"My wife thinks I'm completely insane," says Gray, who describes himself as aged "between 50 and death". "She believes you get once around the merry-go-round," he said. "I'm just curious, and I'd love to see what the world looks like in the future... The mind boggles at what there will be in a hundred years from now. I think it's worth taking the chance." Gray is one of 30 Australians who have signed up for cryonic suspension with one of two American companies doing it. Four Australians are already in suspension, along with 96 others from around the world.



Cryonic suspension aims to preserve the body for potential future revival. A process known as perfusion flushes out all blood and replaces it with a liquid that performs a function similar to anti-freeze. In 1990 Melbourne man Roy Schiavello, who had died at 30 during a brain tumour operation, became Australia's first cryonic patient. His body is now stored at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Arizona.

A Western Australian man, Helmer Fredrikkson, was cryonically suspended in December, 1994, at the Detroit institute. His widow, Marta Sandberg, is also signed up for cryonics and believes she has a 50-50 chance of seeing her husband again. "When I wake up, I will have spent half my life without Helmer," she says. "We'll have to fall in love again. Isn't that nice? I'm not saying I don't have a soul. If cryonics is against God's will, He'll make sure it doesn't work, so I don't see that there's a Last December, the body of a Sydney man, Colin Walls, underwent perfusion at the Sydney firm O'Hare Funeral Directors before being sent to the Detroit facility. O'Hare had the equipment on standby to begin perfusion immediately after his death. Cronicists say the greater the delay in perfusing the body, the more potential damage there is to cells.

In April the body of a man in his 60s underwent preliminary perfusion at a South Australian funeral parlour with telephone assistance from O'Hare. It was then sent to Detroit. The process is not cheap. It can cost up to $US33,000 ($61,000) for storage and $16,000 for preliminary treatment and transport to the United States. Australia has no cryonics facility. Cryonics proponents believe that within 50 to 100 years it will be possible to return life to a dead body and repair damaged cells. But scientists are sceptical of the chances of successfully thawing out Ugly Dave Gray, or anyone else, in the future.

"It's a pipe dream," said Graeme Pollock, deputy director of the corneal donation service at the Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital. "I would equate it to chopping down a tree, making a dining room table out of it and believing in 100 years you can grow another tree from that table. "If you start with something that's dead, it's not a matter of trying to re-animate life, it's a matter of trying to re-create it."

For 40 years, "legitimate scientists" had been trying to freeze individual organs for transplantation to save lives, said Dr Pollock. They have not been successful, though they are making progress, particularly in the US and Britain. "But the way people are currently being frozen has no scientific validity to it." The stumbling block is that during the freezing and thawing of the body ice crystals form. These crystals grind and mangle the tissue, damaging cell walls and breaking up the structured arrangements of cells. A thawed brain would be mush, Dr Pollock said.

Jill Shaw, a researcher at the Monash Institute of Reproduction and Development, is a little more optimistic, pointing out that we freeze much smaller, simpler things like embryos, eggs and sperm. Individual cells or small bunches of cells can arrange themselves around and between ice crystals, unlike large, complex structures that make up the tissue of an organ.

Dr Shaw agreed that current technology was not even close to being able to freeze something as large and complex as an entire body, but progress was being made. "I'm not saying five years, I'm not saying 10 years - possibly 20 years." As for reviving a brain, complete with memories and some semblance of a continued personality, Dr Shaw said she had no idea whether it would ever be possible. Dr Pollock was similarly equivocal."Maybe in the future," he said. "What that might do to your consciousness is a complete unknown... I'd call it almost an act of faith rather than an act of belief in legitimate science."

Gray, however, remains optimistic. "They give you a 50-50 chance," he says. "The only thing that is suspect at the moment is your brain, and deterioration from freezing damage.