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"The point sticks in your head: physics rules. Virtue does not triumph unless the physics allows it."
- Larry Niven

Sprung-Samser Treatment  
  A medical treatment to extend human life.  

As you might guess from the title, this book treats different aspects of how a person might live a long time, as well as what a person might do with a long life.

Conrad Nomikos (who has had a variety of names over the course of his long life) was born long-lived through a (non-natural) mutation. Hasan the Assassin, however, gained his extra years with a special medical treatment.

Eighty or ninety or more, looking about forty, [Hasan] could still act thirty. the Sprung-Samser treatments had found highly responsive material. It's not often that way. Almost never, in fact. They put some people into accelerated anaphylactic shock for no apparent reason, and even an intracardial blast of adrenalin won't haul them back; others, most others, they freeze at five or six decades. But some rare ones actually grow younger when they take the series - about one in a hundred thousand.

It struck me as odd that in destiny's big shooting gallery this one should make it, in such a big way.

Technovelgy from This Immortal, by Roger Zelazny.
Published by Ace Science Fiction in 1966
Additional resources -

From immortality granted by the gods to the Fountain of Youth, human beings have been fascinated by how a person might live longer. At the present, the only treatment known to extend life in mammals is an extremely low calorie diet.

It was apparently a series of treatments:

"I've pushed the S-S series about as far as it can go. I fancy I can feel the mainspring winding down now. Maybe it will take a few more windings and maybe it won't...

The Sprung-Samser treatments could extend human life to the 150-year range.

Compare to young blood - new blood for old from Methuselah's Children (1941) by Robert Heinlein, conscious retarded animation from A Race Through Time (1933) by Donald Wandrei, the anti-Tri-D shot from The Morning of the Day They Did It (1950) by E.B. White and the anti-agathic drugs from Cities in Flight (1957) by James Blish.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from This Immortal
  More Ideas and Technology by Roger Zelazny
  Tech news articles related to This Immortal
  Tech news articles related to works by Roger Zelazny

Sprung-Samser Treatment-related news articles:
  - Can Sirtuins Block The Aging Process?

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