A 30-year pause on life is indeed mind-boggling. How much more mind-boggling, then, to have a 46,000-year pause.
It’s not often that worms make headlines. But this week, a discovery published in PLOS Genetics was unusually attention-grabbing. Roughly 46,000 years ago, a pair of roundworms also known as nematodes were frozen in the Siberian permafrost. Millennia later, they were thawed, wriggled back to life, and even reproduced in a lab before they expired at the end of their natural (days-long) life cycle.
The worms were able to survive extreme conditions by entering a dormant state known as “cryptobiosis.” Teymuras Kurzchalia, a professor involved with the study, said: “The major take-home message or summary of this discovery is that it is, in principle, possible to stop life for more or less an indefinite time and then restart it.”
Could such a process ever be engineered by humans? Or to be even more far-fetched, could it ever be applied to humans? I’m thinking Star Wars:
The idea of pausing and then restarting human life sounds fantastical. Nevertheless, it reminds me of twin babies who were conceived by IVF and frozen more than 30 years ago and then born last year to an Oregon couple. The embryos, which were leftover from a married couple, were stored in liquid nitrogen on April 22, 1992, and donated in 2007 to the National Embryo Donation Center (NEDC), a private faith-based organization that seeks to give life to frozen embryos by matching them with adoptive parents. “I was five years old when God gave life to Lydia and Timothy, and he’s been preserving that life ever since,” Philip Ridegway, the twins’ adoptive father, told CNN. “There is something mind-boggling about it.”
A 30-year pause on life is indeed mind-boggling. How much more mind-boggling, then, to have a 46,000-year pause.