Tiny jellyfish holds the secret of immortality. In 1988 a marine-biologist named Christian Sommer found immortality exactly where Utnapishtim told Gilgamesh it could be found, on the ocean floor. Sommer, working off the coast of the Italian Riviera, where Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again,” discovered a jellyfish (Turritopsis dohrnii) which can switch to aging in reverse, à la Benjamin Button, until it reaches its earliest stage of development, whereupon life begins anew.
