Scientists are learning how to cryopreserve living tissues, organs, and even whole organisms, then bring them back to life. LongReads
The rat kidney on the operating table in front of Joseph Sushil Rao looked like it had been through hell. Which it had—a very cold one.
Just before midnight, Rao snapped a close-up photo with his iPhone, proof that the kidney was working. He sent the photo and an ecstatic email to his two bosses, transplant surgeon Erik Finger and biomedical engineer John Bischof, titled “First successful transplant of vitrified, nanowarmed rat kidney.”
Joseph Sushil Rao, a transplant surgeon–in–training at the University of Minnesota, prepares to remove a kidney from a laboratory rat before the organ is preserved at extremely low temperatures. The complex plumbing of a kidney requires delicate handling by Rao during all stages of a transplant . on Hollywood movies might think the technology to freeze and revive entire organisms is right around the corner.’s Han Solo is trapped in “carbonite” and resuscitated.
Then they cooled the embryo, kept in a slender plastic straw, using –196°C liquid nitrogen. Between the rapid cooling and the cryoprotectant, ice didn’t have time to form. Rather than line up in a tidy crystalline pattern, water molecules were stuck in a random mass like a rigid liquid, a process known as vitrification. The result was a hard, smooth, glasslike substance without the problematic properties of ice. To rewarm the embryo, Rall stirred the straw in 0°C water.
University of Minnesota postdoctoral researcher Zonghu Han connects a rat kidney to tubes that pump antifreeze chemicals called cryoprotectants and tiny iron oxide particles into the organ. to persist. The rapid decay of organs is one of the biggest problems bedeviling organ transplants for people. From the moment a human heart or lung is disconnected from a donor, doctors have 4 to 6 hours to get it hooked up to a new patient’s blood supply before it is irretrievably damaged.
Giwa has helped launch several cryopreservation-related companies. One, GaiaLife, is experimenting with vitrifying ovaries. The goal is to remove the egg-bearing organs from people before they undergo ovary-damaging medical treatment such as chemotherapy, then reimplant them after the treatment is over.
The clock for the kidney’s survival had been ticking for more than 3 hours, since Rao, the transplant surgeon, had removed it from a rat in a reenactment of that 2022 breakthrough surgery. Now, as the kidney’s temperature plummeted inside the freezer, the biological processes gradually destroying the organ ground to a halt. “We have stored [a rat kidney] up to 100 days before transplantation,” Han says. “It’s safe in there indefinitely.
At Harvard University and MGH, scientists are taking cues from nature to push tissues below freezing while holding back the ice. The wood frogis a champion of this realm. Found in much of North America, including the frigid Canadian Arctic, it can spring to life after spending months with as much as two-thirds of its body frozen at temperatures as low as –16°C.
On the other side of the country, Boris Rubinsky had the idea that higher pressures might help him supercool organs without damage. In the early 2000s, Rubinsky, a biomedical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, began to cool objects inside sealed metal containers. As water inside approached freezing it expanded, raising the pressure. The higher pressure, he discovered, limited the formation of ice. “In all modesty, it’s a revolutionary approach to preservation,” he says.
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