Microwave resuscitation
In the 1940s, scientists spent more time than you'd be comfortable with freezing hamsters and rats to death before trying to resuscitate them by applying heat. According to IFL Science: "they weren't just playing Hampenstein, the goal was to be able to revive tissue after freezing, something which
would have obvious applications in storing blood and organs". The success rate was pretty low, however, and those that did come back to life were left with horrendous burns.
Scientist James Lovelock, who is 101, tells YouTuber Tom Scott he saw a colleague who had been reviving hamsters and suggested diathermy – using electromagnetic currents to produce heat as a form of therapy. "Lovelock bought a disused Royal Air Force transmitter, and placed the magnetrons inside a box containing a faraday cage of chicken wire, creating what was essentially like a modern-day microwave oven." Then he added one frozen solid hamster.
"It was, surprisingly, quite successful, and the team would publish several papers on the topic, including "Reanimation of rats from body temperatures between 0 and 1C by microwave diathermy". The paper describes how the new technique of microwaving rats instead of heating them with a hot metal spatula improved the revival rate dramatically, with 80-100 per cent of the rats recovering following the cooling. Sadly, the process doesn't scale up to humans, because you essentially can't freeze nor heat an animal of our size quickly enough, nor diffuse an antifreeze agent into the cells fast enough.
A sea of plastic
