Immortality: How Science is Extending Your Life Span and Changing the World

This book, Immortality, was a enjoyable read. It's packed with information and research in the history of science in the field of immortality. The only down side for me was that the book was somewhat dated. As I'm listening to the science on telemers the author states that 'currently, no known way yet for the average person to extend the life of telemers'. (paraphrased) This caused me to pause, since today we know that multi-vitamins especially C & E can allow the telemers to not shrink as fast, and in essences therefore, increasing the life of a telemer. I then checked the publish date on this book and saw that although audible.com is stating the publish date as 5/10 it is actually 1999. /sigh ... So no wonder the information in here is somewhat dated. I do which that audible would in the future make sure they are entering both the publish date and the audible date so that customers can make a more informed decision as to whether they want to spend 7 1/2 hours or not reading (listening) to a particular book. However, It was a fasinating read, and even somewhat dated contains a huge amount of information.

This book is very simplistic. If you know anything about biology (like you have taken college cell bio) you will be bored as I was. Also, the book is old, 1999. It is out of date. My mistake was to look at the release date of the audiobook and conclude it was current and not to find out when it was first published in print. The narrator's voice is just so deep as to be distracting, and he mispronounces medical and scientific words. Also, my mistake, I should have listened to the sample. Now, if Mr. Bova would write a 2011 version, getting a new reader, skipping the basic biology, and prognosticate, speculate, and predict for 300 pages, well that would be attractive.

Yes. While I kept up with most of it, I am positive that there are sections I could have understood better. It is a fascinating listen that gives you a lot of information and leaves you with much to think about. Do we want this future to come about or not.

Not sure I have any that I could. This book is predicting a not so distant future, yet it is more like a journal of recent events. It is science fiction and journalism in a single package.

Stefan is a master. I doubt that he could ever deliver a poor performance. He does this every bit as well as he does Ender's Game or any other tale.

The science around the cell reproduction and the limits to how often some cells can reproduce.

It is now nearly a decade since this book was published. I'd love to see a sequel or second edition with updates on the progress and notes on if Dr. Bova would stick with his original timelines or adjust them in or out.

For me, not really. This book is strongly geared towards lay people without a scientific background. In fact, the book simply acts as a scientific review of research relating to aging at the time (1998, so a lot of the info is rather dated) for the layperson. If you already have some grasp of life extension research, I wouldn't recommend this book. Many of the concepts are over simplified to the point of bordering on being false. I give this book 2 stars basically just because it promotes the idea of aging being programmed.

Include more specific case studies and why he thinks such studies will lead to immortality. He doesn't really give any original ideas.

I wasn't sure if it was read by a computer or not. There were some parts that definitely sounded very much like a computer voice, and other parts where I thought it was too good to be a computer. And many words, such as

No.