Cryopreservation

PUTTING HUMANS INTO A STATE OF suspended animation has been a sci-fi aspiration for decades.

- Elizabeth Rayne

And recently, Alexander German (a researcher at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany) found a way to do just thatcryogenically induce a state of suspended animation in hippocampus slices from mouse brains...and then revive them.

Until now, whether living brain tissue could be shut down by freezing and still regain function was unknown. Building on previous experiments, German and his team put the brain segments in a deep freeze for a week, and then warmed them back up to find that electrical activity had returned to almost normal levels. A 2006 study attempted to freeze and revive hippocampal slices from rat brains in a similar way, but there was not enough evidence to claim the level of reanimation that German has now achieved.