September 19, 2002	Thursday	Rajab 11, 1423

PARIS, Sept 18: Forget the offer of a free alarm clock or rain hat — the British weekly New Scientist has come up with a sales promotion that beats all others hands down: it is offering one lucky subscriber the chance of life after death.

The winner of a competition will be cryonically frozen after he or she dies, and — if all goes well — will wake up in the future, at a time when medical science will be able to revive them and fix what caused their demise.

“The prize means that when the winner of the New Scientist promotion is pronounced legally dead, he or she will be prepared and cooled to a temperature where physical decay of the body stops,” the magazine said in a press release Wednesday.

“The person will then be suspended in liquid nitrogen, in a state known as cryonic preservation. When and if medical technology allows, he or she will then be healed and revived and awoken to extended life in youthful good health.”

The magazine says it will run poster and cinema ads in Britain to promote the competition.

Entrants need to collect three tokens from the current and subsequent four issues of the magazine and complete an competition entry form.

Alun Anderson, New Scientist’s editor-in-chief, said: “We think that the cryonics promotion is a way of making science interesting to everyone, not just scientists, which is exactly the same message we are trying to communicate about the magazine itself.

“We also realise that the idea of cryonic preservation is not for everyone, either because people may not believe it could work or because they may be opposed to it on religious grounds.

“But it does get people talking about science and that is what the magazine aims to do.”

Cryonics has been a pet feature of science fiction for decades and is widely used for preserving tissue and sperm.

But scientists are deeply divided as to whether it could actually work with a complex, multicelled creature like a human being — or even if there is much point to it.—AFP