The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death

A Globe and Mail Best Books of the Year 2011 TitleAt the heart of human experience lies an obsession with the nature of death. Religion, for most of history, has provided an explanation for human life and a vision of what comes after it. But in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such beliefs came under relentless pressure as new ideas from psychiatry to evolution to communism seemed to suggest that our fate was now in our own hands: humans could cease to be animals, defeat death, and become immortal.In The Immortalization Commission, the acclaimed political philosopher and critic John Gray takes a brilliant and frightening look at humankind s dangerous striving toward a scientific version of immortality. Probing the parallel faiths of Bolshevik God-builders, who sought to reshape the planet and psychical researchers, who believed they had evidence of a nonreligious form of life after death, Gray rais