Quest For Immortality

The super-rich are pumping enormous amounts of money into research that will extend life– and keep death at bay for a long, long time…

- E. Kumar Sharma

In the book of Immortality, Canadian author and musician Adam Leith Gollner narrates that Oracle Founder, Larry Ellison, “has vowed to defeat mortality”. He then goes on to quote El-lison’s biographer, Mark Wilson, “Part of Larry... is saying if he’s smart enough, he should be able to beat (death). Death is just another kind of corpo-rate opponent that he can outfox.” In Ellison’s own words, “Death has never made any sense to me. How can a person be there and then just vanish, just not be there? Clearly the reason they’re not there is they’re off doing something else... Death makes me very angry.”

This feeling of anger and frustration is not new. The super-rich have chased immortality for millenniums as it is one thing that wealth cannot buy. Defying old age and death has fascinated the human race from the days of the Puranas. One could never forget the legend of King Yayati whose son Puru gave him the gift of youth for a thousand years. In ancient Egypt, the bodies of the royalty were preserved for an equally enjoyable afterlife. In medieval Europe, alchemists swindled aristocrats by assuring eternal life. Even now, the ultra-rich, with all their superyachts, supercars, private jets, personal trainers and celebrity chefs, are heavily investing in enterprises focussed on finding physical immortality. The hunt for amrita will always be arduous.