“I mourn the brief moment of my life, and envy the infinity of the Yangtze River.”
It can be seen from ancient poems that people have always longed for “immortality” . People are afraid of death and long for immortality. They go to great lengths to get the right to live forever. Just like Qin Shihuang in ancient times. He was powerful but still hoped for immortality and recruited warlocks to refine the elixir of immortality for him; another example is that Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty used copper to build a huge "dew-receiving plate" to collect dew and jade shavings. Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty used it as a good medicine to prolong life...
If people in ancient times did not have If we have enough scientific understanding of the aging and passing of life and have an inexplicable desire for "immortality", then modern people are "re-exploring" the mysteries of human life based on science. Nowadays, the science and technology that has the hope of keeping people “young forever” is none other than cryonics technology.
What is freezing technology?
I believe that many friends, like the author, are very confused when they hear the word "freezing". How can freezing make people live longer? In fact, the cryopreservation technology is still in the experimental stage. Its principle is to preserve the human body or animals in an extremely low-temperature environment, and hopes that advanced medical treatment can revive them in the future. Charges are high for refrigeration of human bodies, even if it looks like "the secret to immortality has been discovered."
But also because the price is too high, not many people can afford it. So far, no one has been successfully resurrected after refrigeration, and there are also some technical problems in human cryonics technology. For example, if the human body is thawed for too long, brain cells will die, and the brain will lose thinking ability after thawing.
The world's first case of cryonics
The world's first case of cryonics occurred in the United States 53 years ago, and the person who was frozen was James, a psychology professor at the University of California. · Bedford. James Bedford once read a book "The Prospect of Immortality" by Dr. Robert Ettinger during his lifetime, so James Bedford mentioned in it that "the human body can be frozen as long as it is frozen quickly enough." Intrigued by the theory of "reversal of death," James Bedford contacted Dr. Robert Ettinger and expressed his desire to freeze his body.
When James Bedford died in 1967, James Bedford was placed in a cryogenic liquid nitrogen tank for freezing. It has been 53 years since then. But James Bedford was frozen after death, so he was not resurrected successfully.
China's first frozen human being
Du Hong was born in Chongqing in 1955. He is one of the editors and reviewers of the famous science fiction novel "The Three-Body Problem". "The Three-Body Problem" is a wonderful book that uses the grandness of the story structure, the novelty of scientific imagination, and the simplicity of humanistic reflection to create a space epic with noble connotations. What "The Three-Body Problem" embodies is a high level of imagination. The famous scholar Yan Feng also spoke highly of this book. He once publicly commented: After reading "The Three-Body Problem", Liu Cixin raised Chinese science fiction literature to a world-class level. Some readers commented that the science fiction novel "The Three-Body Problem" has surpassed the current science fiction system and is a masterpiece that all Chinese people should read.
Du Hong, the editor of Trisomy, suffered from pancreatic cancer. The sick Du Hong did not have much time to survive. However, her filial daughter Zhang Siyao was very reluctant to leave her mother, so she and her husband Lu Chen contacted her everywhere and found her. An American cryonics institution, the American Alcor Life Extension Foundation, one of the largest cryonics institutions in the world.
However, because the technology of freezing human bodies is too expensive, the daughter and son-in-law communicated with Du Hong and chose brain freezing method to freeze mother Du Hong’s brain for 50 years. In May 2015, Du Hong passed away. Within the first hour of Du Hong's death, Du Hong was infused with protective fluid, injected with anticoagulants, and used special equipment to compress his heart. After a series of operations, Du Hong's head was transported to the agency's headquarters in Los Angeles, USA, and then stored in a low-temperature liquid nitrogen environment of -196°C, waiting for the day when medical technology allows to open his eyes again.
Today, Ms. Du Hong has been frozen for 5 years. Can her wish to be "resurrected" after 50 years of freezing really come true? We can only wait and see.
Summary
People want to live longer, perhaps because they are nostalgic for the world, reluctant to leave their loved ones, etc. Therefore, these will continue to promote mankind's in-depth research on the secrets of "immortality". Perhaps it was because of Du Hong's exposure to science fiction novels that she dared to calmly try to freeze her own brain after death, which is a fantasy to ordinary people. But whether it has successfully cracked the secret of human life or whether it is just a dream will have to wait fifty years or even longer to tell.