He founded both the Cryonics Association of Australia and the Institute for Neural Cryobiology, which has funded ground-breaking research in cryopreservation of brain tissue.

When Eric Drexler’s ideas about molecular nanotechnology came to dominate cryonics thinking in the mid-1980s, he frequently expressed concern that too much reliance was being placed on the new molecular-mechanical repair paradigm to the exclusion of earlier biological approaches.

[5] According to Donaldson, as long as the brain continues to exist in some kind of repairable form, “death” was merely a label indicating that the memory and personality information within it were beyond reach of current technology.

Donaldson also maintained an avid interest in biomedical gerontology, self-publishing the book "A Guide to Anti-aging Drugs" in 1994.

In 1990 he received international attention when he unsuccessfully sued the Attorney General of the State of California for the right to an elective cryopreservation to prevent the tumor from destroying his brain.