Stories about humans waking up from cryosleep have dominated popular culture for decades in the Alien films, Cameron’s Avatar, and Nolan’s Interstellar.
While these films are out there, space- and time-wise, we know the science exists offscreen.
Globally, there are about 500 people in cryogenic preservation: 300 of them in the United States. Thousands more — currently, more than 5000 — are on the waitlist for future cryonic arrangements.
The technology for human revival has yet to exist, of course, but cryopreservation as a discipline has long been used in fertility and medical research, particularly for the opportunities it presents in regenerative medicine, organ transplantation, and neuroscience.
All of this led to some exciting news: For the first time, scientists at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg in…