…And yet the reanimation of a cell or an organism is wondrously strange. I’ve been out of the field for a long time, but I still pay a cattle-breeding center over a hundred dollars a year to maintain a few oyster embryos in liquid nitrogen. They look like microscopic hairy volleyballs. I froze them twenty-five years ago, and they have no conceivable value or use, but if you plunge them into seawater they’ll wake up, those little hairs will start to beat, and off they’ll swim. So, yes, freezing corpses and taking money to do it is pathetic and immoral- but I still can’t bring myself to flush my tiny sleeping oysters.