  Well protected human and laboratory animal populations with abundant
resources are evolutionary unprecedented, and their survival far beyond
reproductive age may be a byproduct rather than tool of evolution. Physical
approach, which takes advantage of their extensively quantified mortality,
establishes that its dominant fraction yields the exact law, and suggests its
unusual mechanism. The law is universal for all animals, from yeast to humans,
despite their drastically different biology and evolution. It predicts that the
universal mortality has short memory of the life history, at any age may be
reset to its value at a significantly younger age, and mean life expectancy
extended (by biologically unprecedented small changes) from its current maximal
value to immortality. Mortality change is rapid and stepwise. Demographic data
and recent experiments verify these predictions for humans, rats, flies,
nematodes and yeast. In particular, mean life expectancy increased 6-fold (to
"human" 430 years), with no apparent loss in health and vitality, in nematodes
with a small number of perturbed genes and tissues. Universality allows one to
study unusual mortality mechanism and the ways to immortality.
