"The nineteenth-century fascination with scientific advances-especially those of science's friendliest side, medicine, pursuant to the discovery of the miracle drug penicillin-intensified during the twentieth century. Meanwhile, the interest of the masses in literature and the humanities sunk like a grand ocean liner that had run into an iceberg of disappointment. More than by any novel, I myself-a person who does nothing but read and write-have been impressed by the research of Aubrey de Gray, a gerontologist at Cambridge with a picturesque beard, and of other sages who, like de Gray, predict that we will soon be able to put death off for a long time and ultimately be rid of it entirely by halting cellular deterioration. Because, de Gray affirms, it is not inscribed on cells that they must necessarily undergo entropy. Others, like physicist Kevin O'Regan, foresee that in a few hundred years' time, human beings will be able to transport consciousness into a computer. And that computers need not be cold, metallic robots. They might well be organic and sensitive beings akin to clones. The computer scientist and inventor Ray Kurzweil jealously keeps the DNA of his father, Cedric, along with his father's other belongings, in hopes that one day he will be able to create a virtual person very much like his dad..."-- provided by distributor.