Frostbitten brain

Scientists have thawed the brain of a rabbit in close to perfect condition

Ivan Sychev, Geektimes based on Motherboard: A Mammalian Brain Has Been Cryonically Preserved and Recovered.

A team of scientists led by Robert McIntyre, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, managed to freeze the brain of a small mammal and restore it to a state close to ideal. The Brain Preservation Foundation awarded the team the "Small Mammalian Brain Preservation Prize".

Scientists have been researching cryopreservation since the 17th century, when experiments on freezing animals hibernating in winter first began. The English scientist John Hunter in the XVIII century put forward theories about the prolongation of human life due to cyclic freezing and thawing. At the end of the XIX and the beginning of the XX century, the Russian physicist and biologist Porfiry Ivanovich Bakhmetyev investigated the phenomena of suspended animation and hypothermia of animals. He developed a thermoelectric thermometer for measuring temperature in insects and showed that an exit from suspended animation is possible if tissue fluids remain in a liquid state.

Humans were first cryonized in 1967. It was psychology professor James Bedford, who was dying of kidney cancer with lung metastases. In 2010, experiments to create cryosleep technology for soldiers were started by DARPA.

In 2015, Natasha Vita-Mor from the American University of Modern Technologies and Daniel Barranco from the Department of Cryobiotechnology of the Spanish University of Seville were able to prove that the use of cryonic technologies does not destroy the long–term memory of the simplest multicellular organisms - in this case, we were talking about nematode worms Caenorhabditis elegans.

In Caenorhabditis elegans worms, the nervous system consists of 302 cells. And the human brain contains 86 billion neurons, which complicates the task of scientists to preserve it. Cryopreservation should preserve long-term memory so that the brain can then be restored or loaded into a machine.

In order to achieve the ability to preserve the human brain, scientists are experimenting with other mammals. In 1995, biologist Yuri Pichugin froze sections of the rabbit's brain, after defrosting, the sections retained bioelectric activity. In a new study by a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, scientists cryonized an entire rabbit brain, after which they restored it with minimal damage.

The technology proposed by a team of scientists from 21st Century Medicine has shown that the cryoprotector is able to protect against the formation of ice crystals even with a slow decrease in brain temperature to minus 130 degrees Celsius. The team was able to preserve neural connections after defrosting the brain. Scientists filled the vessels of the brain with special chemicals that fixed the neurons, cooled the brain, and then warmed and removed these substances.

"Every neuron and synapse looks perfectly preserved throughout the brain," says neuroscientist Kenneth Hayworth, president of the Brain Preservation Foundation, which awarded the prize. The judges of the Foundation were convinced of this with the help of electron microscopy. John Smart, co-founder of the foundation, commented to Motherboard that for the first time, the procedure preserved everything that neuroscientists consider involved in learning and memory.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru 11.02.2015