Freezing humans, part 2

I reduced the importance of this in the modern version of Rome's Revolution but there was a second component to freezing humans and thawing them that was crucial to their survival.

In a short story that will never see the light of day, I explored the ramifications of the experiments where they froze living human beings and thawed them five years later. Most died. The few remaining survivors were brain dead or close. The only person that survived reasonably well was the one person that had a fissured disk in their back.

The nucleus pulposus, the jelly-like substance that fills the inner portion of the vertebral disks, has been shown to express Tumor Necrosis Factor/Alpha when exposed to interstitial fluid. This substance is so toxic, so inflammatory, that it causes back pain all by itself. There are some that say that a substantial portion of back pain is chemical in nature only. And it can be treated medically with biologically active drugs like Embrel, Humira and the like.

So I took that little known fact and made it the basis of how humans could be frozen and thawed. Demoted in the current story, almost to the point of being invisible, I built the sarcophagi with tiny needles that extended upwards and punctured the backs of the soon-to-be-frozen colonists and allowed the Tumor Necrosis Factor/Alpha to ooze from the disks into the blood system.

The only overt evidence of this procedure was that Silas Hiram, Rei Beirak and the vast majority of the colonists aboard all of the Arks experienced back pain upon being reanimated.

OMCOM incorrectly assumes this was a by-product of the freezing process and produces the pills that a) turns Rei into a superhero and b) saves humanity from devolving into the Onsiras. But nonetheless, it is an integral part of the plot early on. Later, the pills that OMCOM produced become crucial.