Freeze your brain if you want, but you won't be you ...even if they can thaw it out

The chances of successfully cheating death by having your head cryogenically frozen remain sub-zero

- Dr Dean Burnett

Perhaps inevitably in such turbulent, uncertain times, there's a renewed interest in cryonics: the freezing and storing of human remains so that they can be resurrected in the future when medical technology is sufficiently advanced.

The appeal of this is obvious. It's basically the mortality equivalent of a video game save point, allowing you to 'undo' whatever life-ending harm you've experienced and pick up where you left off.

But a growing enthusiasm for cryonics doesn't change the fact that, at present, it's a process with many significant hurdles to overcome before it could be said to 'work', in any meaningful way.

Cryogenically freezing someone is rarely, if ever, permitted before that person has died. Why? Because freezing a living body is inherently a lethal process and, even if they're okay with it, it's illegal to kill a person.

It's often said that the human body is mostly water. Water makes up the bulk of the vital fluids that keep our cells and tissues alive and functional.

When you freeze water, however, it turns to ice. Solid, expansive, spiky ice. If living cells are suddenly filled with it, ice does a lot of damage. This is why freezing and thawing things like strawberries renders them mushy - the cells that give strawberry flesh its structure are badly disrupted.