Word: organism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...being frozen should give it a stimulating boost. Last year predictions ran that it would be 50 years before a mammalian brain would be successfully frozen, but one was successfully frozen and thawed that very year (Nature, Oct. 15, 1966). Now you are saying that success with a human organ lies in the distant future. How distant...
Another composition, Momente, featured an orchestra plus chorus and soloist who, among other things, snapped their fingers, scraped their feet, giggled and whispered lovingly (Stockhausen confesses that he was in love when he wrote the piece). One musician poked a gong with drumsticks while another "played" the organ with the palms and backs of his hands. Stockhausen declared that Momente was still unfinished and, to the dismay of some listeners in the audience, added that "some day it will be played all evening...
...fact is that although some of the lower forms of life, such as bacteria, can survive freezing and thawing, no higher animal can, and certainly not man. Not even a single major human organ can be thus preserved. The National Naval Medical Center, the world's foremost freeze bank, stores only three types of tissue: corneas, skin, and bone-marrow cells. Frozen red blood cells and sperm will also keep for months or years. It is not for want of trying that researchers have failed to preserve whole organs, for a frozen-kidney bank would be invaluable to transplantation...
...drawn from inside the cells, many of which are damaged in the process. As the water freezes, its dissolved salts are expelled. The permeability of cell membranes is altered; capillaries are injured; countless enzyme systems are ruined. Much of the damage may not develop until the organ is thawed...
...Virginia's Surgeon Leslie E. Rudolf has tried a number of variations, including supercooling with DMSO, under different oxygen pressures, to reduce the cell's metabolism. Dr. Rudolf believes that ways of reducing the metabolism still further may provide the key to preservation of a single whole organ. Even that comparatively modest achievement, starting with a live organ, still lies in a distant future. The prospect of restoring function to a whole human body, with dozens of organs and cell types, which must first be brought back to life, is even more remote...