Never Say Die

CRYOBIOLOGY

James H. Bedford, 73, a retired psychology professor dying of cancer, in Glendale, Calif., had decided years ago that he wanted his body preserved by freezing for later revival if possible. He had left $4,200 for a steel capsule and for liquid nitrogen to keep his body frozen at about 200DEG below zero centigrade. When Bedford died on Jan. 12, his physician, Dr. B. Renault Able, began to pack the body in ice. Members of the Cryonics Society of California arrived to help. They spent eight hours, sending out periodically for more ice, getting the body frozen solid. They used artificial respiration and external heart massage to protect the brain from oxygen-loss damage until it was frozen, drained out the blood and replaced it with antifreeze solutions. Then Professor Bedford's icy body was flown to Phoenix, where Edward Hope, a wigmaker by trade, waited with the capsule he had designed and put the professor's remains in liquid-nitrogen storage.

Dim Prospects. Underlying these strange rites was the hope that when cures for cancer are discovered, Bedford's body could be thawed out, cured, and restored to healthy life. This hope has been fostered by Robert C. W. Ettinger, a physics teacher at a Michigan junior college, in his book The Prospect of Immortality (TIME, Sept. 30).

The fact is that although some of the lower forms of life, such as bacteria, can survive freezing and thawing, no higher animal can, and certainly not man. Not even a single major human organ can be thus preserved. The National Naval Medical Center, the world's foremost freeze bank, stores only three types of tissue: corneas, skin, and bone-marrow cells. Frozen red blood cells and sperm will also keep for months or years. It is not for want of trying that researchers have failed to preserve whole organs, for a frozen-kidney bank would be invaluable to transplantation surgeons.

All freezing results in the formation of ice crystals. Some water to make the ice is drawn from inside the cells, many of which are damaged in the process. As the water freezes, its dissolved salts are expelled. The permeability of cell membranes is altered; capillaries are injured; countless enzyme systems are ruined. Much of the damage may not develop until the organ is thawed.

Organs & Cells. If organs are removed from an animal's body, they can be flushed out with antifreeze solutions to reduce the ice-crystal damage. Kidneys treated in this way have survived 24 hours of freezing and then recovered part, but not all, of their function when reimplanted in the same animal.

The University of Virginia's Surgeon Leslie E. Rudolf has tried a number of variations, including supercooling with DMSO, under different oxygen pressures, to reduce the cell's metabolism. Dr. Rudolf believes that ways of reducing the metabolism still further may provide the key to preservation of a single whole organ. Even that comparatively modest achievement, starting with a live organ, still lies in a distant future. The prospect of restoring function to a whole human body, with dozens of organs and cell types, which must first be brought back to life, is even more remote.

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