Ray Kurzweil is a slight guy with a big brain and a lot of money. His slow, deliberate speech, in sync with his cultivated, mellow demeanor, gives no hint of his upbringing in Queens, New York. With his thick-rimmed glasses, thinning hair combed back to hide a bald spot, and olive T-shirt tucked into gray trousers, the 59-year-old looks a little like a scientist version of Woody Allen. On this day, the man who invented a reader for the blind and is the father of the modern-day musical synthesizer—just two of the gadgets that have brought him fame, fortune, and prizes—has come to talk about his most recent quest at the far reaches of the scientific frontier.

He sits sipping pink bubble tea at a vegan café in Brookline, Massachusetts, picking inchlong earth-toned pills—milk thistle, primrose oil, and soy isoflavones among them—out of a plastic bag he keeps hidden under the table. “I’ve always been a little embarrassed about taking pills in public,” he says. For Kurzweil, a music- and speech-recognition pioneer and the head of a hedge fund called FatKat, this evening’s ration is only a small portion of the 220 pills he takes each day. He accompanies this regimen with weekly intravenous antioxidant drips, acupuncture, and large doses of alkaline water, all in an effort to live for a very, very long time.

Actually, Kurzweil, whom some peers consider to be a pure genius with a bit of Mad Hatter about him, has slightly more-ambitious goals. He wants to live forever—or at least until science delivers some longevity technology that will save him (and presumably the rest of us) from the predations of disease and aging. A futurist of some repute (he, for example, predicted the fall of the Soviet Union long before others did), Kurzweil is personally betting on “nanobot technology”—microscopic machines that could be inserted into the body to detect and destroy cancer and other life-threatening diseases without causing nasty side effects. Between that and the startling advances in artificial intelligence that he expects will aid the human cause, “our lives will extend exponentially,” he says with no trace of irony as he munches his gluten-and-papaya salad. “And then we’ll eventually take over the universe and ultimately become godlike.”

Whatever you think of Kurzweil and his ideas, he is hardly alone these days in thinking that at least some aspects of that future aren’t merely possible—they are close at hand.

The quest for immortality, or at least to live far longer than we ever have, isn’t new. What’s different now is that longevity research is attracting the attention of mainstream investors, including hedge fund managers and C.E.O.’s, who are casting their eyes and money toward a broad array of theories and regimens in hopes of extending their lives, thus giving them more quality time to spend with their fortunes. Some of the ideas—Kurzweil’s nanobots and the cryonic suspension of bodies in nitrogen freezers so they can be thawed and revivified when medical science has conquered death—still seem more like science fiction than science. But recent breakthroughs in genetics, stem cell research, cellular regeneration, cancer therapy, and bionic medicine have given new credence to longevity advocates, reinvigorating their ranks and attracting attention from serious types who might otherwise have been turned off by the field’s “weird science” aspect.

On a more prosaic level, Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone has declared that he plans to live at least 50 years beyond his current age of 84 with the help of a life-extending juice he drinks every day. British physician and longevitist Richard Reyes, whose influential acquaintances include American hedge fund manager Louis Bacon, has a client list of businesspeople happy to shell out $50,000 a year for his services. Reyes performs an exhaustive physical examination to determine clients’ biological ages as well as which diet supplements and hormone injections will, in his view, extend their lives.