DOCTOR HEIDEGGER'S EXPERIMENT

Incidently, on living forever or controling the aging process, consider "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment", this is the short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne where a Dr. Heidegger, who is a prominent medical doctor in New England in the 19th century, procures an elixir of life from the Fountain of Youth recently discovered by Juan Ponce de Leon, the Governor of Puerto Rico, in a search in 1513 in Florida. He tests the elixir on a crumpled rose that is all dried up and it comes back to life as rosy as the day it bloomed. He then gives the elixir to 3 friends who are very old and they slowly, over a period of hours, return to their youth.......................but they unfortunately retain their same human social frailties and shortcomings as they had all along in their miserable lives, and then subsequently revert permanently to their old age, albeit slowly. In other words, the transformation back to youth did not change their inherent selfish dispositions. And this is the lesson of "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment", the morale being that the gift of immortality would not change our world from being the hurt-filled, miserable place it is now...........................