Scientists are learning how to cryopreserve living tissues, organs, and even whole organisms, then bring them back to life<\/p>\n
MINNEAPOLIS\u2014The rat kidney on the operating table in front of Joseph Sushil Rao looked like it had been through hell. Which it had\u2014a very cold one.<\/p>\n
Normally a deep pink, this thumbnail-size organ was blanched a corpselike gray. In the past 6 hours, it had been plucked from the abdomen of a white lab rat, pumped full of a black fluid, stuck in a freezer cooled to \u2013150\u00b0C, and zapped by a powerful magnet.<\/p>\n
Now, in a cramped, windowless room on the 11th floor of the University of Minnesota\u2019s (UMN\u2019s) Malcolm Moos Health Sciences Tower, Rao lifted the kidney from a small plastic box and gently laid it inside the open abdomen of another white rat. Peering through a microscope, the transplant surgeon\u2013in\u2013training deftly spliced the kidney\u2019s artery and vein into the rat\u2019s abdominal blood vessels using a thread half the thickness of a human hair.<\/p>\n