‘Things sort of get mushy’: inside Australia’s cryonics facility where ‘patients’ pay to be frozen

Southern Cryonics operates out of a shed in Holbrook. Experts say reanimation is ‘a dream’ but true believers pay $200,000 for a second chance at life

I’m standing atop a very tall ladder, peering down through a haze of liquid nitrogen vapour into a giant stainless steel flask containing three smaller containers.

Inside the smaller wedges – which are labelled 005, 006, 007 – are three of Peter Tsolakides’ “patients”. The frozen bodies belong to people who, before their death, paid handsomely to be cryogenically frozen in the hope of one day being brought back to life.

The ladder is inside a normal-looking shed in an industrial estate in Holbrook in regional New South Wales. Next to the shed is a grassy block strewn with several wrecked Hondas. Across the road is the local fire brigade.

Since it opened in 2023, the shed has housed the southern hemisphere’s only cryonics facility. Inside, seven patients are “suspended” head-down in liquid nitrogen at -196C. Four to a flask, or dewar, as they’re known in the business.

Tsolakides’ company, Southern Cryonics, is selling people “a chance of life extension”.

The gamble costs more than $200,000. Experts say there’s no way it will work.

Cryonics, they explain, remains a “dream”. Any attempted resurrection would be akin to taking a defrosted, and decidedly mushy strawberry, and believing it could be made firm and vibrant again.

But proponents say cryonics offers adventure – a glimmer of hope of a longer or potentially limitless life.

Tsolakides, the chair of Southern Cryonics, makes no promises.

“Basically, you need to have conquered death, cured all diseases and then be able to bring people back from the dead,” he says.

He puts the likelihood of his patients being brought back to life in 250 years’ time at about 10%. That’s more than nothing, he says.

But as with any risky venture, it pays to read the fine print.

A shed and a submarine

Holbrook is small town off the Hume Highway halfway between Melbourne and Sydney. It’s home to the decommissioned submarine HMAS Otway, stranded in a park 250km from the ocean.

Southern Cryonics is one of six such facilities in the world, according to its operators. There are two in the US and one each in Switzerland, China and Russia.

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It’s thought there are about 1,000 people cryogenically frozen worldwide. Tsolakides describes the community as “tight knit”.

“Almost nobody’s interested in cryonics,” he tells the Guardian. “The people who we get joining us are people who’ve had a sort of life interest … but never knew it was available” in Australia.

Southern Cryonics chose Holbrook for its storage facility because of its proximity to Sydney and Melbourne and the fact it’s unlikely to be hit by earthquakes or floods.

The cryonicists need somewhere relatively safe given patients are frozen indefinitely. They’re in the dewar until humanity develops the technology capable of “reviving” them; or, as their contract stipulates, the company goes bust. In that case, their body may be “disposed of”.

Conveniently, Holbrook was already home to a cattle breeding association, and hence a delivery destination for the liquid nitrogen needed to freeze bull semen and embryos.

Southern Cryonics has two dewars so far. They’re basically big Thermos bottles.

Inside one are the first four of Tsolakides’ patients to be frozen. In May 2024, a man who died in his 80s was the very first to be loaded upside down in his Trivial Pursuit-style quarter-cylinder wedge.

The second dewar has room for one more patient. Being in the shed, looking down into that space, I feel an immense loneliness.

Tsolakides says women are less likely than men to be interested in being frozen. That’s because, he suggests, women don’t like the idea of waking up in a future without family or friends.

‘A slow process’

I am the first journalist allowed into the shed since the initial suspension in May 2024.

The shed is unremarkable apart from the two towering dewars – and a crash test dummy, fully dressed and lying on the floor. It was used to test the winching mechanism for depositing bodies into the dewars.

Jim Davis, from Parkes Liquid Nitrogen, is there to top up the dewars. The metal flasks release plumes of vapour when they’re refilled. They were initially topped up once a month, but that’s been increased to fortnightly at the request of two early clients who were worried about supplies running low after their mothers died and were suspended.

Davis also delivers the icy liquefied gas to police dog and cattle breeders, hospitals, engineers and human IVF clinics. “If they’re freezing it, I’m doing it,” he says.

Demand is increasing all the time, and supplies must be replenished regularly, Davis says.

You can’t seal liquid nitrogen in a vessel without the container blowing up, meaning it slowly escapes. “If I sealed one of these tanks, mate, the building wouldn’t be here,” Davis says.

To give patients the best chance of avoiding cellular destruction, their body undergoes an eight-hour “vitrification” process as soon as possible after death, Southern Cryonics says.

Another of Tsolakides’ companies, CryoPath, arranges a third-party medical perfusionist company to carry out the vitrification.

After someone dies, their body is cooled as quickly as possible – including by placing ice packs around their head. The corpse is then pumped with antifreeze-like embalming chemicals that turn it into a “glass-like state” and hopefully protects it from the extreme temperatures inside the dewar, Tsolakides says.

“It’s a slow process,” he explains. “You have to follow a very strict protocol.”

After a body has been “stabilised” – usually at a funeral home – it’s transported to Holbrook and stored upside down. However, not every patient in the shed has undergone this procedure. Some underwent a “straight freeze”.

In the Southern Cryonics contract, clients are asked to acknowledge that any known cryonic suspension method will probably result in physical damage to their body, which may be irreversible. The contract notes there will be another fee, yet to be determined, for any future revival.

Science v ‘mysticism’

Associate Prof Saffron Bryant, a cryopreservation expert at RMIT University in Melbourne, says current science “does not support our ability to quite preserve a whole body at this time”.

Bryant says cells, embryos and blood products can be successfully “cryopreserved” through vitrification. She says it’s “sort of like antifreeze you might put in a car” to prevent ice forming and protect cells from damage.

But it is not possible to deliver a cryoprotectant to everywhere in the body or even, at this stage, to a single organ.

“If you’re trying to cool a whole body down at the same rate, you’re going to have the outside, like the skin, cooling down faster than the inside,” she says. “We [use] that strawberry analogy – where things sort of get mushy.”

Bryant says even if it were possible to deliver cryoprotectant to the whole body and cool it at the correct rate, the underlying cause of death would remain.

The “heart attack or the Alzheimer’s or whatever it was that killed them” happened and no amount of freezing could reverse that, the academic says.

As to whether it’s possible to revive someone’s consciousness along with their physical body, Bryant considers this question to be more in the “realms of mysticism” than science.

Asked if she thinks Southern Cryonics is a scam, Bryant replies: “I’m not allowed to answer that.”

The initial stabilisation process costs an estimated $60,000. Clients then have to pay another $150,000 to Southern Cryonics for their indefinite storage and a $350 annual “membership fee”.

The company “demands payment upfront” and Southern Cryonics recommends people take out a $210,000 life insurance policy.

Tsolakides says it costs about $5,500 a year to keep a patient suspended. Most of that goes towards liquid nitrogen and staff costs.

He plans to invest $100,000 from each client in “blue chip” funds which he says could result in a collective pool of billions of dollars over the 250 years he estimates it will take for revival to become feasible.

On its website, Southern Cryonics says most suspensions are funded through life insurance and it can help people obtain a policy through a broker.

However, Tsolakides acknowledges only one Australian customer’s insurer has agreed to pay so far and that they were reluctant. He knows of “two or three” major insurers that will pay for cryonics but he won’t name them.

The Council of Australian Life Insurers (Cali) says it can’t verify or endorse claims made by Southern Cryonics, CryoPath or any broker about using life insurance to fund cryonic suspension.

The Cali chief executive, Christine Cupitt, says nominating a cryonics provider as the beneficiary of a life insurance policy is a “significant decision” that people should consider carefully.

‘It is a dream’

Dr Kate Falconer, an Australian legal academic who specialises in death law and teaches at University College Cork in Ireland, says the cryonics community is made up of a small number of “diehard true believers”.

“Look, I think they probably do believe it,” she says. “But at the end of the day, it is a dream. There’s nothing concrete there.”

Falcolner nevertheless shows her students a New York Times video from 2015 where a young woman with terminal cancer talks about having her brain frozen after death.

“It’s incredibly moving [and] it really does hit home that there are some people who are choosing it because it is their only hope of any kind of long life.”

The most recent suspension at the Holbrook facility occurred in June after a man in his 90s died. Southern Cryonics’ youngest patient is a woman who died in her 40s and whose premature death devastated her family.

The facility manager, Philip Rhoades, says he once preserved the brain tissue of a 15-year-old boy who took his own life. That was at request of the teenager’s parents.

The preservation was done by Rhoades’ earlier venture, the Neural Archives Foundation, a registered charity which claims to preserves brain tissue as a “historical archive”.

Rhoades says the organisation makes use of “normal biomedical storage” across Australia. His own parents’ brains are preserved along with 12 other human brains and three dog brains.

Rhoades is a left-leaning vegetarian with a big family but no children of his own. He was planning to open a “Life Extension Village” near his home in Cowra, in NSW’s central west, but says that was foiled by red tape.

“There was too much bureaucratic stuff,” he says. Instead, he’s thinking of turning the block into a GP clinic adjoined by a “biomedical research facility” for “radical life extension treatments”.

‘If you get woken up … you’ve hit the jackpot’

When he dies, Rhoades would love to be “uploaded to a supercomputer as soon as possible”. However, as he doesn’t think that will be possible given he’s in his 70s, he plans to be frozen and stored in the Holbrook shed.

Future generations will want to revive their great-great-great grandparents, Rhoades says.

“If the technology is possible at all … I think it will become very popular to talk to revivees.”

He thinks patients could be revived by 2080 and that someone who had a “good preservation” has more than a 50% chance of making it. But he knows there are no guarantees.

“If you get woken up in the future, you’ve hit the jackpot, really.”