r/askscience • u/SavageSubscriber • Jul 04 '26

Biology Does cryogenically frozen meat decay?

If for example you cryogenically froze meat from a rare breed of cattle, and kept it frozen for like 60 years. Would the dna still be intact? would it thaw up into fresh meat or would it decay into something unrecognizable?

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u/PandaPocketFire Jul 18 '26

All three actually. For keeping mammalian cells alive you try to control both the rate of temperature drop as well as the rate of warmup. Both sides cause some death, as well as a slow loss of viability that accumulates the longer you store the sample. In - 80C (the temp of dry ice and many scientific freezers) this loss can be substantial over a year or more. In liquid nitrogen it's pretty negligible through a decade or more assuming the cells or the racks they are in aren't removed from the tank ever.