John Sperling
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John Sperling (1921-) is a US billionaire who founded the for-profit University of Phoenix for working adults in 1973, which is now part of the publicly traded Apollo Group (NASDAQ:APOL (http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=apol)). He has gained additional notoriety recently for his funding the project to clone his dead pet dog Missy in a project called Missyplicity. A subproject of Missyplicity was called Operation CC which successfully created the first cloned pet. The pet created was named Cc after the project, which was short for CopyCat.
More recently John Sperling has directed his attention towards the anti-aging movement that extend the life span of human beings, often called longevity research or clinical immortality projects. Wired magazine reports in their February 2004 article John Sperling Wants You to Live Forever that his fortune is quickly approaching 3 billion (3,000,000,000) U.S.D., and has plans to donate it to human biology research when he dies. If he does so, this would be the biggest private program devoted ever to human biology.
John Sperling is also an opponent of drug prohibition and is actively financing initiatives to legalize medical marijuana in the United States.
Sperling has together with George Soros, and Peter Lewis of Progressive Insurance raised considerable amounts of money for drug related causes and other liberal causes, especially during the 2004 presidential campaign.
Related topics
Political
External links
- Wired Magazine, 'John Sperling Wants You to Live Forever' (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.02/immortal.html?tw=wn_tophead_4)
- USATODAY.com - Independent voices rising in ads (http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/2004-08-18-metro-retro-usat_x.htm)
- Utah Initiative B Contribution Details (http://www.nationalfamilies.org/guide/UTBmoney.html)
- Forbes.com: Forbes World's Richest People (http://www.forbes.com/finance/lists/10/2004/LIR.jhtml?passListId=10&passYear=2004&passListType=Person&uniqueId=0348&datatype=Person)