South Korean Kim Jung-kil (not his real name) paid to have the body of his mother, who died of cancer at 83 in 2020, frozen.
He is not alone. There are about 600 cryogenically frozen human bodies around the world. Jung-kil’s mother is in a cryopreservation unit in Moscow, for example. In the United States, this process can cost the equivalent of R$ 160 thousand.
Cryopreservation is a process of freezing the body at freezing temperatures, in the hope that science in the future will be able to bring these people back to life.
The dead person’s blood is drained and replaced with medically used preservatives and antifreeze, which prevent ice crystals from forming in the body and damaging cells and tissues.
If this is done immediately after the heart has stopped beating and while the tissues are still intact, in theory future doctors and scientists will have a greater chance of success.
“Currently, I’m not sure that thawing is theoretically possible, but it could be,” says Kim C-Yoon, from Konkuk University, in South Korea. could be answered in up to ten years.
Some experts who believe in the feasibility of this technique claim that nanotechnology (with tiny robots) can, for example, treat affected cells over time.
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Today, there are no viable techniques for defrosting the internal and external parts of the body at the same temperature.
Currently, cryopreservation is used in hospitals to preserve parts of the human body, such as sperm, eggs, blood cells and embryos. But there is still a high failure rate in this process, and in the case of an entire (highly complex) human body, the risk of it not working is much higher.
For Clive Coen, professor of neuroscience at King’s College London, the cryopreservation of entire human bodies is based more on magical thinking than on scientific evidence.
“Despite several statements by cryogenesis companies, they have failed to demonstrate that this extraordinary mass of tissues that make up the human body can be protected by the antifreeze fluid they inject into the body after death,” he told the BBC.
John Armitage, professor and director of tissue banks at the University of Bristol, believes that “you can never say never in science”, but there is little chance that cryopreservation will prove viable given what is known today.
He says taking tissue from healthy people to be stored for future use is one thing, but taking a diseased body, freezing it safely (including the complex structure of the brain) and reactivating it is a much, much more difficult task.
“What are the chances that there is no harm done? We are not at the stage of cryopreservation of organs yet, so doing this with the whole body would be a big challenge,” Armitage told the BBC.
Barry Fuller, professor of surgical science and low-temperature medicine at University College London (UCL), told the BBC that the first step in whole-body cryopreservation research is to demonstrate that human organs can be cryopreserved for transplantation. At the moment, however, there is no equipment for this.
“That’s why we have to say that, at the moment, we don’t have any objective evidence that an entire human body can survive cryopreservation with cells that will function after reactivation,” he said.
The US-based Institute of Cryogenesis contests the argument based on the burden of proof that the process is unworkable because to date no one has been revived. Furthermore, he claims that no scientist has presented irrefutable proof that the post-freeze revival theory does not work.
“Our premise is not that successful cryopreservation revivals are an indisputable fact today, but that current evidence and technology strongly suggest that revival will be possible in the future.”
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