Suspended Animation: Coming soon to a freezer near you?

According to Wired News, suspended animation may not be as far away as we once thought. Suspended animation tests have been successfully carried out on pigs, and we may be as little as two years away from clinical trials on humans. Mike Duggan, a veterinary surgeon, and Hasan Alam, a trauma surgeon from the Massachusetts General Hospital, have cryogenically frozen 200 pigs for an hour each, and they are getting up to two hours now. They say it's great for surgeries, since it buys them a lot of extra time for a procedure.

We have long had the ability to freeze people. There are people in California right now wrapped in aluminum foil and frozen, waiting for cures for their currently terminal diseases to be found. The problem is the unfreezing process. You know how when you freeze, say, a strawberry and it looks great frozen, but turns into a mushy mess when you thaw it? That's what happens to cells when we unfreeze them...so far. They take on too much water and burst. So until they figure out how to safely thaw the popsicle people, they're staying right where they are, even if they do find a cure for the diseases.