Winter World_ The Ingenuity of Animal Survival - Bernd Heinrich [80]
If even multicellular animals, such as insects with organs, muscles, glands, and nervous, reproductive, digestive, and excretory systems, can survive having all of those systems, each with its thousands of cells, being stopped and potentially disrupted, then how much easier it must be to stop and restart the nevertheless highly orchestrated chain of complex biochemical reactions in a single cell, or an even much simpler system, such as a virus? Viruses are not primitive organisms. They are inordinately elegant life-forms that are functionally reduced to a bare minimum required for growth and reproduction in their specific environment, the interior of cells. Their liveness is a complex series of chemical reactions that is within our grasp of understanding. It is at least theoretically possible for us to synthesize them from chemicals “off the shelf.” A bacterium is admittedly a much more complex combination of molecules than a virus, but the same principles apply. If a fly or a tardigrade can survive being dried for a century (and presumably much longer), then a bacterium could be potentially immortal.
A DNA molecule could remain forever; if it is preserved in a saline solution and is not degraded, then time is irrelevant to it. Only the ambient conditions are vital. Given constant conditions, there is no scientific surprise if it survives or has a “shelf life” of 10 years, 10 million years, or 100 million years. I’m emotionally shocked and surprised that bacteria may have been preserved for 250 million years, but intellectually I’m less surprised that, if indeed preserved, they could still metabolize, grow, and divide when recovered. However, I do not subscribe to the idea that they were alive all this time. They were dead as a rock. And so is an insect that freezes in winter. It is not matter that defines life. Process, such as energy flow, does.
Research on insects has opened the amazing possibility, only broached in folklore, science fiction, and most recently even business, of freezing ourselves solid and later reviving. After being frozen the body is “dead” by most definitions (no movement, heartbeat, circulation, respiration, neurological activity) and there should then be no limit to the length of time a body can be preserved. Thankfully, no humans have been immortalized in ice. But freezing of human embryos has been in practice since 1984; some human embroys have been in storage for eight years before being implanted. There is no obvious physiological reason why they could not be stored for more than a century (see Time magazine, March 2, 1998), but I could think of lots of moral ones.
There is a whimsical story of the townsfolk in a village in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont—an isolated backwoods area known for its cold winters—where the residents of one little village were said to avoid the awful winters by downing a few stiff drinks in the fall and then freezing themselves solid and then unthawing to resume an active life at an appropriate time in the spring. The movie Iceman similarly featured a man who had been frozen in ice some ten thousand years ago, who was subsequently thawed and brought back to life. Some people are willing to believe that these stories are in the realm of possibility, which is why a company (TransTime Inc. of San Leandro, California) provides “commercial cryonics and cryonic suspension services”; they will freeze anyone in liquid