This research is one more step towards achieving cryo sleep, that is, freezing ourselves, not being the correct term, keeping us in a frozen state indefinitely, for example, to make interstellar trips, is a step in that direction, in this publication what it means is that scientists had managed to reactivate activity in the brains of frozen mice for the first time.
It is a step to achieve cryo sleep, which is still a thing of science fiction, but it is a step and it has been achieved by a German team led by neurologist Alexander Herman from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. This team achieved it for the first time, recovering that functional activity in the brain tissue of mice after having completely frozen them through a process called vitrification.
It sounds good, it sounds impressive, but be careful, this story goes wrong soon. What they did was, and here the bad thing begins, they took thin slices of a mouse's brain, they treated them with cryoprotectant solutions to prevent the formation of ice crystals, that is the bad thing about freezing in the crude way that was done years ago, I don't know if it is still done, but I hope not, when they promise to cryogenize deceased human bodies, obviously it is usually pure and simple freezing and that does not work because the ice crystals have the habit of destroying the cells, with which you have a disaster.
What you have is a frozen human body, but in reality it is a slurry of a human body. With these cryoprotectants, the formation of ice crystals is prevented, which is essential. Another important thing they did was cool it very quickly with liquid nitrogen to -196º Celsius, keeping those slices in a glass state, like glass, rather than cryogenizing the body it would be vitrifying it, then they stayed like that for 7 days, then they thawed or devitrified those slices in a controlled manner and discovered that the neuronal membranes and synapses were left intact and that there was no metabolic damage to the mitochondria or the rest of the cells involved in that vitrification.
The neurons then responded almost normally to electrical stimuli, the tricky part is that how do you then manage to join the slices of the brain so that it becomes a whole brain, but in principle if they had managed to do it with the entire brain of the mouse with the electrical stimuli, they could make it work again, if it can be said that if you take the brain out of a body, in this case a mouse, it can be made to work again, but the neurons and synapses could be active again.
This is obviously a very important advance, it demonstrates that the physical structure of the brain can maintain emerging functional properties, even after a complete shutdown, such as this process, and after days of being in that state and this brings us closer to cryo sleep, to achieving that, in part to protect brains during long surgeries, for example, or serious illnesses or during interstellar travel.
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