How can imperfect preservation be reversed?
Any cell that has ever survived freezing or vitrification has recovered from imperfect preservation. Cells cooled below -100ºC enter an alien state in which most cell water is replaced by solutes, molecules deform from normal shapes, and even cell membranes undergo phase transitions. After warming and removal of cryoprotectant, cells engage in considerable self-repair before operating normally again. It is a premise of cryonics that natural self-repair is not all that will ever exist in medicine. And indeed, it already is not, since molecular intervention in cell death following cryopreservation has already begun in mainstream cryobiology. Cryonicists have been envisioning cell repair augmentation by drugs, synthetic enzymes, viruses, and macrophages since the 1960s. These ideas, part of a biological tradition of diffusion-driven chemistry, are now termed “wet nanotechnology”. In the 1980s, a new type of nanotechnology based on positional control of chemical reactions was proposed in a
