From the Pulitzer Prize winning author, Jonathan Weiner comes LONG FOR THIS WORLD: The Strange Science of Immortality, a rollicking adventure-story in science writing of the highest order.  Could we live forever? And if we could . . . would we want to?

In the Middle Ages, human life expectancy was around 30.  By 1900 average life expectancy rose to 47 years, an increase of about 30 years over eight centuries.  But things have considerably sped up over the past century where we added another 30 years to our life expectancy.  Nowadays, our life expectancies increase an amazing two years per decade which translates into five hours per day!  And there are scientists working today who are tantalizingly close to adding not mere hours but whole centuries to our lives.  
 
A natural storyteller and an intrepid reporter with a gift for making cutting-edge science understandable, Jonathan Weiner takes the reader on a whirlwind intellectual investigation into the state of the science of aging.  From Berkeley to the Bronx, from Cambridge University to Dante’s Tomb in Ravenna, he meets the leading minds in the field, including the extraordinary Aubrey de Grey, a garrulous Englishman who lives on little else but dark ale and bears more than a passing resemblance to Methuselah, at 969 years the oldest man in the Bible. He explains the extraordinary, mind-blowing science behind the latest research. And he tells the dramatic story of how aging could once and for all be conquered by the latest scientific advances.
 
“I admire all of Jonathan Weiner’s books, but this one especially because of its intellectual depth and clarity, its sense of personal involvement, and its tone and wit. The chapter on the evolution of aging is particularly brilliant! I couldn’t put the book down.…"
—OLIVER SACKS

Jonathan Weiner is one of the most distinguished popular-science writers in the country: his books have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A former editor at The Sciences and writer for The New Yorker, he is the author of The Beak of the Finch; Time, Love, Memory; His Brother’s Keeper; and other books. He lives in New York, where he teaches science writing at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.