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"What television does is rent us friends and relatives who are quite satisfactory. This is quite something, to rent artificial friends and relatives right inside the house."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
 |
| 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 1965 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:
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.
"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...
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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?
| Bacteria Turns Plastic Into Pain Relief? That Gives Me An Idea. |
| Heart Patches Grown In The Lab Repair Hearts |
| Pixel Watch 'Loss of Pulse Detection' And Philip K. Dick |
| ErythroMer Artificial Blood |
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'Their only check on the growth and development of Vulcan 3 lay in two clues: the amount of rock thrown up to the surface... and the amount of the raw materials and tools and parts which the computer requested.'
'I guess there's nobody round this table who doesn't have a Crosswell [tapeworm] working for him in the small intestine.'
'Figments of his mind in one sense, of course, for he had shaped them...'
'So the parent drone carries a spotter that it launches...'
'...nurse drones that would cruise around dumping large amounts of power into randomly selected pods.'
'It's done with a flip of the third joint of the tentacle on the down beat.'
'...for months Grantline bores had dug into the cliff.'
'I hope all those other cars are on automatic,' he said anxiously.
'It’s smart enough to go wrong in very complicated ways, but not smart enough to help us find out what’s wrong.'
