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Lazarus Long is a fictional character featured in a number of science fiction novels by Robert A. Heinlein. Born in 1912 in the third generation of a selective breeding experiment run by the Ira Howard Foundation, Lazarus (birth name Woodrow Wilson Smith) becomes unusually long-lived, living well over two thousand years with the aid of occasional rejuvenation treatments.

His exact (natural) life span is never determined. In his introduction at the beginning of Methuselah's Children, he admits he is 213 years old. Approximately 75 years pass during the course of the novel; but because large amounts of this time are spent traveling interstellar distances at speeds approaching the speed of light, the 75-year measurement is an expression of the time elapsed in his absence rather than time seen from his perspective. At one point, he estimates his natural life span to be around 250 years; but this figure is not expressed with certainty. Heinlein acknowledged that such a long life span should not be expected as a result of a mere three generations of selective breeding, but offers no alternative explanation except by having a character declare, "A mutation, of course—which simply says that we don't know".^[1]

In Methuselah's Children, Long mentions visiting Hugo Pinero, the scientist appearing in Heinlein's first published story "Life-Line", who had invented a machine that precisely measured lifespan, but who failed to determine Long's age and suggested that the machine is broken.

The promotional copy on the back of Time Enough for Love, the second book featuring Lazarus Long, states that Lazarus was "so in love with time that he became his own ancestor," but this never happens in any of the published books. In the book, Lazarus does travel back in time and seduce his mother; but this happens after his own birth. Heinlein did use a similar plot in the short story "—All You Zombies—", in which a character becomes both of his own parents.

A rugged individualist with a distrust of authority, Lazarus drifts from world to world, settling down periodically and leaving when the situation becomes too regimented for his taste—often just before an angry mob arrives to capture him.

The Lazarus Long set of books involve time travel, parallel dimensions, free love, incest, and a concept that Heinlein named World as Myth—the theory that universes are created by the act of imagining them, such that even fictional worlds are real.

Appearances[link]

Novels featuring Lazarus include:

• Methuselah's Children (1941) (serialized magazine version)
• Methuselah's Children (1958) (rewritten novel version)
• Time Enough for Love (1973)
• The Number of the Beast (1980)
• The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (1985)
• To Sail Beyond the Sunset (1987)

The Notebooks of Lazarus Long, a book containing sayings of the character Lazarus Long largely taken from Time Enough for Love, was published in 1978.

The Lives of Lazarus Long[link]

[edit] Methuselah's Children

When the character of Lazarus Long is introduced in Methuselah's Children, he is 213 years old, and the breeding experiment that created the Howard Families has proven to be a success, with most "Howards" enjoying a lifespan of approximately 150 years and changing identities periodically to conceal their long lifespans. 10% of their number have elected to end "The Masquerade" and live publicly, with the approval of the Howard Foundation; but this process has backfired.

The general public of Earth, once exposed to the Howards' lifespan, believes incorrectly that the Howards have discovered an anti-aging process that they are choosing to conceal, and come to resent them. Civil liberties applied to the Howards are suspended, and the entire membership of the Howard Families is detained, with the exception of Lazarus himself.

With the aid of the elected head of the world government, Slayton Ford, Lazarus hijacks the New Frontiers, a starship designed to travel to distant stars, and liberates the Howards. While the New Frontiers was designed to sustain a colony in travel at speeds significantly below the speed of light, a Howard named Andrew Jackson "Slipstick" Libby raises the ship to speeds approaching lightspeed. With the ship thus modified, the Howard Families, under the leadership of Lazarus Long, escape the solar system in search of a planet of their own.

The first planet they encounter is populated by the Jockaira, a species acting as domesticated animals for an unnamed species whom they worship as gods. When the latter discover that the humans cannot be domesticated, all of the humans are forcibly removed from the planet and placed in their ship, which is then transferred to another star system and planet by means of technology sufficiently advanced that it is not observable by the humans.

This second planet is populated by a diminutive furry species called the "Little People", who are a very advanced collective intelligence. They are very accommodating to the humans, and in fact their world is pleasant enough to be considered a paradise. After many years, Mary Sperling—a close friend of Lazarus and the second-oldest of the Howard Families—joins the collective intelligence in order to escape thanatophobia; whereupon Lazarus and many other Howards return to Earth. Approximately twelve thousand remain behind.

Upon return to Earth, the Howards learn that a rejuvenation treatment has been developed to approximate the secret of longevity supposedly held by themselves; thus permitting Lazarus, who is grown old, to regain his youth.

[edit] Time Enough for Love

At the beginning of this book, Lazarus has grown weary of life and decides to die. He returns to Secundus, where he is captured by the police and subjected to rejuvenation at the behest of his descendant Ira Weatheral, Chairman Pro Tempore of the Howard Families, who believes that the society and culture of Secundus are in death throes, and wishes to lead the Families to a new planet named Tertius, having had Lazarus advise him in doing so. Lazarus later agrees, promising to commit suicide if Ira does not meet his demands; and in exchange, Ira orders a search to find Lazarus a new amusement. This search, using a "Zwicky Box", is performed by an artificial intelligence named Minerva, who handles most of the computerized functions of the planetary government, is in love with Ira, and becomes friends with Lazarus. Meanwhile the latter's caretakers, named Hamadryad and Ishtar, both give birth to female clones of him, their Y-chromosome being replaced by an identical copy of the X chromosome, producing "daughters" named Lapis Lazuli and Lorelei Lee. Lazarus' advice to Ira appears alternately as proverbs and as stories.

Lazarus assists Ira in the migration to Tertius; settles the latter; and attempts a trans-temporal journey to Earth, circa 1919-1929; but mistakenly arrives in 1916, there to insinuate himself into his parents' family under the name of "Ted Bronson", whom his grandfather Ira (resembling "The Old Man" of Heinlein's earlier work The Puppet Masters) suspects to be an illegitimate nephew or son of his own. Lazarus also discovers, to his surprise and (initial) shame, a sexual desire of his own mother, Maureen. When his family learns that he has no plans to join the army in World War I, they spurn him, prompting him to enlist as a drill sergeant. His father, Brian Smith, also an officer, makes arrangements for him to go overseas, thinking he is doing "Ted" a favor.

Before deployment, Lazarus again visits his family, whereupon he learns that Maureen is as attracted to him as he is to her. She explains that her husband does not insist on fidelity, although she is careful not to become pregnant by any man but Brian; and being newly pregnant, consummates her attraction to Lazarus himself. Overseas, Lazarus is seriously wounded in combat, but is rescued by his Tertian household.

Other novels[link]

In The Number of the Beast, the main characters discover a way to travel to fictional worlds, and in the course of their explorations, visit the world of Lazarus Long. Using the technology of these characters' ship (which can teleport through space and time), Lazarus snatches his mother out of the time stream at the end of her life and replaces her with a dead clone.

Lazarus also appears as a minor character in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls and plays a role in Heinlein's last novel, To Sail Beyond the Sunset, which is the life story of Maureen. In the former novel, Lazarus is revealed at the end of the novel as the father of protagonist Colin "Richard Ames" Campbell; whereas in the latter novel, Maureen as narrator tells a somewhat different version of Lazarus' visit to Earth in 1916-18 and reveals that Lazarus (as Woodrow "Bill" Smith) was the backup pilot of the first lunar expedition.

Footnotes[link]

1. ^ Justin Foote the 45th in the (in-fiction) Introduction in Time Enough for Love, p. xvi

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (June 2007)

David Lazarus is an American business and consumer columnist for the Los Angeles Times. He joined the paper in August 2007.

Before joining the LA Times staff in 2007, Lazarus worked as a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and a nightly talk radio host for San Francisco's KGO Radio.^[1] He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley.

He won first place in the 2005 National Headliner Awards contest for business reporting. And the Society of Professional Journalists in Northern California named him "Journalist of the Year" in 2001. A media watchdog site, Grade the News, described him this way: "Since coming to the Chronicle from Wired News in 1999, David Lazarus has been one of the most prolific, and influential, writers at the paper."^[2]

Lazarus is the author of two books on Japan, where he lived for several years, and has had articles published in many magazines. He had a small part in the 1976 film The Bad News Bears.

David lives in Southern California with his wife and son.

References[link]

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Aubrey de Grey
In Los Angeles, California, 2008
Born	(1963-04-20) 20 April 1963 (age 49) London, England
Residence	Cambridge, England
Nationality	British
Education	MA, PhD (Cantab)
Alma mater	Trinity Hall, Cambridge
Occupation	Chief Science Officer of the SENS Foundation
Known for	Work in Biogerontology, Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS)
Spouse	Adelaide Carpenter[1]

Aubrey David Nicholas Jasper de Grey (born 20 April 1963) is an English author and theoretician in the field of gerontology, and the Chief Science Officer of the SENS Foundation. He is editor-in-chief of the academic journal Rejuvenation Research, author of The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging (1999) and co-author of Ending Aging (2007). He is perhaps best known for his view that human beings could, in theory, live to lifespans far in excess of that which any authenticated cases have lived to today.

De Grey's research focuses on whether regenerative medicine can thwart the aging process. He works on the development of what he calls "Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence" (SENS), a tissue-repair strategy intended to rejuvenate the human body and allow an indefinite lifespan. To this end, he has identified seven types of molecular and cellular damage caused by essential metabolic processes. SENS is a proposed panel of therapies designed to repair this damage.^[2]

De Grey is a fellow of the Gerontological Society of America, the American Aging Association, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, and an advisor to the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.^[3] He has been interviewed in recent years in a number of news sources, including CBS 60 Minutes, the BBC, The New York Times, Fortune Magazine, The Washington Post, TED, Popular Science, The Colbert Report, Time, and the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe.

Early life and education[link]

De Grey was born and brought up in London, England.^{[citation needed]} He told The Observer that he never knew his father, and that his mother, an artist, hothoused him in the areas she herself was the weakest: science and mathematics.^[1] He was educated at Sussex House School and Harrow School. He went to the University of Cambridge, graduating in 1985 with a BA in computer science from Trinity Hall.

Career[link]

After graduation in 1985, de Grey joined Sinclair Research Ltd as an AI/software engineer. In 1986, he co-founded Man-Made Minions Ltd to pursue the development of an automated formal program verifier. He met his wife, fruit-fly geneticist Adelaide Carpenter, at a graduate party in Cambridge, and through her was introduced to the science of anti-aging, when her boss needed someone who knew about computers and biology to take over the running of a database on fruit flies.^[4] From 1992 until 2006, he was in charge of software development at the university's Genetics Department for the FlyBase genetic database.^[5]