This scientist rewarmed and studied pieces of his friend’s cryopreserved brain | MIT Technology Review

L. Stephen Coles’s brain sits cushioned in a vat at a storage facility in Arizona. It has been held there at a temperature of around −146 degrees °C for over a decade, largely undisturbed. That is, apart from the time, a little over a year ago, when scientists slowly lifted the brain to take photos of it. Years before, the team had removed tiny pieces of it to send to Coles’s friend. Coles, a researcher who studied aging, was interested in cryogenics—the long-term storage of human bodies and brains in the hope that they might one day be brought back to life. Before he died, he asked cryobiologist Greg Fahy to study the effects of the preservation procedure on his brain. Coles was especially curious about whether his cooled brain would crack, says Fahy. Coles’s brain was preserved shortly after he died in 2014, but Fahy has only recently got around to analyzing those samples. He says that Coles’s brain is “astonishingly well preserved.” “We can see every detail [in the structure of the brain biopsies],” says Fahy, who is chief scientific officer at biotech companies Intervene Immune and 21st Century Medicine (where he is also executive director). He hopes this means that Coles’s brain still stands a chance of reanimation at some point in the future. Other cryobiologists are less optimistic. “This brain is not alive,” says John Bischof, who works on ways to cryopreserve human organs at the University of Minnesota. Still, Fahy’s research could help provide a tool to neuroscie...