Science: Vitreous Life

Cryogenic (low-temperature) experimenters have known for some time that certain living cells, dry or nearly dry— such as spores, infusoria, some types of bacteria—can survive temperatures close to absolute zero. In that extreme cold, around 273° Centigrade, below freezing, such living cells go into a state of “suspended animation,” but resume normal living when thawed out. Cells with higher water content die when so frozen because their internal liquid crystallizes. Their molecular structure is rearranged in a “thermodynamically stable configuration,” which is a fancy chemical description of death.

Dr. Alexander Goetz, who has a cryogenic laboratory at California Institute of Technology, explained this last week to members of the American Philosophical Society convened in Philadelphia. However, if the organisms are frozen very rapidly, molecules are immobilized before they can change their pattern.* They become “vitreous” like glass—that is, solid but with the molecular arrangement of a liquid. By cooling in a fraction of a second with liquid hydrogen, Dr. Goetz has induced suspended animation in yeast cells.

He did it with a cooling speed of 1,000° C. per second. At the temperature of vaporizing liquid hydrogen ( — 252° ), Dr. Goetz estimates that such a “vitrified” cell could be preserved for 10,000 years without aging biologically more than one minute. He disclosed off the record last week that he is trying at present to induce suspended animation in human spermatozoa. The significance of this curious experiment is that it might actually lead to some sort of Brave New World: if successful it would make it possible for the sperm of men with extraordinary endowments to be preserved for women of later generations who want to bear exceptional children.

*A fact which is made use of commercially in the quick freezing to preserve certain food products, which are not living, however, when the process takes place.