[ExI] 'The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death'

Samantha Atkins sjatkins at mac.com
Sun Jan 23 21:42:57 UTC 2011


On Jan 23, 2011, at 11:04 AM, scerir wrote:

> http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/02d318c8-24e8-11e0-895d-00144feab49a.html
> 
> 'The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death',
> by John Gray, Allen Lane, RRP £18.99, 288 pages
> 
> In the review, by Stephen Cave (who is writing a book about immortality for Random House),
> one can also read ....
> 
> 'The first part of the book, however, is not dedicated to the techno-utopians but to those whom Gray considers their intellectual predecessors: the worthy figures who together led the Society for Psychical Research, the London-based learned society founded in 1882 to examine the paranormal. Its members included the cream of Edwardian society, such as the Cambridge philosophy professor Henry Sidgwick, the co-discoverer of evolution Alfred Russel Wallace, prime minister Arthur Balfour and the poet WB Yeats.' 
> 

Are we really in such blighted times that something as obviously desirable as ending aging is called "utopian" and compared to taking all aspects of the "paranormal" seriously?

- s



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