Question: Can you revive dead cells?

Robert Lees answered on 19 Nov 2015:

I’ve never thought about this before. You can definitely save cells that are very close to dying, but once a cell has died it loses it’s membrane and all of the stuff inside gets lost and degraded.

We do freeze cells for a very long time though, and in that way, they are no longer living, as they’re sort of frozen in time. We use liquid nitrogen to do this as liquid nitrogen is VERY cold.

I guess it all depends on what you class as ‘dead’, when humans ‘die’ it is a result of lots of our functions not working correctly, but the cells in our body are still alive for some time – which is why we can be revived!