Evening star., 1941-04-19
Child by Long-Dead
Father Foreseen in
Scientific Freezing
Tests Raise Possibility Of
Thuwing Spermutozou
For Use After Centuries
BY THOMAS r. HENRY,
Star staff Corrskpondent.

Ch1CAlIOg April lS.-1ne ran"
tastic and distant possibility Of
keeping human generations in cold
storage for thousands of years ap-
peared here today.
Individual men and women
would perish but their outstanding
qualities, in so far as these have
anything to do with heredity,
might be reproduced in first gen-
Grafton descendants, and a persons
own father might be dead for a
millennium.
This was not predicted. The weird
possibility appeared from two re-
ports. One was that for the first
time a living creature has been
placed in a state of suspended ami
nation through freezing it solid,
and then brought back to life. This
strange experiment was reported 10
the American Physiological Society
by the world-famous priest -biolo-
gist of st. Louis University, the
Rev. DR.. Basile j. Luyet.
Among the weirdest of pseudo
scientific conceptions which came
out of Russia a few years ago was
that of placing human beings in
a frozen sleep from which they
could be revived centuries hence
into a new and better world. The
idea might be theoretically sound
if-but there is an enormous pile
of ifs"
Simple Life First Used.
A few years ago DR.. Luyet started
experiments with the simplest
forms of living things he could
find-sections of very thin leaves
and found that he could freeze and
revive them with a very specialized
technique. 1t was still a long jump
to the extremely complex picture
presented by even the lowest animal.
He has succeeded, he reported to-
day, in doing the same with
vinegar eel, worm about one-flf-
teenth of an inch long, which IS
found in stale vinegar. Several Of
these animals were plunged into a
temperature of 1875 degrees below
zero centigrade. They were brought
back after five minutes-but theo-
retically it might just as well have
been 5000 years.
The difficulty lies in the peculiar
nature of water, of which a major
portion of any animal from a vine-
gar eel to man is composed. 1t is
found up in the microscopically mi
mute body cells. At zero centigrade
it freezes-turnS into a crystalline
solid, ice. When it does so, unlike
anything else in nature, it increases
in volume. When animal tissue
freezes, the delicate cells are broken
up by the increase in volume inside
them and their walls are cut by the
sharp edges of the crystals. This
kills them.
But this is true, DR.. Luyet pointed
out today, only between the tem-
peratures of 0 and and about minus
40 centigrade-the latter about the
lowest ever reached normally on
earth. Below that, water forms
into solid without crystallizing and
without any increase in volume. II
an organism can be shunted over
this temperature death zone there is
no reason why freezing should do
any hurt.
Freeze in Liquid Hydrogen.
This was relatively simple one
way process with so minute an orr
ganism as vinegar eel. The little
animals were plunged into baths OF
/ liquid hydrogen. In the terrible cold
of minues 1913 centigrade. the freez-
ing was so rapid that the water did
not have time to crystalline. 1t
| passed Immediately from liquid to
solid water without any ice stage.
Once DR.. Luyet had them there
his problem was to get them out
again. This has required extremely
delicate manipulation with special
instruments. They must be thawed
| out with a rise in temperature of
slightly better than 1000 degrees a
second. Even one-tenth of a second
in the death zone kills them.
Even before starting the freezing
process. the priest biologist drew
good deal of water out of the bodies
of the animals by a chemical pro-
cess. With any larger organism
than the vinegar eel, he pointed out,
the process would be impossible in
its present stage because of the time
that would be required for tempera-
ture changes to pass from one cell
to another.
But almost simultaneously with
DR.. Luyet's report came one which
indicates possible practical appli-
cation, growing out of experiments
by Drs. Hudson Hoagland and Greg
ory Pincus of Clark University.
Worcester, Mass.
Use Different Technique.
They have been testing the same
| methods, but with slightly different
technique, on human germ plaSm.
They have found, DR.. Hoagland re-
ported, that as many as so per cent
OF human spermatozoa. which might
be considered minute animals, even
smaller than the vinegar eel. can be
restored to life after rapid plunging
in bath of liquid air and extremely
rapid thawing. They have been able
to do this, however, only over periods
of few minutes.
They were able to find no differ
ence in the revived organisms and
ordinary ones.
With the rapid increase of arti-
flclal ensemination this may open
up the possibility, still far in the
future, of preserving not the indi-
viduals but the genes of a genera
tion far into the future-that is, of
having sons of a now-living indi-