50 years ago, scientists hoped freezing donor organs would boost transplants

The icy world of organ freezing Science News, August 19, 1972

If whole organs could be frozen and stored … surgeons would be able to perform far more transplants…. For all their efforts, though, cryobiologists (biologists who study the effects of cold on life) have not been very successful with organ freezing…. Nobody to date has cooled whole mammalian hearts any lower [than −20° Celsius] or longer [than six hours] and revived them.

Update

Scientists still struggle to keep donor hearts on ice for longer than six hours, but it is now possible to store a different organ — the liver — at below-freezing temperatures for

→ Continue reading at Science News

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