How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World

by Steven Johnson

But the frozen world that Tudor and Birdseye helped conjure into being would do more than just populate the world with fish sticks. It would also populate the world with people, thanks to the flash freezing and cryopreservation of human semen, eggs, and embryos. Millions of human beings around the world owe their existence to the technologies of artificial cold. Today, new techniques in oocyte cryopreservation are allowing women to store healthy eggs in their younger years, extending their fertility well into their forties and fifties in many cases. So much of the new freedom in the way we have children now—from lesbian couples or single mothers using sperm banks to conceive, to women giving themselves two decades in the workforce before thinking about kids—would have been impossible without the invention of flash freezing.