LEILA FADEL, HOST:

Good morning. I'm Leila Fadel. What were you doing at age 11? Chances are it wasn't graduating with a bachelor's degree in physics like Belgian child prodigy Laurent Simons. The preteen took just a year to complete his degree and graduated summa cum laude. So what's next for the child prodigy? Simons is doing research he hopes will someday enable him to replace his body parts with mechanical ones. His goal? Immortality. He says, I've mapped the path to get there. It's MORNING EDITION. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.