The Immortals That Live Under The Sea…

This news is from last month, but just in case you haven’t heard: The “immortal jellyfish” can transform itself back into a polyp and begin life anew.

Can a Jellyfish Unlock the Secret of Immortality?

By NATHANIEL RICH

Takashi Murai

“After more than 4,000 years — almost since the dawn of recorded time, when Utnapishtim told Gilgamesh that the secret to immortality lay in a coral found on the ocean floor — man finally discovered eternal life in 1988. He found it, in fact, on the ocean floor. The discovery was made unwittingly by Christian Sommer, a German marine-biology student in his early 20s. He was spending the summer in Rapallo, a small city on the Italian Riviera, where exactly one century earlier Friedrich Nietzsche conceived “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”: “Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again. . . .”

For the complete article click here to go to the New York Times.