Interesting interview featuring …" In his new book, Why We Die , Nobel Prize–winning biologist Venki Ramakrishnan breaks down the biology of aging to examine what potential humankind really has for life extension."
He’s been hitting the circuit promoting his book… he sounds positive on the Dog Aging Project (and by implication, rapamycin), but generally he sounds quite conservative in his outlook but obviously a thoughtful and knowledgeable person.
In the Times book review, it does mention Venki’s view on rapamycin:
It is not that there isn’t plenty to get excited about. It is more that that excitement comes tempered with tedious caveats of the sort that decent scientists boringly insist upon. Take, for instance, rapamycin. Any casual reader of the health pages of newspapers over the past two decades will have found excited reports about this drug. Rapamycin has caused a lot of commotion because it seems to mimic the effects of calorie restriction without the unpleasant act of actually restricting your calories.
There is pretty good evidence that animals on a restricted diet live longer. There is pretty good evidence that humans, despite knowing this, don’t restrict their diet. Rapamycin promised to be a cheat code — a trick for your body. Mice who took it lived longer and lived healthier while still chowing down.
So should we all take it? Well, Ramakrishnan thinks it is very promising. He also points out that the drug inhibits bits of the immune system. Maybe those mice wouldn’t have lived longer if they had existed in the dirty, pathogen-rich, world outside a laboratory? There is a trial currently ongoing, in household dogs, that might give an answer.
From his interviews, it seems to me that he may be coming to this book project with a bias that leans away from significant life extension, from a philosophical perspective. I have not read the book yet, but thats the feeling I get when I listen to his interviews below.
Transcript of the second interview (with Pete Bowes) here: https://www.llamapodcast.com/venki-ramakrishnan/
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan is a British-American structural biologist. He shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Thomas A. Steitz and Ada Yonath for research on the structure and function of ribosomes
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Some book reviews, and relevant links:
Why We Die by Venki Ramakrishnan review — are we close to a cure for death?
Self-obsessed tech bros are pumping money into therapies designed to reverse the ageing process. They might want to temper their expectations, says a Nobel Laureate
For most of our evolutionary history a book called Why We Die would have been difficult to market. For most of our evolutionary history there wasn’t much mystery. We died because we were eaten, because we were attacked, because a cut became infected, because it was too cold or too hot or too dry, or because our hunt failed.
We didn’t die because of, say, the accumulation of senescent cells that our protein machinery failed to clear. Or because our DNA gained mutations. Or because our mitochondria became dysfunctional. Or because our store of stem cells depleted, and defective cancerous ones proliferated.
Mostly our ancestors did not spend time worrying about eating superfoods to protect themselves from free radicals. They worried about eating any food at all, and then protecting themselves from sabre-toothed tigers.
And yet, argues Venki Ramakrishnan, a Nobel laureate, in his highly accessible Why We Die, in an odd way the two — the modern body’s tendency to deteriorate in old age and the prehistoric body’s tendency to be ripped apart by predators — may be connected.
Full article: Why We Die by Venki Ramakrishnan review — are we close to a cure for death? (The Times)
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Venki Ramakrishnan is going to be speaking to the New York Academy of Sciences, and the talk is available to listen to online:
Venki Ramakrishnan: Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality
April 16, 2024
7:00 PM - 8:30 PM ET
The New York Academy of Sciences
115 Broadway, 8th Floor, New York, NY 10006
or join virtually
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Thanks. Dr Brenner is always the party pooper except when it comes to nicotinimide riboside (NR) for some reason. But I agree with the idea that human biology is very complicated (maybe too complicated). I’ll add that I have stopped hoping for the “untied shoe” finding that will make all the difference.
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Brenner has an economic interest in Nicotinamide Riboside. He’s not going to bite the hand that feeds him.
As far as I’m concerned, he’s too pessimistic. He’d be one of those people who would think we’d never be able to make it to the moon in the 1960s.
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And a good interview with Venki Ramakrishnan by Antonio Regalado of the MIT technology review:
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Nice summary, but nothing new for most of us. It’s kind of a Longevity 101. But well done.
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