RobArt Penguin

Many decades ago, when I was in 8th grade, we had a class science fair. I don’t remember what I presented (I loved dioramas, so I’m sure one was involved) but I remember a presentation on Cryogenics. One of my closet friends was fascinated by the concept of freezing a living organism and bringing it back to life later. His display included a wonderful model of a cryogenic chamber, borrowing a large supply of his mother’s aluminum foil. To prove the concept, he began freezing living goldfish. Unfortunately, many goldfish died in the course of his experiments. After each failure he revised his methods, shocking his mother when she discovered glasses of goldfish in her refrigerator (the pre-freeze phase). My friend had no liquid nitrogen chamber–just the family freezer. He claimed he successfully froze and revived one, but he had no evidence to prove it. Nonetheless, his project captured my imagination. But no, I never killed anything trying to continue his work on cryogenics (but I was tempted because I thought I learned from his mistakes). It was a good age, when our imaginations thought anything was possible, where we imagined a future full of scientific marvels. Today, we do have many cool inventions and technologies. I doubt I will be freezing myself at the end of my life to be revived in some super-advanced future. But, one can dream…