But if you stretch it, you'd realize that Allen's movie Sleeper and the science fiction hit both talked about people frozen in time. It may make you itch, but some of those creepy, crawly things you swat in the summertime may help scientists find a way to keep certain body parts in storage for space traveling astronauts.
Cryobiology has more realistic applications for the space program.
Thanks to longer missions like those on the MIR space station, we know the body's supply of oxygen-carrying red blood cells decreases dramatically in space. If scientists could just figure out how to develop the same type of internal antifreeze as nature, we may be able to use it in the long-term freezing of bone marrow and major organs. Right now, besides hoping to keep them in our bodies, we can keep hearts and kidneys cooled for a certain amount of days. But emergencies on space flights to places like Mars would demand much longer storage of organs. Certain body cells are torn apart by the sharp ice that forms during the freezing process, ripping apart even smaller internal structures, such as those cute mitochondria we learned about in biology class.