'An exercise and a half': Cryonics warehouse welcomes first patient

Southern Cryonics transferred a Sydney male in his 80s to the southern Riverina warehouse after he died on Sunday, May 12.

The man was transferred to the A. O'Hare funeral home in the inner city suburb of Leichhardt where a team of six people from Australian Blood Management worked for 10 hours to stabilise the body and cool it to dry ice temperature, approximately minus 78 degrees, before it was transported in a hearse to Holbrook.

Upon arrival, the patient was gradually brought to liquid nitrogen temperatures, approximately minus 196 degrees, in a computer-controlled cooling chamber and then transferred to a dewar, a large vacuum flask.

The body is stored head down in the event of a leak to ensure the brain remains immersed in the freezing liquid.

Southern Cryonics founding director Peter Tsolakides said it was a build-up of about 12 years to achieve the milestone.

"It has taken more than 10 years to get the facility built, certified, to get all the people that we needed, and get all the equipment," he said.

"We did a lot of training through that time, and luckily we did, because the patient came up relatively quickly. It wasn't unknown, but it was relatively quick for us.

"Even though we had everything in place, luckily the patient was at a hospital near the funeral home near where we needed to do our work.

"We picked them up at the hospital after legal death, took him to the funeral home, did the work, which was essentially work associated with stabilisation, perfusing with certain anti-freeze chemicals when the temperatures are dropped, and then we got the patient to the facility.

"We went from dry ice temperature (minus 78 degrees and below) to liquid nitrogen temperature (about minus 196 degrees) and you have to do it this particular way. You have to pass a certain transition state to get it to the glass state.

"There's a lot of stress going on, particularly in the brain, and you have to give it a chance to take the stress away so you don't get cracking."

"We knew what we needed to do, but it was really an exercise and a half. I think one of our people who was there is still asleep."

Mr Tsolakides said the immediate family of the late man were interested in cryonics, which made the process easier, while he was pleased with the level of support from the hospital.

"The doctors reacted immediately when we needed, we got a death certificate very quickly, we were able to get the initial cooling that we needed at the hospital fairly quickly. They were only in hospital for a short time, maybe half an hour," he said.

"Everything went very well, but we did learn a few lessons and a few things that we need to put into our own processes as well. We did it by the book, but the book maybe needs a little bit of extension here and there as to what we do.

"We thought that would happen after we had our very first case, but we'll use whatever lessons we learnt there and take them on to the next patient.

"They'll be there until we find the way to reanimate them. It could be 100 or 200 years.

"We've got a system hopefully that will take us at least for the next 50 or 60 years. We're then hoping as that generation goes away, there's another generation coming up."

Mr Tsolakides said Southern Cryonics had 50 people on its books aged in their 30s to 80s.

"The thing about people interested in cryonics is they're very interested. Those people we have in that 50 membership are very interested," he said.

"We will aim to have the next generations take over and care for the patients as we move into the future.

"We just want to keep improving what we're doing and hopefully we do a job which is even better for our next patient.

"Obviously there are critics, and we want critics. We like to consider ourselves a science, so if you're a science and you don't take criticism, you're not a science any more.

"Nobody can be sure what's possible, but we think there's a reasonable chance (of restoring life) based on the procedures that we have."

Mr Tsolakides said Southern Cryonics could fly patients if required, but the uncertainty around the timing of a death made it more challenging than a transfer from the eastern states.

"You're flying five or six people to these locations and keeping them in hotels for days on end at these locations. I don't want to ever be able to do this, but you can't predict when somebody's going to die," he said.

"You might have to send five people over to Perth, professional people who are not cheap, so that's one of our challenges.

"Packed in a particular way, (the patients) can actually be flown through the airlines."

Construction of the Holbrook cryonics warehouse was first flagged in 2017.