There's a good story in USA Today on progress in vitrification, which is freezing animal tissue into a glasslike state. This is the best near-term technology for reducing the damage caused by freezing cryonics patients.

The article makes it sound like Fahey and Wowk are part of the mainstream cryobiological community (which in fact they are), which will have some members of it grinding their teeth.

Vitrification is fascinating. It is in fact the creation of a "glass" (in the physico-chemical sense of an extremely high viscosity liquid), essentially by using certain sugars and other "small molecules" (molecular wt in the low hundreds), to prevent ice nucleation at low temperatures. It has been shown to occur in dried seeds, which respond to the evaporation of water by producing "osmolytes", which form a physical complex with the water to retain some of it. It is very interesting that similar processes are important in protecting cells from being too dry (dessication) and too cold (vitrification). I don't know to what extent it can be applied to human beings, but it certainly can be applied to mammalian (and therefore to human) cells.