The ReactivatorSuspends Life and Reanimates It

Guest: Shannon Tessier, Instructor, Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, and Scientific Staff, Shriners Hospitals for Children, Boston When you hear the word "cryogenics," what comes to mind? The strange practice of freezing heads of people when they die in hopes that somehow, someday, medical science will figure out how to unfreeze them and bring them back? Yeah, it’s a thing. Well, it turns out that "cryonics" is the word for the pseudoscience of achieving immortality by freezing bodies. "Cryogenics" simply means the science of working with materials at extremely low temperatures. Now, if you were a frog, you might do both--it turns out that some frogs can be frozen all winter, frozen solid--and then thaw and come back to life in the spring. If we can figure out how this works it may be more than just cool, so to speak. It may have medical implications. Think about preserving organs as they move from donors to transplant recipients.