent of your brain cells, but there
Speaker 4: could still be massive changes based on per of this
Speaker 4: delicate balance of proteins at the synapse. So simply having
Speaker 4: something that looks like a brain, it doesn't necessarily mean
Speaker 4: that you have a functioning brain.
Speaker 1: I see, what about the thawing process. Let's say I
Speaker 1: freeze the brain and I thought it out. Can the
Speaker 1: brain just kind of kick start back up like a
Speaker 1: computer just turned back on?
Speaker 4: Not really. You know, the same concern with suddenly trying
Speaker 4: to freeze everything at once and being sure that the
Speaker 4: metabolism is adapting appropriately to cryo preservation would be true
Speaker 4: in reverse. Sell death and sell stress is very real
Speaker 4: and brain cells need time to adapt to this new temperature.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, last question, Dwayne, Let's say you are at
Speaker 1: the end of your life, would you freeze your brain?
Speaker 4: I don't think so. There was a time when I thought, yeah,
Speaker 4: that would be cool. But you know, part of it
Speaker 4: is philosophical. What does it mean that I continue?
Speaker 3: Me?
Speaker 4: Continuing means a lot to me. But would I want
Speaker 4: to cont you if I thought I was going to
Speaker 4: be eighty percent of me? You know, I think that's
Speaker 4: what it boils down to. So you know, if you
Speaker 4: ask me this question in ten years and the process
Speaker 4: is worked out, I might give you a different answer.
Speaker 4: But as it is right now, I would say, you know,
Speaker 4: we're not quite ready, and you've got to be very
Speaker 4: careful because it's possible to get in love with that concept,
Speaker 4: the idea of extending our existence, you know, possibly forever.
Speaker 4: But one of the things we actually talked about in
Speaker 4: the book, what does that do to our society if
Speaker 4: all of the old people just hang around forever with
Speaker 4: their old ideas about how to do things, is that
Speaker 4: actually good for us as a society? You know, I
Speaker 4: don't have the answer to that. I'm just simply asking
Speaker 4: the question.
Speaker 1: So there you have it. The answer to the question
Speaker 1: can you survive being cryogenically frozen is that someone us
Speaker 1: already have. If you were born from IVF, then you
Speaker 1: were frozen at some point. And it seems possible that
Speaker 1: we might be able to freeze organs like kidneys or
Speaker 1: livers for things like organ banking and organ transplants. But
Speaker 1: the question of whether you can freeze a whole grown
Speaker 1: up body seems to hinge on the question of whether
Speaker 1: you can ever freeze and successfully thaw out the brain.
Speaker 1: It doesn't seem like it's possible right now, but there
Speaker 1: are people working on it, so for now, if you
Speaker 1: have dreams of traveling to distant stars or living in
Speaker 1: the future, you might want to put those dreams on ice.
Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us, See you next time You've been
Speaker 1: listening to Science Stuff production of iHeartRadio written and produced
Speaker 1: by me or Hitcham, executive producer Jerry Rowland, an audio
Speaker 1: engineer and mixer Ksey peckrom and you can follow me
Speaker 1: on social media. Just search for PhD Comics and the
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Speaker 1: you get your podcasts, and please tell your friends We'll
Speaker 1: be back next Wednesday with another episode