Norio Owada's freezing method can keep milk fresh for months. Livers, too.
Norio Owada keeps things in his freezer that don't freeze well: cream cakes, half-eaten apples, milk, fish, sushi rolls. When visitors stop by his lab outside of Tokyo, he reaches into one of his tall, deep, polished freezers and pulls out a cake lowered to --25 degrees Fahrenheit. Then he drops it, with a clang, on the laboratory's steel table. Once it thaws it looks and tastes as good as new.
Owada's is an amazing feat: Anyone who has tried to freeze cream knows that the water separates from the fat, leaving a crumbly discolored glob. About a decade ago Owada, 64, brought to market an invention called the cells alive system. Not since Clarence Birdseye's fast-freeze method came along in the 1920s has there been a chiller technology with this much potential to change the world. Birdseye was able to freeze food with minimal cell damage; Owada has eliminated harm from the process.
It works like a microwave oven but in reverse. Inside the freezer the object being frozen is zapped with a strong magnetic field and, Owada says, other kinds of energy. The field keeps the cream or beef's water molecules swirling in liquid form even as their temperature plummets. When the field is switched off, the object is instantly frozen, without time for the formation of ice crystals. These crystals normally rip apart organic cells, which degrades the texture and taste of food.
So far his privately held company, ABI, has sold 230 freezer systems to food processors, restaurants, hotels and hospitals in and outside Japan. Sales were $14 million last year. Agriculture and fisheries officials from around the world have been poking around his iceboxes, which cost between $100,000 and $3 million. In February Owada showed off his invention to Ireland's farm minister, Mary Coughlan. "I fed her defrosted shrimp, tuna, squid and sea bream. She said it tasted like fresh," says Owada.
Owada wants to save lives by shipping another kind of meat: organs. The danger of chilling organs on ice for too long-- 5 hours at most for a heart, 6 to 12 for a liver--has kept organ shipment for transplantation restricted to short distances. Even getting a liver across town is still sometimes a low-tech dash with a cooler box. "If you could preserve a heart for three days, you could fly it anywhere," says Owada.
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Forty-seven researchers are experimenting with Owada's technology to preserve human organs. A group at Tokyo University is freezing mouse hearts with a technology similar to Owada's. Another group at Keio University is preserving nerve fibers. Owada predicts that the first defrosted organ transplant could happen within a decade.
Toshitsugu Kawata, an associate professor of dentistry at Hiroshima University, is using Owada's system to run a commercial cryogenic tooth bank, with 1,600 teeth in stock. Under a tooth's hard enamel are softer layers with enough water in them to form harmful ice crystals when frozen. For $1,200 he'll keep your wisdom teeth safely on ice for 20 years. You can have them transplanted back for less than the cost of artificial implants. "It's like having a spare tire," he jokes.
It took Owada 30 years to perfect his idea, which was partly inspired by an American pilot who, 40 years ago, told him about how raindrops turn to ice on contact with aircraft wings. Owada worked on the idea while apprenticing at his father's small engineering firm. The two made guns, pinball machines and ovens. "My friends would head off to the beach or the pool, my father would tell me to get to work," he says.
Even at his age, Owada feels sharp enough for a new venture. This year he's going to build a plant in Europe to freeze cakes and chocolates from France and Belgium. "We'll put them in a 40-foot container and ship them over to Japan," he says. All those sweets may spark a run at the tooth bank.