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.

Some investors are going further: PayPal founder Peter Thiel, for example, recently pledged up to $3.5 million to an organization headed by the British longevity guru Aubrey De Grey, a Cambridge-educated Ph.D. who is experimenting with mice to see if the aging process can be reversed by cellular regeneration. That sum is just a part of the millions De Grey has raised from a variety of donors to expand his research into what he calls “strategies for engineered negligible senescence,” or SENS, which are based on the idea that aging as we know it can be “cured” by arresting the destructive metabolic forces that cause it and manipulating genes to renew themselves. De Grey’s work competes, in a way, with that of the Ellison Medical Foundation, financed by Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison. The foundation, which has received about $300 million from Ellison since its startup, funds basic biomedical research into aging with an eye toward treating age-related diseases, though it adamantly distances itself from the notion that aging can be cured. For his part, Kurzweil invests heavily in his beliefs, helping finance De Grey’s efforts and the pioneering work of Dr. Robert Freitas, a nanobot researcher at the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing in Palo Alto, California. Kurzweil is also in the longevity business himself, partnering with Terry Grossman, a Denver antiaging doctor, to produce, among other things, a line of supplements sold under the Ray & Terry label.

The longevity field is splintered between people like De Grey, who think a cure for aging is a realistic goal, and those like the researchers at Ellison, who argue that medical science will indeed be able to extend life, but not eternally. (Since 1970, the average U.S. life span has crept up by four years, to 77.9, not the kind of increment that the immortalists have in mind.) “We’re all going to croak,” says Richard Sprott, the Ellison Medical Foundation’s director, who expects that humans may eventually live as much as 30 years longer, but only in the distant future. As for the rest of it, including cryonics, Sprott says, “I don’t know how anybody takes some of this stuff seriously.”

Such skepticism explains why Peter Thiel, now head of Clarium Capital Management, a $2.7 billion hedge fund, has raised some eyebrows with his very public funding of De Grey’s immortality work. After announcing his investment in 2006, he discussed it further at the annual Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence conference—in front of hundreds of the nation’s digerati. (Tech bloggers later went after Thiel, dismissing Aubrey De Grey as a crackpot.) In Thiel’s view, “Aubrey is the rare combination of a first-rate scientist with an out-of-the-box thinker. In just the past five years, the notion of radical life extension has moved from the fringes to the mainstream, and he’s been one of the central figures in bringing about that shift. Every myth on this planet tells people that the purpose of life is death. It’s time for us to move beyond mythology and try to find a real cure for this universal disease.”

Neutral observers suggest that the interest in longevity or immortality research among many high-powered business executives is stoked by the same fire, optimism, and ego that made them successful in the first place. “Many of them are masters of the universe in terms of creating great funds and profit, and they think any problem is solvable,” says Ari Kiev, a psychiatrist who has worked with Steve Cohen, founder of SAC Capital Advisors, the Stamford, Connecticut, hedge fund. “That they would get involved in this is not so far removed from their ability to create outsize dreams and go for it. It has to do with risk taking, dealing with the unknown.”

It's hardly surprising, however, that some investors on the fringe of longevity research don’t want to talk about their involvement. The science can easily turn into spectacle. Recall the lurid estate fight, back in 2002 and 2003, over the body of baseball great Ted Williams, whose written wishes were to take a swing at immortality by surrendering his remains to the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona. The Associated Press filed this report: “Ted Williams was decapitated by surgeons at the cryonics company where his body is suspended in liquid nitrogen, and several samples of his DNA are missing.... The head is stored in a can filled with liquid nitrogen.... Williams’ body stands upright in a 9-foot-tall cylindrical steel tank, also filled with liquid nitrogen.”

Still, not all the big money is put off by the B-movie, sci-fi aspect of cryonics. Edward Thorp, the 75-year-old founder of Edward O. Thorp & Associates, a Newport Beach, California, hedge fund, has lined up a cryonic-suspension team from Alcor to freeze him in a thermos filled with liquid nitrogen. Thorp is explaining this on a mercilessly sunny day during a conversation in his roomy office overlooking the Newport Beach Fashion Island Mall. He insists there’s nothing particularly strange about wanting to hedge his bets in terms of death. He doesn’t consider himself a kook; he runs an investment fund that he says has averaged a 20 percent return (after fees) during the past 30 years and made a lot of his clients rich. He’s a fitness buff. Indeed, with his tan, smooth skin, firm grip, and youthful demeanor, he could pass for a guy 10 years younger. Antioxidants and anti-inflammatory drugs are both part of his life-extension gospel, and he practices what he preaches.

“Want to try one?” he asks, pointing to a pile of large pills he has spilled out on his desk alongside a pile of small white ones. The pills form a cocktail he’s ordered from a Fort Lauderdale, Florida, company called the Life Extension Foundation, one of a growing number of firms cashing in on the longevity business. On his windowsill are the company’s order forms, brochures, and its most recent newsletter, all of which he is eager to share. The newsletter describes recent studies about the longevity benefits of typical supplements like omega-3, resveratrol (found in red wine), and grape-seed extract—and some not-so-typical supplements, like velvet deer antler and optimized cat’s claw. Tucked deep inside is an advertisement for the inaugural Life Extension Cruise, which sets sail from Miami aboard the Norwegian Sun. In theory, having fun while extending your life doesn’t seem like a bad idea, though the cruise, as the ad describes it, seems heavy on lectures about the latest longevity theories.

Thorp says he first became interested in cryonics after reading The Prospect of Immortality, a 1960s nonfiction book by sci-fi writer Robert Ettinger, who posited the basic scientific premise of cryopreservation. (Ettinger has gone on to start his own cryonics business, the Cryonics Institute, in Clinton, Michigan.) “It all made sense to me as a possibility,” Thorp says. So he began shopping around. Besides Ettinger’s firm and Alcor, he had a third choice: Trans Time, in San Leandro, California. (Alcor also has representatives in numerous countries around the world.) Ettinger’s firm had the lowest price—$28,000 for “vitrifying” Thorp’s head only—but Thorp settled on Alcor, the largest and best endowed of all the businesses. It will cost him $120,000 to cryonically preserve his entire body, but, Thorp says, “there’s more memory in your whole body than your brain. It would be weird to adjust to a new body.” (Those going for the head-only option are betting that they’ll be able to have a new body cloned from their DNA.)

Thorp was impressed with Alcor’s sales pitch: Alcor claims to have state-of-the-art technology, 77 “cryo-patients” in suspension, and more than 800 living clients. To Thorp, the company’s extensive client list means it is “an institution that will be around for a while’’—which is important, since he thinks it may be 300 years before science perfects the art of bringing people back to life. When the time comes for his revivification, Thorp probably won’t have to worry about money: He has set up a trust—reported to be as much as $50 million—that can be used to pay medical bills for revivifying him and rebuilding or regenerating any nonworking body parts.

Alcor provides detailed instructions to clients like Thorp. Its approach rests on the premise that the body is revivable after legal death. In the first 10 minutes after cardiac arrest, the brain is still viable, and there is little damage to bodily organs. So once Thorp or his designee notifies Alcor of his impending death (the company recommends that clients in their final days relocate to a hospice near its Scottsdale facility or find a cryopreservation-friendly hospital), the company’s teams will hover nearby on a round-the-clock watch. When Thorp’s heart stops and he is declared legally dead, they’ll rush in and put him in an ice-water bath before restoring his circulation and breathing artificially with either a heart-lung resuscitator known as a Lucas chest compression device or an implement known as a cardiopulmonary support Thumper.

Then, to keep the body as close to its living state as possible, they will hook his corpse up to an IV and administer anticoagulants, pH buffers, and so-called free-radical inhibitors (free radicals are agents that damage cells and are thought to speed aging) plus anesthetics, which Alcor scientists say work as a preservative, particularly on the brain. Thorp’s blood will be drained and replaced with a cryoprotectant, which keeps the tissue from being damaged by cold temperatures. Next step: storage in the nitrogen container, called a Dewar, which is kept at –196°C.

Thorp admits this process gets tricky if he dies suddenly—say, in an accident—far from Alcor’s minions. That’s why Alcor advises all its clients to file living wills that state a religious objection to an autopsy, which often damages vital organs, notably the brain.

When the tough questions are put to Thorp—Why do you think you’d want to live in a world that could be transformed for the worse? Do you really believe this has a chance of succeeding?—he’s pretty candid in his responses.

True, “you could wake up and the language could be different,” he says. “Osama bin Laden could have nuclear weapons. There’s just no telling what could happen.” But while cryopreservation may be an extreme bet, such bets “have paid off for me in the investment world,” he adds.

As for his actual chances of coming back? “Five percent,” Thorp says. “It’s like buying a lottery ticket.”

Thorp may want to live forever, but most new investment in longevity research is going to less extreme areas, which adherents say have great promise to extend life now. Aside from De Grey’s cure-for-aging movement and the more mainstream work of the Ellison Medical researchers, a host of advocates are lobbying for other life-extension approaches: the calorie restrictors; the low-body-temperature enthusiasts; the hormone-replacement, supplement, and diet supporters. Some of these seem like a sideshow—the low-body-temperature theory, for example—but all of them have funding, passionate supporters, and just enough legitimate science in them that they aren’t going away.

Calorie restrictors, backed by an organization called the Calorie Restriction Society, repeat as their mantra “fewer calories, more life.” (The Ellison Medical Foundation also sees promise in some aspects of calorie-restriction research.) It’s actually an old idea, born of research conducted at Cornell University in 1934, which showed that rats that ate half as much as a control group lived twice as long. Similar studies of fruit flies in 1988 seem to show similar results. But calorie restriction vaulted to new prominence in 2004 when researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis reported that a restricted-calorie diet—eating about 45 percent less than the average adult consumes—lowered cholesterol and blood pressure. About the same time, independent researchers noted that a pill form of resveratrol—the antioxidant found in red wine—mimicked the effects of calorie restriction in rats that weren’t on a diet. Problem: Given the amount of resveratrol in red wine, and after adjusting for body weight and metabolism, humans would have to drink a huge amount of wine each day to get the same results. Still, big money is chasing the idea: The findings were provocative enough to allow Sirtris, a biotech startup co-founded by a Harvard M.D. and his venture capitalist partner, to raise about $60 million from an initial public offering to try to produce a pill with a highly concentrated amount of resveratrol.

Then there are the low-body-temperature advocates, emboldened by research showing that a reduction in body temperature slows metabolism and decreases wear and tear on the body and thus logically could extend life. Cooling theory is already part of conventional medicine: In recent years, doctors have taken to putting patients in a state of induced hypothermia as a way of slowing down their metabolism, thereby reducing risk during complicated surgeries. No mainstream studies show that cooling actually promotes longevity, but that hasn’t stopped Alen Salerian from vigorously pursuing the theory. Salerian, a Turkish-born psychiatrist in Washington, D.C., and the onetime head of the F.B.I.’s Mobile Psychiatric Emergency Response Team, fell from grace at the bureau when he was fined by Maryland medical authorities for leaking information to the press in the Robert Hanssen spying case. Salerian says he has unearthed statistics suggesting that people in temperate climates have longer life spans than those in hot climates, and he posits the notion—which he admits is just a notion—that humans could extend their lives by 10 to 20 years simply by lowering their core body temperature by 1°C.

Salerian also sees a business opportunity in this idea. He and his twin brother, a Texas chemical engineer, are making a run at the cooling-attire business, obtaining patents on a variety of devices that can be worn to lower body temperature. Just how serious Salerian is about this became apparent a few months ago when he made a presentation to investment bankers at Allen & Co.’s Fifth Avenue headquarters, seeking backing to begin mass-marketing some of his inventions, among them a cooling hat equipped with a minifan and ice pockets, and a vest with a built-in air conditioner. One banker who was at the meeting says that all Salerian got for his efforts was snickers. Salerian acknowledges that he came away empty-handed. Undaunted, he continues to try to raise capital and, meanwhile, has published his cooling-and-longevity theories in Medical Hypotheses, an obscure scientific journal, in hopes that they will inspire others to take up his cause. “I could not delay humanity any longer,” he says.

To see what Peter Thiel, the PayPal founder, was getting for his longevity investment, I caught up with Aubrey De Grey in a cramped midtown Manhattan hotel room, where he had come to cool his heels before appearing on Good Morning America to talk about his latest book, Ending Aging. At 44, De Grey is an arresting figure—tall and trim, with piercing brown eyes; a bushy, two-foot-long beard; and long brown hair pulled back in a ponytail. But if stress contributes to aging, De Grey may have lost a few minutes this morning. He’s sitting on his hotel-room windowsill facing a drab inner atrium, explaining that his Good Morning America appearance had just been canceled because, he says, the subject matter was “apparently too technical for their dumb audience.” Of course, De Grey should be used to this kind of thing by now. He’s been in a long-running feud with the editor of Technology Review, M.I.T.’s science magazine, which repeatedly attacked his core idea that aging is a disease. Though at loggerheads, the magazine and De Grey (through De Grey’s nonprofit Methuselah Foundation in Lorton, Virginia) put up a $20,000 prize for any scientist who could credibly debunk his SENS theories. Though a handful made submissions, an impartial panel of scientists concluded in 2006 that the attacks on De Grey’s work had not proved SENS “unworthy of discussion” even as its proponents had “not made a compelling case for it.”

Despite such skepticism—and the fact that he’s raised only a few million dollars so far—De Grey, with missionary zeal, is trying to raise the $1 billion he needs to carry out the research that he believes will begin to methodically roll back the aging process. Pared down, his thesis argues that seven aspects of our metabolism eventually kill us as part of what we call aging. They include cell loss and depletion, which are linked to heart disease and senility; cell mutations, which lead to cancer; and the mutation of mitochondrial DNA, which may lead to most age-related diseases. Science is already attacking cell loss and atrophy with stem cell research, and cancer rates, owing in part to medical breakthroughs, are dropping. The problem is, De Grey says, that no one has systematically tackled what he calls the seven deadly things at once because science and modern medicine decline to consider aging as a disease, regarding it instead as an evolutionary inevitability. Moreover, as even De Grey concedes, there are sticky moral and philosophical issues. If a cure for aging is found, what would become of children in a world populated by frisky 200-year-olds? And what of malevolent people? Do we really want Mahmoud Ahmadinejad around for 500 years?

In his frequent public appearances, De Grey, by way of a rejoinder to such criticism, offers a series of slides: The first is of kids playing soccer, with a caption that says fun. The second shows decrepit, stooped seniors huddled morosely around a bench. The caption: no fun. Aging, like malaria, is a “ghastly” killer disease, he says. No scientists in their right mind object to finding a cure for malaria, so why do they object to a cure for aging?

De Grey’s vehicle for pursuing his cure is the common lab mouse, Mus musculus. Since 1993, De Grey and his adherents, including his Methuselah Foundation, have been exploring life-extending therapies aimed not only at simply slowing down the damaging processes that cause aging but also at reversing them. They hope to use stem cell, hormone, and gene manipulation along with other therapies to induce a mouse’s system to repair and rejuvenate itself. The foundation is sponsoring two scientific competitions for what it calls the Mouse Prizes: The first goes to the scientist who can beat the current record for the oldest lab mouse (one week shy of five years), the second to any scientist who can demonstrate a life-extending intervention in older mice. For scientists to claim the awards, worth a combined $4.5 million, the results must be published in a reputable scientific journal, thus opening the research to independent critique.

For now, a lot of the big money is staying on the sidelines because investors (correctly) see no short-term payoff in this; De Grey, in fact, estimates that any real breakthroughs on the mouse front are at least 10 years away. “Another problem is that these guys worry they’re going to be laughed off the golf course,” De Grey says. “There’s a herd mentality even among billionaires. They have to be able to say what they’re funding so they won’t be teased. I help them with that and how to phrase it.”

Thus it was a major coup for De Grey to get the $3.5 million pledge from Thiel, and De Grey is hoping to capitalize on Thiel’s San Francisco contacts to continue to raise money. “Peter is a visionary,” De Grey adds, “and San Francisco is the epicenter of the visionary-billionaire demographic.”

Richard Reyes, a former British National Health Service doctor and consultant for the BBC’s World’s Strongest Man competition, isn’t asking his wealthy clients to wait for some longevity miracle. He thinks he has found a formula that can break unhealthy habits and allow people to add 20 to 30 years to their lives, and he’s willing to share it—for a price.

Driving his black Volkswagen Tauran, Reyes passes East London’s famous Muscleworks weightlifting gym, screaming “Bollocks!” at the cars blocking his way to Wong Kei, his Chinese restaurant of choice after the occasional judo class. As the traffic finally thins out, he returns to his life story and how in 2003, at a London motivational seminar, he realized he had a higher calling than consulting for muscle-bound hulks carrying cars, or clocking hours as a middle-class wage earner in the N.H.S.

With his long experience in working with high-performance athletes, including those in the strongman competitions, Reyes had already honed his interests in fitness, strength, and diet. He had been developing these into a longevity program when, in a London gym, he met an American hedge fund manager who was looking for a longevity coach. If this hedge fund manager was willing to shell out for a counselor, many others like him might do the same. Sensing an opportunity, Reyes, in 2004, put up a website (thelongevityprogramme.com), rounded up some high-profile clients, and went into business.

The regimen Reyes provides is multilayered. For an initial fee of about $20,000, Reyes has his clients screened for a wide spectrum of diseases. Then, to monitor their lifestyles and try to correct bad habits, he evaluates their diet and exercise practices, goes shopping and dining with them, and cooks with them. Each new “module” of the program costs another $10,000, which makes clients’ total fees for the first year about $50,000 if they sign up for all of them. Succeeding years in the program are considered maintenance, and prices drop by varying amounts according to the work deemed necessary. Clients can track their antiaging progress by logging on to Reyes’ website and checking out their own personal “longevity thermometer”—an intricate assessment of their diet and metabolism. But changes to diet and lifestyle aren’t all Reyes offers. He also prescribes an aggressive regimen of antiaging treatments, such as testosterone, DHEA (a kind of legal steroid), and human growth hormone.

As he drives from London to Southend, where he is scheduled to give a lecture at a client’s health club, Reyes continually emphasizes his program’s exclusivity—in between answering phone calls from a client vacationing in Cyprus who is distressed at retaining water after eating a plate of barbecued chicken. “No more salt,” he recommends. After hanging up, he explains that it’s this kind of wealthy jet-setter he is targeting. “I don’t give this information to the masses,” he says, taking a sip of sugar-free Red Bull. “I’m an elitist. You don’t cast your pearls before swine.” Instead, he wants to lure “the most valuable asset of the corporation: the chief executive. I want the guys who control billions of pounds.”

If you’re looking for the more sober end of the longevity spectrum, listen to Richard Sprott, head of the Ellison Medical Foundation. Sprott, who has a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the University of North Carolina, is speaking at the Age Boom Academy, an annual weeklong immersion seminar on aging and longevity issues for journalists, thinkers, and researchers. Among those on hand is Jane Fonda (who, before shooing me away, says she’s researching a book on longevity).

For starters, Sprott tells the audience, immortality is a nonstarter. “I don’t think we’ll ever be immortal. We won’t see any big changes in our lifetime” in longevity, he says. Not that there aren’t promising areas: He cites stem cell research and gene therapy as two potentially life-extending technologies, but he thinks the payoff for these is pretty far down the road. He also takes aim at De Grey and his work, declaring that his SENS theories will never pan out. “Our lives might eventually be extended 10, 20, 30—maybe even 50 years,” says Sprott, who is 67. “But I don’t see us being around to witness that.”

Ask De Grey about this and he goes into a long lament about how Sprott has all this money to look into cutting-edge longevity theories but is spending it unimaginatively on traditional geriatric research. Sprott, he says, “is the most pessimistic gerontologist I know. All he cares about is studying aging, not extending life.”

Indeed, if there is a major longevity breakthrough, it will come despite a great deal of friction in the field. Traditional geriatric medicine is inclined to write off De Grey as a nut. The nanotechnologists think the cryopreservationists are crazy. The cryopreservationists think the nanotechnologists are optimists living in a fantasy world. The hormone-rejuvenation crowd thinks the calorie restrictors are Spartans, and the calorie restrictors think the hormone-rejuvenation experts are causing cancer. It sometimes gets quite personal. In the introduction to a Technology Review article criticizing De Grey’s science, the journal’s editor called De Grey a “troll,” declaring that he “dresses like a shabby graduate student … and drinks too much beer.” De Grey, in a rebuttal published on the magazine’s website, jeered at the attack’s “almost comically ad hominem tone.”

On the other hand, when the likes of Jack Welch find the longevity ruminations of Ray Kurzweil interesting enough to make them the focus of a robust dinner conversation, it probably means that the buzz about the subject is bound to get louder. On a balmy October evening, Kurzweil has come to the Morgan Library and Museum in Manhattan to give a speech on his theories before a private equity group. Welch, the former C.E.O. of General Electric, ends up at Kurzweil’s table, and when he notices Kurzweil’s bag full of supplements, he’s clearly intrigued.

“Well, aside from that bag of tricks,” Welch asks, “what other parts of the good life do you have to give up?”

Kurzweil launches into a description of his 220-pill-a-day regimen and his other antiaging therapies, including his somewhat ascetic diet—fish, steamed vegetables, and green tea. Welch, a man with a wide mischievous streak, interrupts him with a guffaw. “Don’t you ever have any fun?”

“Isn’t this fun?” Kurzweil asks, a caramelized apple slice dangling from his fork.

Welch laughs again. “This is not fun,” he says, pointing out that while Kurzweil did eat his bread and steak, he didn’t even touch his wine.

Kurzweil says he limits himself to three glasses of wine a week. The mirthful chiding continues. “Do you chase women?” Welch asks.

Kurzweil pauses, shifting in his chair, then says, grinning, “I enjoy the company of attractive women.”

Welch nods and then, switching gears, says that he himself had received longevity pills, ones extracted from some essence of red wine.

“Resveratrol,” Kurzweil says. “We sell them. I’ll send you some.”

Soon, Kurzweil is preparing to get up to speak, and Welch tells him to take his time at the podium. Welch clearly wants to get up to speed on longevity. “I’m not letting you go home,” he declares. “I’m trying to live longer over here!”