\n<\/p>\n
Like Vladimir Putin, Joseph Stalin was interested in immortality (\u2018To them, ageing is a technical problem that can, and will, be fixed\u2019: how the rich and powerful plan to live for ever, 28 September). In 1939 he read Prolonging Life, a pamphlet promising a lifespan of 150 years, by Aleksandr Bogomolets, a haematologist famous for his rapid-healing serums and blood transfusion methods.<\/p>\n
Bogomolets promised to prolong life with cytotoxic proteins, herbs and transfusions of young blood. Stalin made him a Hero of Socialist Labour and gave him generous research funding, but was dismayed when he died aged 64 in 1946 (this was hardly Bogomolets\u2019s fault \u2013 as a boy in Tsarist times, he visited his mother, a revolutionary serving a sentence of hard labour in a Siberian prison, and caught tuberculosis). Aleks Krotoski says dictators and US techno-billionaires are striving for immortality. They should read After Many a Summer by Aldous Huxley, a novel about a Hollywood millionaire who tries to achieve immortality, but regresses to an ape\u2011like creature in the process.<\/p>\n The book is partly seen as reflecting science showing that embryo development takes a foetus through stages resembling a worm, a fish, a tailed rodent-like creature etc. Hence returning an adult human body to a younger stage might reverse this evolutionary process. But the book has also been seen as reflecting the narcissistic obsession with eternal youth in the US that Huxley had moved to.<\/p>\n So has anything changed in the intervening century? Certainly not the obsession, which if anything has become stronger. Perhaps Vladimir Putin is already undergoing transfusions with \u201crejuvenating\u201d blood, sucking, vampire-like, the blood of young Russians? Have an opinion on anything you\u2019ve read in the Guardian today? Please <\/em><\/strong>email<\/em><\/strong> us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our <\/em><\/strong>letters<\/em><\/strong> section.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Like Vladimir Putin, Joseph Stalin was interested in immortality (\u2018To them, ageing is a technical problem that can, and will, be fixed\u2019: how the rich and powerful plan to live for ever, 28 September). In 1939 he read Prolonging Life, a pamphlet promising a lifespan of 150 years, by Aleksandr Bogomolets, a haematologist famous for<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25679,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[376,141,8760,15495,3558,527,8257],"class_list":{"0":"post-25678","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-death","9":"tag-dying","10":"tag-enduring","11":"tag-immortality","12":"tag-obsession","13":"tag-putin","14":"tag-stalin"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25678"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25678\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/25679"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Donald Rayfield<\/strong>
Emeritus professor<\/em>, Queen Mary University of London<\/em><\/p>\n
Joseph Ulanowski<\/strong>
Cambridge<\/em><\/p>\n