The Immortalization Commission

John Gray''s The Immortalization Commission: The Strange Quest to Cheat Death raises vital questions about the ''truths'' science can offer, the technology we are still exploiting for immortality - and exactly what it means to be human.

At the heart of all human experience lies our obsession with death. For many years, we turned to religion for our answers, but at the turn of the twentieth centuries ideas from evolution and politics seemed to suggest that our lives - and afterlives - were in our own hands.

These ideas would have both trivial and terrible effects, from the nightmares of H. G. Wells''s science fiction and the wild, sweeping craze of s¿ces to the murder of millions in the Stalinist terror.

''Our sharpest critic of utopian fantasies skewers the crazed but enduring dream of cheating age, time and death''
  Boyd Tonkin, Independent

''Elegant ... He is on to something important regarding the delusion th