Australian Cryogenic Company Freezes 80-Year-Old Man In Hopes Of Future Revival

An Australian cryonics company finally got its first client after an 80-year-old man died in Sydney. His family requested a cryonics procedure to deal with the old man’s body. As per ABC News, Southern Cryonics, which is the Southern Hemisphere’s first known cryonics facility, announced that the company has cryogenically frozen its first client at its Holbrook facility. The client is now stored in a vacuum storage pod with a temperature of minus 200 degrees. He has now become the company’s “Patient One”.

Southern Cryonics’ facility manager Philip Rhoades told ABC News, that the whole process was “very stressful” and it kept him awake for a week. He said, “There are a number of different procedures to go through for different days, and there were a number of situations that might have gone wrong if we hadn’t prepared properly.”

Mr Rhoades added that Patient One’s case came to them out of the blue. He had been expecting his first clients to be people who were already well-versed in cryonics. He recalled, “His (Patient One) family rang up out of the blue and we had about a week to prepare and get organised.” The manager said that while they were prepared to do the process, handling a real body felt daunting regardless of their preparation.

After Patient One was declared dead, he was wrapped into a sleeping bag with packed ice which brought his body temperature to minus 80 degrees Celsius. The next day, he was transferred to Southern Cryonics’ Holbrook facility, where he was kept on dry ice until a delivery of liquid nitrogen arrived. Patient One’s temperature was further reduced to minus 200 degrees Celsius, after which he was deposited in a special tank that serves as a vacuum storage pod.

This entire over 10-hour process costs over $170,000 (Rs 94.13 lakh). This comes with additional fees for medical teams to help with the preservation process. Cryonics advocates believe that by properly freezing people, they can be brought back to life later. This technique has clearly not been proven and many treat it as speculation based.

Some notable personalities whose corpses are subjected to Cryonics are baseball player Ted Williams, economist and entrepreneur Phil Salin, and software engineer Hal Finney. Other known people who have reportedly arranged for cryonics upon death include PayPal founders Luke Nosek and Peter Thiel.