John Sperling

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John Sperling (1921-) is a US billionaire who is credited with leading the contemporary for-profit education movement in the United States. His fortune is based on his founding of the for-profit University of Phoenix for working adults in 1973, which is now part of the publicly traded Apollo Group (NASDAQ:APOL).

John Sperling received his undergraduate education at Reed College, Oregon, a master's from U.C. Berkeley under the G.I. Bill, and then went on to attain a PhD. in Economic History at Cambridge University. Before becoming an entrepreneur (at age 53), he taught as a tenured professor at San Jose State University.

Sperling 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, a cat. The pet created was named Cc after the project, which was short for CopyCat.

More recently John Sperling has directed his attention towards the life extension movement that extend the life span of human beings, often called longevity research or biological immortality projects. Wired magazine reports in their February 2004 article John Sperling Wants You to Live Forever that his fortune is quickly approaching US$3 billion, 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 decriminalize medical marijuana in the United States. According to Time Magazine John Sperling smoked pot to combat pain caused by the cancer he fought during the 1960s.

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.

In August 2004, John Sperling published Retro vs. Metro, a liberal sociological treatise attempting to explain the Red America / Blue America cultural and political divisions of the United States - co-authored by himself, Suzanne Helburn,Samuel George, John Morris and Carl Hunt. The book was launched with an accompanying website [1].