cryopreservation

Some years after also working on the wood frog in Ottawa, another Storey lab alumna, Rasha Al-Attar, now works at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Engineering in Medicine & Surgery, where she takes inspiration from nature to develop cryopreservation techniques for experimental model animals like zebrafish, or to preserve organs like human hearts.

In 1976, Ettinger founded the Cryonics Institute, a nonprofit that freezes both humans and pets in the hope of someday reviving them, and the cryopreservation movement was born.

A research fellow at Melbourne’s Monash University, Zeleznikow-Johnston wrote the new book, "The Future Loves You: How and Why We Should Abolish Death," which makes the case that cryopreservation is possible and should be more widely available.

A recent study in Frontiers in Medical Technology explored several potential strategies for preserving structural information in the brain after death, including traditional cryopreservation.

Humans have yearned for immortality for as long as we‘ve understood our fragile permanence. But while dodging the Grim Reaper was once relegated to the realm of religious myth, now technology is attempting to find the cure for death. Most popular is the idea of cryopreservation — that is, any process which preserves biological tissues by storing them at extremely cold temperatures — which can be traced back to a 1931 science fiction novel, “The Jameson Satellite” by Neil R. Jones.