Pim van Lommel is a reputed Dutch cardiologist who has worked for over twenty five years in a teaching hospital with eight hundred beds. In talking to hundreds of his patients who had suffered a cardiac arrest, he was astonished to discover that, far from having lost consciousness during the period in which they had been clinically dead patients remembered having lived an extraordinary experience, something that Van Lommel as a scientist, he was hard to accept. So he decided to study the phenomenon systematically for twenty years at his clinic with a specialized team, and in 2001 published a summary of their research in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet, thereby causing an international stir.