Reanimated Lobsters?

SYFer writes "Trufresh, a Connecticut-based frozen food company claims that lobsters frozen with its special freezing process sometimes come back to life when thawed. If these claims prove true, will the dubiously regarded field of "cryonics" finally get some respect?" If people were more like lobsters, maybe. The company's success rate at reviving lobsters after short-term freezing (at -40 degrees) is 12 out of 200.

Ice Fishing

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to go ice fishing as a kid. We'd just throw the fish on the snow. They'd freeze solid. At home we'd toss them in water and they all came back do life, only to die minutes later. Clearly the article is about something quite different, but I'm not stunned.

Selective breeding

[jhoger]

If true they could do some selective breeding and increase the survival rate...

Of course, that presumes the ones that survive can still breed, or that usable reproductive material is extracted before freezing.

Re: Ice Fishing

[Black Parrot]

> I used to go ice fishing as a kid. We'd just throw the fish on the snow. They'd freeze solid. At home we'd toss them in water and they all came back do life, only to die minutes later. Clearly the article is about something quite different, but I'm not stunned.

A few years ago there was a news story about a kid who got lost in a blizzard. When they found her(?) she was "stiff as cordwood" and had a heart rate of 4 beats/minute. But they thawed her out OK.

Not that big of a deal...

[ibbey]

I worked in Alaska on a crab processing ship, & we used to do the same thing to crabs all the time. You'd toss them in the brine (salt water cooled well below freezing) for a few minutes & they'd come back to life pretty consistently. Crab's (& presumably lobsters as well) are pretty simple life forms, so they respond just fine to the freezing.

Hmmm...

[Undefined Parameter]

The blurb reminds me of this [bash.org] classic. Only six percent of the lobsters survive being frozen.

On the other hand, I seem to recall watching a PBS "Nature" show which included a bit about a species frog (or toad?) that survived the frozen winter through some sort of hibernation, and I have to wonder if that's similar to what is going on with these lobsters.

In the mean time, I'm going to stay away from the lobster ice cream.

~UP

reanimation odds?

[Ratso Baggins]

12 in 200 is better odds than you apparently get stuffed into an incinerator or the more traditional 6ft under.

Re:Flash Freezing...

[FattMattP]

If we fix the ice crystal problem, we still can't fix the damaged tissue in those folks that have frozen their bodies/heads/etc before...

The people in those situations were banking on nanotechnology having progressed enough that something would be able to repair the damage before reviving them.

-40 degrees

[3141]

Incidentally, Timothy was totally correct in saying -40 degrees without specifying Celsius or Fahrenheit, because -40 degrees Celsius is the same temperature as -40 degrees Fahrenheit.

We use to do this with goldfish...

[(H)elix1]

If you froze goldfish in liquid O2, we had a surprising amount of success reviving them. I believe the mitochondria were shattered due to ice crystals, so they only lasted for a bit. The tricky bit is keeping them alive. Did a fair amount of b-cell cloning - separate out the white blood cells, add enormous quantities of EBV, toss in nuked whites as feeders, and isolate the interesting ones. You could freeze down a single blood cell if you were careful (and used a bit of dimethyl sulfoxide to help with the crystallization problem)

I hear we missed out on the real fun however. Guess lighting charcoal was where the real action was. Picking up shattered goldfish bits got old fast....

Not so breaking news....

[SuccuBUS]

Back in school we did an experiment on mud crabs with the similar results. We progressively cooled them down and measured their responses (forget how). Soon got bored and left them in the freezer. Remembered next day and found them (unsurprisingly) frozen completely solid in a block of ice. Thawed them out and the little buggers walked away. Our teacher nearly fell over in surprise!

Same thing happens with alpine Wetas (Native NZ crickets). In heavy frosts they freeze solid overnight and thaw out the next day. Research shows they have an antifreeze in their blood which helps to prevent ice xtals forming.

Freezing things

[Anonymous Coward]

At work we freeze mammalian cell lines for weeks at a time. A good percentage of the cells do survive process. I heard that a some of the researchers where taking this a step further to whole organisms. Though that hasn't been very successful.

BUT...

[redled]

There is no such thing as a degree Kelvin. They are simply kelvins. Also, there is no such thing as a negative kelvin. The kelvin scale starts at 0.

So? People gamble on longer odds

[SmallFurryCreature]

They are dead anyway. Adding a tiny percentage of surviving dead no matter how small doesn't sound all that crazy.

The real problem I am afraid isn't tech. It is why. Why should we want to unfreeze these people in a hundred years? It is not like we are running out of people.

Re:Not that big of a deal...

[ibbey]

I was on a processing ship, so it was basically a factory that happened to be in the middle of the ocean. The dangerous job is crabbing, actually going out & catching the crabs. That is extremely dangerous, but it paid well. You were paid according the catch, and once you'd been on the ship a few seasons & earned a full share, it is possible to make $25,000 during a two-week King crab season. But you work 21 hours a day, seven days a week, moving around 1000 pound crab traps, often in sub-zero conditions, on a slippery, wildly rocking boat. Because of the speed at which you need to work, it's not possible for you to wear a life jacket, and if you go overboard, you'll be dead in about 4 minutes. Oh, and the crabs can easily take off a finger.

I briefly thought about trying to get a job on a crabber, but promptly realized that I wasn't cut out for that sort of work & stuck to the shitty processing job.