Jonathan Weiner

Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Jonathan Weiner talks about the quest for eternal youth and the scientists, researchers, and entrepreneurs who believe that human immortality is not only possible, but attainable in our own time. In Long for this World: The Strange Science of Immortality, Weiner meets the leading intellectuals in the field and delves into the science behind the latest research.

Immortality has always been a dream of humanity, though in movies and books, we are often told that our mortality is somehow integral to the human experience. If you could live longer – much, much longer than our expected 79 years — would you want to?  Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Jonathan Weiner examines the science of longevity in his new book, Long for This World: The Strange Science of Immortality.

This is a good time to be a mortal. Life expectancy today is roughly eighty years for anyone in the world’s developed countries. And life expectancy is still improving, which is why each day we live now we are given the gift of more time down the road. It’s as if we’re all driving on a highway that is still being built, and the roadbuilders are adding to it at a good rate. Our bodies haven’t changed. We haven’t evolved. A few generations is too brief a time for our life spans to have gained thirty years through evolution. It’s only that our circumstances have gotten more comfortable. A field mouse in the wild lives about one year. The same mouse in the safety of a cage lives about three years. With our farms and supermarkets and reservoirs and thermostats, we have done for ourselves what we have done for a pet mouse. We have tripled the life expectancy that our ancestors enjoyed or suffered in the wild.