A team of scientists has brought back to life a microscopic animal known as an Arctic rotifer. According to reports, the animal remained buried in the Siberian permafrost for as many as 24,000 years. Scientists believe that this creature has even reproduced. The animal was in a state of suspended animation while dug out of the subsurface soil.
The Arctic rotifer, which has found its way to the journal Current Biology, comes from rotifers known as Bdelloids. It was one of the many specimens collected from the middle reaches of the Alazeya River in Yakutia, northeastern Siberia. According to reports, the specimens were found more than 11 feet under the surface of the frozen waterway. “Layers of sediments were frozen relatively quickly after their formation and have never melted,” study authors write in their report.
A multicellular organism can be frozen and stored for thousands of years and brought back to life.
The recent breakthrough makes scientists want to believe that this is nothing short of a fiction story. “The takeaway is that a multicellular organism can be frozen and stored as such for thousands of years and then return back to life–a dream of many fiction writers,” says co-author Dr. Stas Malavin from Russia’s Institute of Physicochemical and Biological Problems in Soil Science in a media release.
An Arctic rotifer measure as small as a millimeter in length or 1/25th of an inch has a complicated body that includes a gut and a brain. The discovery of how the cells and organs are protected from disintegration is why the creature’s prolonging life.
Scientists are deterring if the philosophy will work on human beings
The recent breakthrough makes scientists want to ponder if the same logic of preserving the cells, tissues, and organs of animals, specifically those of mammals, can be applied to human beings. More than 350 cryogenically frozen individuals are on the waitlist to be brought alive and thus given a lease of life. Besides this, several thousand individuals have consented to have their bodies placed in facilities in centers in the U.S. and Russia.
