About sixteen members and guests attended the dinner in Ventura. Dr. Diller explained that the fundamental problem of preserving tissue is obtaining the proper cooling rate. At excessive cooling rates, ice crystals form within the cell and destroy the cellular material. When a cell cools too slowly, intracellular fluid flows out of the cell to counteract the increasing salinity of freezing extracellular fluid. The resulting dehydration kills the cell.
Different tissues require different cooling rates.
By numerically solving sophisticated mass and heat transfer models, Dr. Diller has been able to predict the cooling behavior of certain tissues. He is extending his work to the preservation of whole organs. An organ provides a much more complicated modeling challenge due to the presence of multiple tissue types. Maintaining cooling rates is also difficult in such a relatively large specimen. The Channel Islands Section thanks our Distinguished Lecturer for 2000, Dr. Kenneth Diller, for providing a fascinating glimpse into engineering cryopreservation.