Paco Dennis
SF VIP
- Location
- Mid-Missouri
I don't. "Let me go naturally"
“Life imitates art,” said Oscar Wilde in his essay “Decay of Lying,” turning Aristotle’s saying on its head. Sometimes Wilde was a prophet.
Case in point: a May 31 article in Bloomberg Businessweek began by announcing, “As the tech industry has matured, people in Silicon Valley have become obsessed with developing ways to stop the human aging process.”
It is a phenomenon that recalls Aldous Huxley’s novel of Southern California, “After Many a Summer Dies the Swan.” First published in 1939, and perhaps inspired by the figure of William Randolph Hearst, the novel is about a wealthy tycoon, Jo Stoyte, who pays for the research of a quack scientist named Doctor Obispo to find the secret of immortality.
Some of the tycoons of the Silicon Valley, according to Bloomberg Businessweek, unnamed in the piece, began experimenting with “really long bike rides and intermittent fasting” and progressed to “taking dozens of pills every morning, or injecting stem cells into their brain [sic], or infusing their body with the blood of the young and virile.”
The goal is what is called “life-extension,” exactly what the millionaire Stoyte seeks in Huxley’s novel. Stoyte eventually finds out about an English lord, the Fifth Earl of Gonister, who discovered that eating fish viscera prolonged life. Eventually, the millionaire finds the earl, who has shrunken to an ape-like state and is hidden in the basement of an English estate. He has found immortality, but it has taken a frightening form."
Eternal Life?
“Life imitates art,” said Oscar Wilde in his essay “Decay of Lying,” turning Aristotle’s saying on its head. Sometimes Wilde was a prophet.
Case in point: a May 31 article in Bloomberg Businessweek began by announcing, “As the tech industry has matured, people in Silicon Valley have become obsessed with developing ways to stop the human aging process.”
It is a phenomenon that recalls Aldous Huxley’s novel of Southern California, “After Many a Summer Dies the Swan.” First published in 1939, and perhaps inspired by the figure of William Randolph Hearst, the novel is about a wealthy tycoon, Jo Stoyte, who pays for the research of a quack scientist named Doctor Obispo to find the secret of immortality.
Some of the tycoons of the Silicon Valley, according to Bloomberg Businessweek, unnamed in the piece, began experimenting with “really long bike rides and intermittent fasting” and progressed to “taking dozens of pills every morning, or injecting stem cells into their brain [sic], or infusing their body with the blood of the young and virile.”
The goal is what is called “life-extension,” exactly what the millionaire Stoyte seeks in Huxley’s novel. Stoyte eventually finds out about an English lord, the Fifth Earl of Gonister, who discovered that eating fish viscera prolonged life. Eventually, the millionaire finds the earl, who has shrunken to an ape-like state and is hidden in the basement of an English estate. He has found immortality, but it has taken a frightening form."
Eternal Life?