What can the cold

The hero of the famous French sci-Fi movie thawed in a hundred years, and he was pleasantly surprised to see all the changes in life. What is now the real possibility of freezing of the cells, organs and whole people if we have the chance to enjoy the paintings of the future?

Alas, while experts are well able to freeze only the sexual cells and the early embryos of animals and humans. But this may not be enough for many years to raise their whole body.

Store cells in liquid nitrogen at -196°C almost indefinitely. For example, cells of a malignant tumor, taken in 1952, one female (who died shortly thereafter) and stored in such conditions, it is still fully retained viability after thawing continue to grow and divide, allowing them to be used for scientific research.

Globally, there is a special store - cryobanks, where retain frozen semen of farm animals. There are cryobanks for frozen embryos - the first such Bank for the preservation of embryos clean and mutant lines of mice were created in 1976 in England. Stored there from 8-cell embryos after thawing, more than half of the cases a full grow mouse.

Many specialized cryobanks exist in Russia - they store more than 2,000 cell line and a hybrid that is required for biology, medicine and agriculture. This allows with minimal cost to prevent the loss of unique gene pool - both natural and created in laboratories (mutant, transgenic, marked cellular strains). Exhibits such collections are used to prepare vaccines, diagnostics and other biomedical products, as well as highly specific test-systems for ecological monitoring.

Can be stored in the Cryobank, the frozen and early embryos and the gametes of a person. Sensation of the end of the twentieth century was the development of methods to enablekeep ing in such conditions female egg, and if necessary to thaw them and fertilize. The sperm for fertilization can also be frozen. In this way the world was born already 50 thousand "test-tube babies".

It was established experimentally that in itself hypothermia to sobolevym temperature not causing damage to cells. The important thing is that they are threatened by freezing is the formation of these ice crystals, causing mechanical denaturation of macromolecules, dehydration and deformation of cells. The probability and nature of the crystallization water in the cell depends primarily on the cooling rate of the cell suspension. Most of the cells undergo damage in the critical temperature zone, when allocating a latent heat of crystallization. To as quickly as possible this area to pass, you need to very precisely control the freezing and to regulate the cooling rate.

For this purpose, special software freezers - they are served in a cooler strictly metered amount of liquid nitrogen in accordance with laid down in the installation program. The mode of freezing depends on the nature of the biological object and the composition of the medium containing the cells. Different types have different resistance to freezing and, therefore, its own optimal cooling rate.

Until recently, for freezing sperm used cryosurgical model "Ice Cube 1810", developed by the Austrian firm "SY-Lab" software for freezing of blood components, heart valves, small organs and skin. The device is capable of a few minutes to freeze at the same time more than a thousand vials of a biomaterial or a few packages of blood components. But it is necessary to cool only a few filled with cum capillary size of ball pen refill.

Now the company has started production of inexpensive portable freezers "CryoCell" intended specifically for the freezing of capillaries with semen and oocytes. The weight of the deviceoysta along with the filled liquid nitrogen Dewar with a total of 9 pounds. The cooling rate them monitors and controls the microprocessor control contained in the non-volatile memory program capacity of up to 20 steps. Programming operations easy and accessible to all.

Frozen cells can be sent over long distances, for example in the Austrian or Swiss Cryobank. To do this, they placed in a special transport Dewar that is not afraid of shaking. And when the cells need - even if it is many years later, they will do the return journey (and some of them just in case to completely eliminate the loss of genetic material would be left in the Cryobank).

And then everything is very simple: the sample is, for example, your sperm for 5-7 minutes to defrost and... in a year or two your child "test-tube" would be fun to frolic on the updated, clean planet. Of course, the descendant is not exactly you, but still nice!