Posted on 01/31/2017 3:24:16 AM PST by beaversmom
It was late evening on January 12, 1967 and three men were laboring over the body of psychology professor James Bedford, who had just died from kidney cancer at the age of 72.
But while the manner of Bedford's death - in bed at a hospital in Glendale, California, was not unusual - what happened next certainly was.
Bedford was about to become the world's first cryopreserved human being – and now lies suspended in liquid nitrogen in a vault in Scottsdale, Arizona. Although the 72-year-old said before his death that he didn't expect ever to be revived, scientist Robert Nelson, one of the trio who carried out the preservation process, says he is confident that Bedford will one day live again.
'When we froze Bedford, man had never been on the moon, there had never been a heart transplant, there was no GPS, no cellphones,' said Nelson, now 80, in an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Hopefully they invested in all of the top of the line, state of the art technology of the time. But if the quality of that black & white photo is any indication....
One of the scariest things i’ve seen in a horror/science fiction movie is when a woman who experimented on aliens (Tortured them) has the tables turned when they escape/take over.
She knows they have torture methods than would make anything a human could think of seem like child’s play, so she blew her brains out to avoid the torture.
Only to be fully intact a second later through the aliens healing her, so that they could torture her forever.
I don’t know why this story made me think of that.
Somehow this reminded me of George Costanza:
I was in the pool!
Yeah, yeah. Talk is cheap, Slick.
Future thawed puddle of goo. Ever freeze a head of lettuce then thaw it?
That’s almost as scarey as Obama coming back or Hillary being President or Warren saying stuff.
Hey, that's great!
I was just about to mention that gentleman’s name (even though that is an urban legend).
Who here remembers the Star Trek TNG episode that dealt with this subject (the housewife, the country music star, and the businessman from the 20th century)?
So, he really IS a stiff!
I don’t see how anyone who, having been dead can expect to thaw out and “return to life”. Return to death, maybe.
Do you remember the title of that movie?
I doubt very much that bodies preserved in liquid nitrogen will be brought back to life.
I have frozen small vials of cells in liquid nitrogen. The cells must first be suspended in a kind of buffer solution (15% glycerin or dimethyl sulfoxide), which prevents water from forming crystals that destroy cells. Then they must be frozen slowly, over a couple of hours (ideally, with the temperature dropping by 1 degree Celsius per minute). Then they must be placed in the liquid nitrogen. If everything is done correctly, the cells should wake up when thawed—but sometimes don’t. I once thawed a vial of cells that behaved exactly as if they were alive—I could see them attach to the bottom of their flask, and they would change position from day to day, but they did not ever start growing. I threw them away after a couple of weeks. Other vials just never revive.
Given the host of issues that arise when trying to cryopreserve and revive cultures of cells, which are vastly less complicated than multi-cell systems such as human bodies, I have serious doubts that the technology will ever advance to the point where large, intact bodies will be thawed back to life.
I will note that tiny embryos are cryopreserved, and further note that these embryos are small enough that they do not need a circulatory system to distribute nutrients and oxygen throughout the body, and that they have no nervous system to worry about. They are *not* equivalent to adult complex organisms.
An extra complication is that the bodies are, in fact, dead at the time of freezing. Death causes massive tissue damage starting almost immediately. Skin cells can remain alive for hours after death, but brain cells, which are crucial for life as a human, die off within minutes. I don’t see how the cryo process could progress rapidly enough after death to keep the brain cells from dying.
Still, this process makes for interesting science fiction scenarios. That’s its main value, as far as I can tell.
Same with squash. They're almost all water, as is a human body.
One might think they'd have worked these things out before ever commencing.
This is my *favourite* “alien” bringing something back to life scene in a movie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ikKH__oC8k
Not scary at all like your movie, but just really beautiful and touching to me.
Maybe that’s why Hillary is all dried up in advance.
‘Like a steam locomotive, rolling down the track, he’s gone, gone, gone, he’s gone, gone, aint nothing gonna bring him back. He’s gone’.
Related from April 2016:
Crossing Over: How Science Is Redefining Life and Death
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3415427/posts
same thing in Stargate- Anubis would torture someone to death and then heal them in a sarcophagus to kill them over and over.
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