Some great expertise from a reader on the issues surrounding the freezing of
human cells:
“Hullo, Derb— … The issue is kind of interesting in that it ties to
technology feasibility and even into moral dilemmas, from Ted Williams, to
abortion, to embryonic stem cell research. You are partly right and partly
wrong about the survival and destruction issues surrounding freezing living
cells.
“You are right in that cells die when there are no cryoprotective agents
added, but it is more than that– there is also a very precise set of
protocols required to succeed and prevent the freezing process from killing
the cells– temp reduction rates, fluid viscosity, and so on. The actual
cause of cell death is not universally understood– the cell membrane is
actually somewhat flexible, so it is not going to simply burst like a water
balloon if there is a 20% increase in fluid space volume from water
freezing– as best ‘we’ can tell (I am not part of ‘we’– our experts here
are led by Dr. Allison Hubel and colleagues around the world), the problem
is that the water forms crystals when it freezes, which have sharp points
that essentially lacerate the cell membrane. Freezing makes the water turn
into little spears that kill the cells from the inside.
“A major problem with cryoprotective agents (CPA- same acronym as Paul
Bremer….) is that the most common, used almost universally and
adjunctively with glycerol, is DMSO, which has the unfortunate
characteristic of also being toxic to humans. So, they harvest blood and
process/concentrate the cells, freeze it with DMSO & etc., transfer it to
the place (city, hospital where the marrow-matched patient is) where a bone
marrow transplant is to be done, thaw it back out, then go through a series
of washes to get the poisons cleaned back off before instilling it into the
patient.
“A good post-thaw viability (survival of cells) is around 60% of the total
of cells– some people advertise >80% or 90-%, but that is a bit of a ‘lie
via statistics’ game– they don’t count all the dead population in computing
the percentage. We are working here with different, more efficacious, and
non-toxic CPAs, of which the most promising appears to be arabinogalactin
extracted from larch trees.
“As you can see, this is the reason that we will never get Ted Williams back
among the living. His frozen body consisting of billions of cells simply
would not work with only ~60% of the cells surviving the thaw process. As
one can say, God instills the soul when He wishes, and outsmarts us all.”