From respected, mainstream publication The Times Online!

Bruce Klein founded The Immortality Institute (Imminst) in 2002 as a non-profit organisation with the aim of ‘conquering the blight of involuntary death’. Klein was brought up in the town of Americus, ‘a jewel of Georgia’, in Bible Belt America, the deep south. ‘Yeah, I’m a southern redneck!’ he jokes. His family was not especially religious, though he did observe the Catholicism of his mother until the age of eleven when he took a phone call from their priest. ‘I said to him I didn’t believe any more. He got kind of upset and I hung up the phone. It was some kind of visceral thing.’

Klein was thirty-one when I met him at Imminst’s conference at the Georgia Tech Conference Center, Atlanta, in November 2005. The conference turned out to be a snapshot of the immortalist front line. It is a movement that is part cult and part serious science. But all were united by the fervency of their belief in the rightness of the project of extending life and by their vehement rejection of deathism and scepticism. The participants saw themselves as visionaries and frequently beleaguered pioneers of the only new frontier left to mankind. Klein is a groomed, fit-looking man. His wife and ‘wonderful friend’, Susan Fonseca-Klein, co-founder and director of the institute, is round-faced and pretty. Together, they have the air not of a threateningly glamorous but of a consolingly ideal couple – young, healthy, good-natured, extravagantly friendly, ambitious, optimistic, glowing. One could imagine them in an advertisement for breakfast cereal.

Part cult how? Just because it’s something unusually ambitious? Were the Wright Brothers and their supporters part cult? What about the Manhattan Project, where scientists were consolidated in Los Alamos? Silly journalists, what would we do if you didn’t take the liberty of exaggerating randomly to “spice up” the article? Reading stuff would just be so boring otherwise.

The article zooms in a bit on the AI side of the pursuit for immortality, something that many of the current ranks at ImmInst seem to be too busy consuming dinner plates of supplements to notice.

“Threateningly glamorous”, hmm. Max and Natasha, I think that’s your job. ;)

Bryan Appleyard, I’m sure your book will be an interesting one, but don’t call immortalism part cult. It’s not necessary to sell your book, or make it interesting.