Peter Mazur
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The Modern Laboratory
Peter Mazur
He spent a lifetime asking how a living cell survives the cold, and helped show that a frozen embryo could live again.
Peter Mazur was born in New York City on 3 March 1928. He studied biology at Harvard University, graduating with honours in 1949 and completing his doctorate in 1953. He spent four years in research for the United States Air Force, then held a fellowship at Princeton. In 1959 he joined Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. He stayed there until 1998, then continued his research at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.
Why freezing harms. Mazur's lifelong question was what happens to a cell as it freezes. In 1972, with Stanley Leibo and a colleague, he set out the two-factor hypothesis. It named two dangers: ice forming inside the cell, and long exposure to concentrated salts as the water around the cell turns to ice.
The first frozen mice. In the same year Mazur, Leibo and David Whittingham froze mouse embryos slowly to minus 196°C, and even to minus 269°C. Once thawed, they grew into healthy young. It was one of the first successful attempts to freeze and revive mammalian embryos.
A long career. Mazur later worked on freezing the embryos of fruit flies and mosquitoes. He wrote more than 170 papers, four of them recognised as citation classics. He was president of the Society for Cryobiology in the early 1970s and received its Fellowship Medal in 2005. He served on the editorial board of Cryobiology from 1967 until his death.
Peter Mazur died at Oak Ridge on 15 December 2015, aged 87.
Also see: Stanley Leibo, David Whittingham
About the sources
- Embryo Project Encyclopedia (Arizona State University). Peter Mazur (1928–2015).
- Embryo Project Encyclopedia (Arizona State University). “Survival of Mouse Embryos Frozen to -196 ° and -269 °C” (1972), by David Whittingham, Stanley Leibo, and Peter Mazur.
- Whittingham DG, Leibo SP, Mazur P. Survival of mouse embryos frozen to -196 degrees and -269 degrees C. Science 1972;178(4059):411–414. PMID 5077328.
- Mazur P, Leibo SP, Chu EH. A two-factor hypothesis of freezing injury: evidence from Chinese hamster tissue-culture cells. Experimental Cell Research 1972;71(2):345–355. PMID 5045639.
- Mazur P. Cryobiology: the freezing of biological systems. Science 1970;168(3934):939–949. PMID 5462399.
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Compiled with AI-assisted research and checked against the original sources. Not yet peer-reviewed. Corrections are warmly welcomed.
