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But after six years in the trenches of immortality, which led him everywhere from the bedside of a dying Jesuit professor in Canada to a private Caribbean island where magician David Copperfield claims to have uncovered “a liquid that reverses genes,” Mr. Gollner has emerged a skeptic, albeit a fascinated one.

“We’re so willing to fall into unthinkingness in our desperation to try to live forever, we have such a strong desire for it that we’ll just put common sense aside.”

The common thread throughout all approaches to immortality is belief, whether it’s in religion, magic, mythology or science. And belief is a way of salving a fear of death, which, he said, comes from the fact that it’s impossible to understand. We want resolution. We want to know. Is there a heaven? Nothing else? Or will I be reincarnated into a tiger?

“The fact that we’re incapable of knowing fills us with something that can be quite intolerable to people, which is uncertainty,” he said. All of the world’s major religions offer a blueprint for how to think about death, he said, and that can be extremely comforting.

“But then you also have…physical immortalists — they have such a different attitude towards it,” he said. “They really think they will never die, and they find the idea that death is real to be an offensive conceit.”

One of the most interesting scenes and characters in the book appear at a Huntington Beach, Calif., 125th birthday party that’s set in the future, year 2068 (but actually in 2009). The gathering of physical immortalists were required to dress as they think they might appear in that year (much to the delight of Mr. Gollner’s friends, who all dress up in silver bodysuits in order to blend in with his research subjects). But the elaborate adult dress-up party is no joke to the guests, many of whom are beyond giddy when prolific theoretical immortalist Aubrey de Grey strolls into the fête — a man who has declared a war on aging and amassed many followers.