I feel a bit morbid by asking, but here goes: so that poor young woman who worked at a cryotherapy center entered the container unsupervised, lost consciousness and was found frozen -
She was frozen pretty quickly. If properly thawed, could a person’s organs be used for those in need? I would assume No, that the water in a person’s body, in this situation, would freeze and the crystalized water would rupture cell membranes, rendering them damaged.
But I thought I would seek the expertise of biology Dopers - ?
The OP specifically said slow freezing, which could leave the cells intact.
However that is only because the cells let out some water from their insides during the slow freeze, and then the water is contributing to inter-cellular ice, which simply must form. So the cells become disconnected, and so the flesh turns to a paste…
Very small organs, such as a Cornea or tooth, may be preserved in very cold environment, if vitrifiied, (basically the cold stops the movement of substances … its called vitrified as the water has not caused expansion due to formation of the water crystal… ) … Cryoprotectants are used to stop the inter-cellular ice crystal forming, thus avoiding the damaging expansion.
Mammal flesh of more substantial and complex form are not successfully transplanted after ANY cryo-perservation.
I’d say that warm blooded animals have lost the genes for restarting… due to small value of that feature ; the hibernating mammals have kept that ability but still must avoid actually going below the freezing point of water…
Cryotherapy is different than cryopreservation (that may not be the technically correct term). I believe cryotherapy is far less sophisticted than deep freezing of tissue with the intent of someday thawing and having it in a state still useful for biological functions. In that process you’d likey added some sort of fluid to the tissue so the cells don’t get damaged by ice cyrstal formation as mentioned above, and I believe it also involves holding those frozen tissues at very low temperatures.
Cryotherapy is the rapid chilling of the skin surface of a living person to stimulate certain physical responses (and hopefully enhance that person’s health). It’s not meant to actually freeze or preserve any tissue at all, just to get you really cold really fast and then to stop and let you warm back up. As such, none of the preservation techniques are used and a person getting accidently frozen in a cryotherapy unit would upon being thawed have suffered the same level of cellular damage as the steak in your freezer…