The man who refused to die

Dying is undoubtedly the greatest concern of man, and to put an end to death one of the most ambitious objectives of modern science. However, though contemporary research is indeed incapable of fulfilling such fantastic dreams, these futuristic visions are dealt with in fiction writing, which never hesitates from imagining that one day humanity will be able to pursue its course ad infinitum. When man defies death and forces science to find solutions to his projects of immortality, one enters fully that obscure zone of contemporary imagination in which machines, biology and artificial intelligence combine to give birth to a new man. But is he also immortal?

The man who refused to die is a tale by Nicolas Ancion that draws freely on François Taddéi's research on the ageing process of bacteria and the transmission of knowledge in nature, from unicellular organisms to human beings. Halfway between science-fiction novel and thriller, this tale runs counter to the researcher's work and revisits the figure of the mad scientist and the sorcerer's apprentice, the stories of robots and organ traffic. Patrice Killoffer's drawings combine robots, bacteria, scientists and intestines to encourage the mind to circulate more efficiently in the piping of this captivating tale.