Lessons from Natural Cold-Induced Dormancy to Organ Preservation in Medicine and Biotechnology: From the “Backwoods to the Bedside”

Hypothermia is a powerful modulator of all life processes, and this has been harnessed over the past 50 years in clinical sciences where tissues or organs for transplantation need to be stored outside the body for periods of time. However for human organs (as an obligate homoeothermic), cooling alone cannot provide sufficient time for the clinical logistics of transplantation, and a series of interventions to further control metabolism have been developed empirically. In retrospect, it can be seen that these approaches mimic to some degree the ways in which cold tolerance in the natural world has developed in evolutionary terms. This chapter reviews the history and the current state of the art of applied hypothermic preservation, and compares and contrasts what is known about natural cold tolerance, highlighting areas for further research and development to meet the challenges for organ and tissue preservation in the next few years. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg