"Immortal"

Dean Crawford worked as a graphic designer before he left the industry to pursue his lifelong dream of writing full-time. An aviation and motorcycle enthusiast, he lives with his family in Surrey, England.

He applied the Page 69 Test to the UK paperback edition of his latest novel, Immortal, and reported the following:

Page 69:

What people don't realise is that human diseases should have been eradicated by natural selection by now via inherited immunity or random mutation. The reason they haven't been is because humans mate young and for most of our evolution have also died young. The presence of extensive age-related disease is a relatively new phenomenon because it's only recently that people have lived until their seventies and beyond on a regular basis. That means that natural selection acts weakly against age-related disease because resilience to it hasn't yet had the chance to evolve within us. My work involved studying how genetic manipulation might serve humanity by acting as a substitute for natural selection and creating specific genes resistant to such diseases as Huntington's or Alzheimer's.

Page 69 describes a character's explanation for why evolution has not yet eradicated age-related disease in humans. The story of the search for human immortality starts as so many scientific endeavours do, with a noble quest: to cure age-related disease. But soon the spectres of profit, and control of population and pandemics, take priority as capitalist interests turn a medical investigation into a race for control of the most powerful elixir the world has ever seen.

Learn more about the book and author at Dean Crawford's website and blog.

--Marshal Zeringue