Cryonics is the process of maintaining the human body by preserving it in extremely cold temperatures once it has died so that one day future medicine may be able to treat it. You may have seen the TV series Futurama where the main character Fry falls into one of the cryogenics pods and wakes up thousands of years later in the 31st Century, this in essence is cryogenics however it is a little more complicated.
For starters, cryonics isn't used as a way of skipping through time - today it is used to preserver people that die with the hope of reviving them in the future. Also there's a process which needs to be undergone before the subject is frozen in order for them to be hopefully revived in the future.
When the person that has signed up to be cryogenically frozen is pronounced dead, their body is taken by a team of people which aim to ready it for freezing. It is made sure that the brain is looked after with blood and oxygen supplied, the body is packed in ice to try and prevent as little decay as possible and an anticoagulant is given so that the blood in the body does not clot. It's easy to think of this as like when crops are picked to be sent to the supermarket; they try to make them as fresh as possible with the least time from picked to shelf - this is essentially what this part of the process is for.
After this vitrification must take place before cooling so that the water in the cells does not freeze, expand and break the cells completely. To do this the water in the body's cells is replaced with a 'cryo-protectant' which makes sure tissue in the body does not for ice crystals and is well preserved - it is brought to extremely low temperatures without freezing.
The body is cooled on dry ice, inserted into a individual container and then the container is put into a tank of liquid nitrogen along with approximately 3 other bodies and six brains. You in the mood to be cryogenically frozen yet?
Oh and if you think this is another plan - it isn't. Tonnes of people sign up to be cryogenically frozen once dead, but no one has ever been revived yet. I guess we'll just have to wait for our frozen friends some time in the future ... and this could be as earlier as 2040.
The fact is it is unsure if we'll have a cure for the causes of death of these people anytime soon. I'm glad they don't do this to people when they are alive as it could be just selling them a lie. I do however think it would be amazing to one day be woken up from death itself cured of whatever 'killed' you. Scientists are starting to wonder when a person is actually dead. People used to be buried alive in the past when medical science wasn't able to fully pronounce a person as dead and now we have such technology like defibrillators which can bring a person back from the brink of death - or even after they are 'dead'.
Thanks for reading, Chris.
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