Science prize to last an eternity

By Mark Henderson

Science Correspondent

A LEADING science magazine is offering its readers a prize to die for. the chance to be cryogenically frozen after death, in hope of an everlasting life.

When the winner of the New Scientist competition is declared legally dead, their body will be cooled to prevent decay and then frozen in liquid nitrogen at a temperature of -196C in expectation of a day when doctors learn how to revive a corpse.

The prize, which would normally cost at least £18,000, is being offered in conjunction with the Cryonics Institute of Michigan, an American laboratory that already stores at least 41 people's remains. The magazine is offering an alternative prize: a week in Hawaii and the chance to view the stars through the world's highest telescope at Mauna Kea.

To enter, readers must explain, in 50 words or less, which prize they would prefer. a chance to be frozen and live again later, or a view of the universe as it is today.

The promotion has stirred controversy among scientists, most of whom see cryonics the idea of freezing bodies after death for revival when new technology permits - at best as a fringe science.

While cryogenics, or the study of low temperature physics, is a mainstream area of research (sperm, eggs and even small organisms have been frozen while alive and revive( without damage), cryonics remains firmly within the realn of science fiction. The concep was advanced in a 1962 shor story by James [sic] Ettinger, who later set up the Cryonics Institute near Detroit, and froze his first customer in 1967.

Most scientists doubt whether the technique will ever work.

"It's a bit of a dud prize", Colin Blakemore, Waynflete Professor of Physiology at Oxford University, said. "The alternative is enormously more attractive. It's rather like those competitions where the first prize is a week in Blackpool, and the second prize is two weeks in Blackpool.

"There is certainly at present no technology that's capable of reviving a dead body in this way, and it's highly questionable whether there ever will be."

The consequences of death begin to ramify through the body extremely quickly, especially in the brain where you get neuronal death within minutes of death,

"I'm not sure quite what they hope to freeze. It certainly wouldn't appeal to me."

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