“I don't want to become immortal through my works. I want to become immortal by not dying.” This wise quip, or something like that, is supposed to have been said by the American film director and comic Woody Allan. Apart from the intended humor, there is a deeper, perhaps unintended, meaning underlying this statement. Conceptions of immortality contain both an individual and a social dimension. People do live on after their death in the memories of friends and relatives, in the lives of people they have touched, and in the products they leave behind, be they films, books, or children. These two dimensions are inextricably interwoven, I believe, in debates on and technologies directed at achieving immortality. They become even more interwoven because, in spite of Woody Allan's aspiration and in spite of ancient alchemy and modern medicine, all human beings die. So immortality is not about “not dying”, but about ways of postponing death and about coping with death at personal and ideological levels, coping which is, more often than not, intertwined with social memory. So we need not be surprised at recent news reports from Beijing announcing that the good old communist Deng Xiaoping had “joined the immortals”!

Ideas and aspirations, moreover, do not exist in a vacuum; they are influenced by and in turn influence the social and economic conditions of the time and thus exist in a creative tension with their underlying socio-economic matrix.