Cryonic Freezing?

Cryonics is the practice of preserving human bodies in extremely cold temperatures with the hope of reviving them sometime in the future. So, how does it work?

• The medical team will first extract the water from your body and replace it with cryoprotectant (a glycerol that is used to stop your cells from damaging while they are being frozen) 
• The next step is to insert your body into an individual container that is then placed into a large metal tank filled with liquid nitrogen at a temperature of around -196 degrees Celsius (-320 degrees Fahrenheit). Your body is stored head down, so if there were ever a leak in the tank, your brain would stay immersed in the freezing liquid.
• Your brain is preserved using nuerosuspension

So I have to you the basic steps, but you now may ask 'Has Anyone Been Preserved Using Cryonics? The answer is 'Yep'! Dozens of people have been stored in cryonic facilities. Probably the most famous of them was baseball legend Ted Williams. But no one has actually been revived, because the technology to do so still does not exist.

Critics say companies that perform cryonics are simply bilking people out of their money with the promise of an immortality they cannot deliver. Even scientists who perform cryonics say they haven't successfully revived anyone and don't expect to be able to do so in the near future. One of the problems is that, if the warming process isn't done at exactly the right speed, the cells could turn to ice and shatter.

Even though people in cryonic suspension haven't yet been revived, living organisms can be and have been brought back from a dead or near-dead state. Defibrillators and CPR bring accident and heart attack victims back from the dead on an almost daily basis. Neurosurgeons often cool patients' bodies so they can operate on aneurysms enlarged blood vessels in the brain without damaging or rupturing them. Human embryos that are frozen in fertility clinics, defrosted and implanted in a mother's uterus grow into perfectly normal human beings.

However, cryonic freezing is not all in the dark. Cryobiologists are hopeful that a new technology called nanotechnology will make revival a reality someday. Nanotechnology uses microscopic machines to manipulate single atoms, the tiniest units of an organism, to build or repair literally anything, including human cells and tissues. Hopefully, one day nanotechnology will repair not only the cellular damage caused by the freezing process, but also the damage caused by ageing and disease. Some cryobiologists predict that the first cryonic revival might occur somewhere around the year 2040.

How Optogenetics work

“Optogenetics” is a new field that combines molecular biology with light stimulation to allow researchers to have precise control over the behaviour of a cell, populations of cells, or even a whole animal. The term optogenetics comes from the joining of two fields: using genetic tools to target light-sensitive proteins to very specific regions within a cell, or to populations of specific cells within a network, and using optical stimulation (light in the UV to the IR wavelengths) to then activate those very selectively targeted proteins (or other probes). It is a very useful emerging technology, and scientists hope to be able cure diseases like Parkinson's disease with it.

The technology is based on the movement of negative ions in the nerve cells, across the cellular membrane. The balance of these ions inside and outside of a cell, and the potential of the membrane, contribute greatly to whether or not the neuron fires an action potential. Action potentials are central to communication between neurons. Therefore, if we can control the movement of those ions, we can control the cells excitability and how and when it communicates (fires action potentials) with other cells in a network.

The key here is that only the cells (such as the dopamine neurons that are dying in Parkinson’s disease) where you genetically target these proteins will be under the control of the light (leaving other cells to function normally). Even more profound is that the technique does not only apply to researchers that want to control ion channels, optogenetics is also being used with other proteins and molecules to modulate very specific signalling pathways such as those that control protein dynamics.