The first Australian to undergo cryopreservation is now on ice. This scientist says he won’t come back (2024)

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It was a race against time.

Earlier this month, the body of a man who died in an inner-city Sydney hospital would become the first person to be cryopreserved in Australia. But first, he needed ice.

Cut to Philip Rhoades, facility manager of Southern Cryonics, who had snagged a couple of bags from a store on the way into the hospital via train.

“At the hospital bed, once the patient has been declared dead, we put a lot of ice on the person,” the facility’s director, Peter Tsolakides, tells me. “Every time we bring the temperature down a little bit more, we have more time.”

From the hospital’s cool room, the deceased man dubbed “Patient One” was transported to a Leichhardt funeral home where medical staff hooked up his body to an ECMO machine (normally used as an artificial heart and lungs for the severely ill), washed out his blood and perfused his body with what Tsolakides describes as biological-grade antifreeze.

After the eight- to 10-hour stabilisation process, staff placed Patient One’s body in an insulated coffin, smothered it in dry ice, and dispatched it in a hearse bound for Holbrook.

The NSW town, south-west of Canberra, hosts Australia’s first cryonics facility, which is zoned as a cemetery by the local council. Here the body went into a computer-controlled cooling chamber, which slowly brought it from minus 80 to minus 196 degrees, the temperature of liquid nitrogen.

“You can’t do it in one go,” Tsolakides says. “Otherwise you get cracking, particularly in the brain.”

Finally, Patient One was lowered into a dewar, a cryostat that’s like a large vacuum flask filled with liquid nitrogen. There Patient One will remain until such time as science can thaw his body, heal whatever killed him and restore his life.

But some scientists say that time will never come.

Can we resurrect a cryopreserved body?

Tsolakides acknowledges the fundamental promise of cryonics may never eventuate. “We don’t make guarantees,” he says. After another 150 years or so of innovation in medicine, cloning, computing power and nanotechnology for cell repair, he puts the probability of people coming back to life at 5 per cent to 30 per cent.

“Don’t forget that’s a reasonable probability versus the alternative – I don’t think people who are in the ground or cremated have any probability at all.”

Professor Gary Bryant, an associate dean in physics who researches cryobiology at RMIT University, has a different take: “I think the chances are exactly the same.”

The fundamental flaw of cryonics is the idea you could bring people back from the dead, he says.

“That’s really the reason why it can never happen. As soon as you are dead, your brain and organs are deprived of oxygen and the individual cells begin to die.”

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Part of Bryant’s work is finding new cryoprotectants, the biological “antifreeze” pumped into Patient One that prevents ice crystals from destroying cells. The chemicals currently used, glycerol and dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO), are toxic.

Infusing the body with these chemicals is more like embalming than preserving, Bryant says: “It makes the body look whole, but inside everything is destroyed.”

When these substances are used to freeze sperm, eggs or blood cells, the cryoprotectant has to be removed rapidly once the cell thaws or it will die. Such a manoeuvre on the scale of tissue, an organ or a body is not currently feasible.

Then there’s the issue of the body’s 200 different cell types, each requiring a different freezing technique. (It’s a bit like how you can happily freeze a bag of peas but defrosted lettuce turns to mush.)

Even whole human blood is too complex to cryopreserve. Red blood cells need to be snap-frozen in a few seconds. White blood cells, on the other hand, require more gradual cooling – do it too quickly and they will die. (Blood is removed during cryogenic preservation, but the complexities illustrate how difficult preserving the medley of tissues and cells within our bodies would be.)

Even if it were possible to cryopreserve each one of the body’s more than 200 cell types, you’d have to separate each kind of cell first.

A hell of a brain freeze

The most advanced thing cryobiologists can do now is freeze single layers of liver cells, Bryant says, because the liver is made up of just one type of simple cell.

As far as he is aware, you couldn’t do this with a brain or neurons, which are notoriously near impossible to preserve via freezing.

In saying that, the field is advancing. Earlier this month, Chinese scientists froze brain “organoids” (bundles of lab-grown brain matter) using a new blend of cryoprotectant chemicals. When they thawed the organoids, some continued growing.

The scientists did the same thing with three-millimetre cubes of brain tissue taken from a nine-month-old girl with epilepsy. After two weeks frozen, the thawed tissue maintained its structure and function.

Bryant says the study looks promising. But we still don’t know whether memory or other functions could ever be preserved after freezing. The folds of your brain might look intact, but are you really still there?

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“I mean, let’s face it, we don’t understand anything close to what the brain does yet. Probably the last frontier in physiological research is understanding how the brain actually works,” Bryant says.

“The idea you can freeze the whole cerebral cortex without any damage, and then we’re going to maintain memories and so on, is pretty fanciful.”

You could look at cryonics as an act of radical hope and faith in future scientific heroism. You could also view it as a glorified, frosty entombment with a $150,000 price tag.

Tsolakides says Southern Cryonics caters only to clients who’ve had a long-term interest in cryonics – at least 30 founding members have signed up for preservation at Holbrook – and is upfront about the low chances patients will get at a second shot at life.

Bryant wonders why anyone would want to wake up hundreds of years into the future with no loved ones. “Futurama shows there’s lots of problems with this,” he says.

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Suspended animation, where humans are put into stasis while still alive, has a slim chance of becoming reality within the next 500 years, Bryant reckons. “Whereas bringing back someone from the dead ... I think that’s always going to be science fiction.”

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