20Sep2002 AUSTRALIA: News And Features - Spike.
Edited by Andrew Hornery with Ben Wyld.
Icy dead people
It sure beats steak knives, holidays and day spa treatments.
Today's issue of the global science and technology magazine New Scientist is offering one reader another stab at life where, after being pronounced legally dead, their body will be prepared, chilled and suspended in liquid nitrogen (cryonics) until medical technology allows for a revival.
The magazine's editor-in-chief, Alun Anderson, said in a media release: "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."
However, we took a wider interpretation of the promotion.
Was the magazine, itself, looking for a way back from the dead?
"No, not all," the magazine's Melbourne-based Australasian editor, Rachel Nowak, told Spike. "We've been successful over the last six or seven years and have a quarter of a million readers in Australia ... this [the promotion] is not a desperate measure."
But while Nowak might have sounded convincing on that point, her description of the US$28,000 ($51,000) cryonics process which the competition winner has the option of undertaking by joining 40 or so other people in the chillers at The Cryonics Institute of Michigan was less persuasive.
"When you're totally frozen the liver is shattered ... with cell membranes, fat and protein congeal like fat in a frying pan ... the frozen water in the body is like ground glass cutting into tissues ... it's tough being frozen."
She was quick to add: "The hope is to repair the damage ... [through] nanotechnology, which is the manipulating of individual atoms and molecules."
Mmm, sounds tempting.
The competition winner can choose the alternative Live Now prize, a week in Hawaii and a visit to the Mauna Kea Observatory.
Music hath charms
Music promoter Michael Coppel has already set the tone for the upcoming Oasis Sydney and Melbourne concerts in October with a press release addressed, "Hey you media/music industry sponging wankers".
It goes on to let the accused spongers know there will be no freebies to see those eloquent charmers the Gallagher brothers. Instead, industry types have to fork out $75 along with everyone else. The statement ends: "Otherwise we couldn't give a F
Sources: SYDNEY MORNING HERALD 20/09/2002 P20