• Question: if you froze someone in ice before they died (like i think they did with walt disney) would you be able to resurrect them?

    Asked by to Aimee, Chris, Dave, Greig, Laurence on 16 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Greig Cowan

      Greig Cowan answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      This depends how you did it. If you just freeze water (to make ice-cubes, for example) then the water expands. That is, the frozen-water has a larger volume than the liquid water. When the water is a liquid, all of the water molecules (H2O) are jumbled up and jiggling about. However, as the water freezes, the molecules have less energy, jiggle about less and this allows them to form a hexagonal structure, where they are bound together by a very weak force called a Van der Waals force. This crystalline structure means that the ice has a larger volume than the liquid (since there is more space inbetween the molecules).

      Now, what has this got to do with freezing someone? Well, if you just froze a person, the water in their cells would expand as they froze, which would probably destroy most of the cells in their body. When you defrosted the person, probably all you would be left with is mush…

      However, there are examples of animals (i.e., catepillars) that survive for many months in a frozen state. They can do this since they basically have some form of anti-freeze (like what you have in a car cooling system) that prevents their blood and tissues from fully freezing. This means that they can survive the defrosting process. If we could adapt this to humans then perhaps we could preserve people for a long time!

    • Photo: Dave Jones

      Dave Jones answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      I think the short answer is probably not. When water freezes it expands and most of the water inside our bodies is inside our cells, and I think that if we froze them quite a lot of the cells would burst or break because of that expansion. Lots of burst cells wouldn’t be very good for resurrection! So, you’d have to find a way of freezing so that they wouldn’t break – Greig’s answer explains that really well!

    • Photo: Aimee Hopper

      Aimee Hopper answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      No you cant. The water in a human cell expands and would burst the cell, destroying it.

      Though it would be cool if one day people could make a substance (like the anti-freeze stuff in caterpillars) so that we COULD do this… 🙂

    • Photo: Laurence Perreault Levasseur

      Laurence Perreault Levasseur answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      I don’t think they did freeze Walt Disney, but there is a lot of research being done right now to study how making the human body cold can help preserving it. This is useful, for example, in the case of big accidents when few seconds can make the difference between life and death. It would be like being able to push the pause button and having a lot of time to repair injuries from, say, a car accident or a gun shot wound. Right now it’s not possible to freeze someone solid, so it’s just about making the body colder. There is a medical trial right now that decreases the temperature of the body to 10 C (about 50 F). Look it out here:
      http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/suspended-animation-human-trials-about-begin

      The reason why you can’t freeze someone bellow zero is that human cells are very fragile, and contain mostly of water. When water freezes, it becomes bigger and less dense (that why ice floats on water!), and that would make the human cells explode and completely destroy them. (Like Greig just said! )

      There are some species, however, who have special, much more resistant cells that allow them to survive being frozen solid. That’s the case of some frog species and (I think but i’m not sure) some fish. Some other animals have antifreeze in their cells, which allows them to cool bellow zero C without actually freezing.

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