Merchants of Immortality: Chasing the Dream of Human Life Extension
Merchants of Immortality: Chasing the Dream of Human Life Extension is a book by Stephen S. Hall.
"MIDWAY through Merchants of Immortality, Stephen S. Hall takes us inside a laboratory in central Massachusetts. Like the rest of the book, the fascinating episode is intensely researched, and it's the simple, mundane details that make it work. We're given the tiny cow eggs harvested in Iowa from the ovaries of slaughtered cattle, the small white plastic tubes the hundreds of eggs were plopped into, the thermoslike container that kept the tubes warm in the overnight mail to Worcester. The container arrived at a drab brick laboratory building, where a technician drew out the eggs, put them under a high-powered microscope and, using an extremely fine needle, sucked the cow DNA out of them. Taking one of these emptied eggs, another technician stuck it with a needle loaded with a human's cells. And then, with a barely perceptible squeeze of one hand, she deposited a single adult skin cell, with its unique payload of human DNA, into the egg of a creature that moos."
- - From the New York Times book review By Atul Gawande July 2003[1]