Why does death exist? Does getting older always mean getting wiser? Should we look to experience or youth for breakthroughs?
In today's episode of the Reversing Climate Change podcast, Nori Cofounder Ross Kenyon is joined by Dr. Venki Ramakrishnan, a 2009 Nobel Laureate in chemistry and author of the new book, Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality.
Despite growing lifespans, it isn't clear that we have become less avaricious or kinder as a species, at least to the extent that may be desired. Would that change if we had radically longer lives? Is that even likely at this point? Venki challenges much of the discourse around anti-aging, immortality, trends made fun of in Silicon Valley like blood boys, consciousness uploads, and much else. And of course, they discuss if and how this will impact the world's attempts to grapple with climate change.
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Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality
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Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change. Hello, and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m one of the co-founders of the Nori carbon removal marketplace. Today I have with me Dr. Venki Ramakrishnan, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and author of the new book Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality. Thanks for being here, Venki.
Venki Ramakrishnan: Thank you. It’s a pleasure.
Ross Kenyon: This topic has come up several times in the past, usually from more philosophical areas, about the Singularity and should humans live forever. So I’m excited to revisit it now. But I had to ask: shouldn’t you have left the writing of this book to a younger author?
Venki Ramakrishnan: Perhaps. But you know, you have to have time to write it, so you write it when you find the time. And the other thing is that I felt things were reaching a moment where tools were becoming more powerful. A lot of science was happening and it was a good time to write it. And also there’s a huge amount of hype in the field. And so it was also time to perhaps take a hard-nosed look at the field and see what it’s telling us. What’s the promise, and where might we be going?
Ross Kenyon: I’m joking, of course, but one of your arguments in the book about why we might be less exuberant about living forever — that it is necessary — I’ve never heard this before, is that many advances in fields are done by younger scholars, and that activity maybe declines with age, is replaced with the brand value of the scientists rather than their unique intellectual contributions. So I’m checking with you about that, but people don’t talk about it that way. I think people assume that you get better and better in your field as you go along, and particularly for intellectual pursuits. But is that actually not the case?
Venki Ramakrishnan: It’s not true. I think the way to look at it is, after somebody’s died, you look at their career and you ask, what are they really known for? Why do we remember them? And in the case of scientists, mathematicians, even writers, which I was surprised to find, their best works were done when they were relatively young. In fact, the big breakthroughs, scientists or mathematicians, it’s usually done when they’re young. Now, that’s not true in everything. For example, there are filmmakers. You know, we just saw Martin Scorsese get a nomination for the Academy Award. He’s about in his 80s, right? And artists, we know, have produced great paintings later in life. And the same thing with composers. Many composers and some musicians have done well.
But by and large, in many creative fields, our cognitive ability, our creative ability declines. And it’s not very well understood why. The novelist Kazuo Ishiguro had an idea, which is that maybe as we get older, our short-term memory deteriorates. And in order to be creative, you have to hold a lot of disparate facts in your head and try to synthesize something new out of them. And maybe that’s part of the act of certain kinds of creativity: you have to hold different facts, and maybe that ability declines with age. That’s one explanation.
I was on a radio program the other day with Charan Ranganath, who’s written a book on memory, Why We Remember, and he felt that as we get older, we tend to forget the outliers. The outliers get harder to remember — this is what he called episodic memory. And so I think for various reasons, a lot of our creative ability declines, and our ability to learn new things also declines with age. You know, try learning the piano or abstract mathematics when you’re older. It’s much harder than when you’re a child.
Ross Kenyon: A friend of mine was telling me about a line in one of the Bob Dylan memoirs, where Dylan says that when he was young he felt like the spotlight of God was pointed right at him, and now it’s pointed at someone else. And I’ve seen him perform a few times, but the last time I saw him there was basically an old guy mumbling in front of a blues band. It was really surreal.
Venki Ramakrishnan: I see it, yeah.
Ross Kenyon: I mean, there’s this sort of campiness that if you like Dylan to start with, you can listen to his albums from the ’80s and [unclear] and still like it. But if you weren’t already a fan, you probably wouldn’t [unclear].
Venki Ramakrishnan: Exactly, exactly. And in the case of scientists, I’m only half joking, but I say that people become famous for work that they did when they were younger — they’re typically in their 20s to 40s — and then they’re well known. So what happens is they attract very good people to their lab. And these people are very smart, and so they carry on the tradition, and of course the professor often gets the credit, because it’s from his or her lab. And so I think this idea of the brand name and influence, it persists in lots of things.
And it’s even true in the corporate world, I’m afraid. If you look at how old Thomas Edison was when he started his big company, or the founders of the big companies of today — Google, Apple, etcetera — they were all very young when they started their companies. And that’s when the companies really were creative and took off. Then of course they became very powerful and hard to dislodge, just like it’s hard to dislodge a famous scientist from a big lab. They have a network. They know how to get funding. They have all the labs set up to do the right sorts of experiments, so they can attract good people, so it becomes more of a branding thing. It’s not as if they themselves are as creative as they were when they were younger.
Ross Kenyon: Is this something that science and technology will get better at? Will it expand the cognitive abilities further into life for people as they age? Or is this something that’s just fundamental about our bodies?
Venki Ramakrishnan: I think there are two aspects to it. One is the biological process of decline. You know, the brain is going to be one of the hardest problems to tackle in terms of aging, partly because our neurons don’t regenerate. A very small fraction of our neurons regenerate, unlike liver tissue or skin cells, which regenerate much more frequently. And in fact, many of our neurons persist throughout our lifetime. So the brain, when it declines, is going to be the hardest to reverse. It’s also hard to get drugs and other things into the brain because of the blood-brain barrier. And even if you could slow down the cognitive decline, it might be hard to reverse. That’s another issue. If you’ve got slow decline, how do you reverse it? That might be hard.
But even if you could do all that — let’s say biology advances tremendously and we can do that — I think creativity and this sort of novelty of ideas doesn’t just come because our brains are young. It also comes because life is young. We’re seeing everything for the first time, fresh, you know, fresh for the first time, and everything hits us as novel. We’re also more open-minded; we haven’t grown into forming our biases and preconceived notions. And that’s as much a part of creativity, I think, as the biological aspect — the newness of it. And I think that’s also why a lot of social movements, social change, is often driven by young people.
Ross Kenyon: I experience this in the sense that I basically know what art I like at this point, and for me to be swept away by a new artist, it needs to compete with a very established pantheon.
Venki Ramakrishnan: Exactly.
Ross Kenyon: I didn’t feel that way when I was younger, and now I’ll see new artists and new styles and new things on TikTok or other places, and I feel probably like my parents felt when I was an annoying teenager, that they didn’t understand me — and now I’m there, and I don’t think any generation really expects to ever be there. I think it’s always a surprise to everyone as they experience it. But I’m also less willing. I have to force myself a little bit more, to try harder to absorb new things when I already have the things that I like. And that’s a new sensation for me.
Venki Ramakrishnan: Yeah. And that’s why, when people say, oh, if we manage to solve the aging problem and we live very long lives, we would do many different things, we would have many different careers — I’m not so sure. I think a lot of our creative ability and drive comes from the fact that we’re seeing things for the — seeing life unfold for the first time. I think that’s my view. So I’m a bit skeptical about those rosy scenarios. We may equally live very long, bored lives. Or boring lives, anyway.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, there’s some — I think I’ve mentioned this on the podcast previously, but there is an Alan Watts line about how we need that, because we lose wonder as we age and youth is about wondering. And if we just crowded out that space with people who maybe lost the ability to wonder... I mean, there’s also an assumption here that maybe this is not set by my biology and not fundamental to me. Maybe I’ve just become lazy and stultified and ossified in my beliefs over time. And maybe if I knew I was going to live for hundreds of years, my youth might be experienced for decades rather than a much shorter amount of time.
Venki Ramakrishnan: Very possibly, but the evidence is against it. A lot of the fiction that has been written about immortality seems to be very pessimistic on it too.
Ross Kenyon: They very rarely — like Borges. Not a fan of immortality.
Venki Ramakrishnan: No, I’m not either. And I have to tell you, we already live a whole extra life compared to even our ancestors 100 years ago. You know, 150 years ago, life expectancy was about 40, okay? And now it’s more in the 80s. So we’ve lived a whole extra life. Are we twice as creative as Mozart or Beethoven or Einstein or people like that? I really don’t think so. So I just think we do more of the same. We live longer lives, we do more of the same. But I’m not sure that we’re doing twice as much with our twice-as-long lives in terms of new things. I mean, really new breakthroughs. We’re doing more stuff because we simply are around longer.
And so I do think that. And the other point you mentioned about, you know, if you’re mortal, your life is limited, and so you have that drive to live a full life, to make the most of it. If we live for a very long time, you would lose some of that drive. And even today, there’s a famous law that work expands to fill available time. So if you have more time to do the same amount of work, you just use up more time. So it could be a case of that.
Ross Kenyon: Well, what do you think about the social and environmental costs of living much longer lives? We could become more wise with more time. Maybe we would become less materialistic. Or I could also see us going the other way and becoming more acquisitive old people.
Venki Ramakrishnan: Yeah, I think it’s not really possible to predict. These things are such unknown unknowns — how it would change society if everybody, say, started living to be 200 years. But I can tell you some rough things that we’ve learned from the past. So every time there have been major health advances — for example, after the discovery of infection, like cholera. It was in London, they figured out that cholera was transmitted through contaminated water, and so then they decoupled the drinking water supply from the sewage supply in London. And that was a big step, and people started living longer. Then antibiotics, then vaccines. All of these things made people live longer.
And each time there were major advances, the population dramatically increased, because people had not yet made that transition to having smaller families. But eventually, in each case, people would start having smaller families and the population would stabilize — but it stabilized at a higher level. Recently, that’s not the case. For example, Japan has increased its life expectancy — it’s one of the highest life expectancy countries, in the high 80s — and yet their population has not gone up. In fact, it’s declined somewhat. So it’s not a hard and fast rule that population’s going to go up.
But if population doesn’t go up, a number of things have to happen. Either you have to have an even fewer number of children per couple, or you have to space out the generations even more. So, 100 years ago people were having children by their late teens, early 20s. Now, in Western countries, often people have their first child at 30 or even later. And so people would have to space that out. But there’s a limit to how much you can space it out, because of menopause. Nobody knows how to extend menopause, although that may be something scientists might work on. And so one of those two things has to happen.
So if we are to prevent a population explosion, what you would have is a population where the turnover is very, very slow. Very few children, people living a very long time, replacement is very slow, or the time between generations is very long. And a slowly turning over population means a population where — we talked about young people and new ideas and creativity — that sort of social change and regeneration of new ideas would also be, I think, slower. So you’d have a more stagnant society, in my opinion.
Ross Kenyon: Given your confidence in that belief, how do you think we should approach the science of aging, whether it should be reversed or halted? Do you think we should stop infinitely trying to preserve life? Or am I misreading you?
Venki Ramakrishnan: I think this quest for immortality is a mirage. We now live twice as long as our ancestors did, and yet people are still fretting about dying and getting old. And I think if we lived to 200, then we’d be wondering, hey, wait a minute, why are we only living to 200? Why shouldn’t we live to 500? So it’s never-ending, and there’s no such thing as real immortality, because we’re all made of material stuff. And so I think that chasing that mirage is really a mistake.
But there’s a different problem which scientists really should address, which is: we are getting older as a society, but the fraction of our lives that are healthy has not gone up. And so we’re spending many years now in old age with lots of disabilities, needing care, etcetera. And as the fraction of older people in society increases, this is more and more of a problem, not just for the people themselves but also for the rest of society. And so one goal is, how can we age more healthily? How can we attack some of the processes of aging so that they don’t cause many of the symptoms of aging?
In fact, many diseases of old age are all correlated with age. As we age, we’re more likely to get cancer, more likely to get diabetes, more likely to get heart disease, more likely to get dementia. We’re even more likely to die of COVID. So infectious disease is a problem with old age. So if we can somehow age more healthily, so that we’re healthier for a much larger fraction of our time, that would be a big bonus to everybody. And it could also allow older people to be independent for longer, or to be productive for longer. It would increase their well-being and happiness. So that, I think, is a very worthy goal.
Ross Kenyon: The real clincher is — I mean, the real question is, can you do that without increasing lifespan even further? Because aren’t those things connected?
Venki Ramakrishnan: They are connected. And I think this is a very serious problem, because every advance that we’ve had for heart disease or diabetes has also increased our life expectancy. So the number of years we spend struggling with old age and the problems of old age hasn’t actually declined. And that’s why you see this explosion of nursing homes and care homes all through most Western, most developed countries. So it’s not clear that we can stay healthy for a long time but keep our lifespan fixed at — you know, the maximum lifespan of our natural biology, unless we change it, is about 120. And so are we going to stay healthy until we bump up against that 120 limit and then just suddenly decline and crash?
So there’s a famous poem called “The One-Hoss Shay” by Oliver Wendell Holmes, which describes this carriage — that’s a horse carriage — that’s so well constructed that all the parts wear out equally, hold up equally well. So this farmer is riding along on this 100-year-old carriage, and he’s riding along, and one second later he finds himself on the ground surrounded by a heap of dust, because the entire carriage just collapsed and disintegrated in front of him. And that’s what we’re asking of life: that we stay healthy and then suddenly collapse. I’m not sure it can be done. I think it might very well extend our lives even further, and so at the end we might still face the same problem.
There is one thing that suggests some hope, and that is people who study centenarians, like Tom Perls in Boston, found that these people who live beyond 105 or 110, they seem to be extremely healthy for nearly all their lives. Unlike most people, who develop various kinds of ailments, they don’t do that. They’re healthy, they’re often completely independent, and then they have a rapid period of decline, and it’s as if they hit the biological limit of our species and they essentially decline and die. So that suggests that maybe — but how to accomplish that is not entirely clear. And I think maybe more detailed studies on these centenarians, it is providing clues: what’s special about them, what’s special about their genetics, their physiology, their environment, their lifestyle, all of those things. So I think there’s a lot of interesting work to be done there.
Ross Kenyon: We can’t just pick up and move to the Blue Zones. It’s not nearly that simple.
Venki Ramakrishnan: Yeah. Well, that could be a mixture of genetics and their particular environment. So we don’t know.
Ross Kenyon: This might be beyond the scope of your scientific expertise, but sociologically speaking, I am in the beginning of middle age — I’m in my mid-30s — and I find it’s such a strange position to be in, because my parents are becoming more frail and I’m realizing that I am the adult in some of these cases, or I even know better. And not like in the teenager sense of “I think I know better.” But I think now my judgement in some cases is, and I can see that it may very well be—
Venki Ramakrishnan: There’s no question. You know, it may very well be.
Ross Kenyon: It’s really surreal. And if you’re listening and this hasn’t happened to you — this is what I’m talking about, archetypes and a broad sociological lens. It will happen to you if you live long enough. Presumably this will happen.
Venki Ramakrishnan: My dad is — my dad is 98.
Ross Kenyon: Oh.
Venki Ramakrishnan: So, you know, and he still cooks and he does his own laundry and things. So I’m hoping that’s like a buffer. When he dies, then I’ll really know that I’m — you know, you really are the [unclear].
Ross Kenyon: I also have— so you have that experience, which is surreal, but it’s also surreal to look down at younger generations too, and find some of the ideas or culture to be alien and difficult. And maybe it also inspires a bit of conservatism on your side too, where you think some of these newfangled things actually are not improvements, and that structures exist for—
Venki Ramakrishnan: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Ross Kenyon: In a — [unclear]. Do you know, for someone who is in that spot, how should we think about aging in our lives?
Venki Ramakrishnan: I think the thing to do is to try and remember what it was like to be young, and to challenge conventional wisdom and try to keep an open mind. And as I say, with age, things do get harder, and it does get harder to absorb new information and new ideas. But I think it’s an effort that pays off. Actually, the more you do it, the more you preserve that ability, I think. So you just have to be open-minded and keep trying.
Ross Kenyon: That’s interesting, because that seems more of a willpower issue. But then, maybe is there some biological basis for your willpower and absorbing new ideas? It sounds like I could practice. I could just delve into this and try hard, rather than just assuming that I’m conservative by nature, I no longer need new ideas, I have everything figured out, I know how the world works. I should just reject that.
Venki Ramakrishnan: I’m afraid this is way beyond my expertise, because I’m not a neurobiologist or a psychologist. But I do think, as we decline cognitively, when we find tasks more difficult, we tend to avoid them. That’s what people do, at whatever age: if things are too difficult, you tend to avoid it. And so I think it may be something to do with that, but I couldn’t say, really. But I know exactly the phenomenon you’re talking about, because we all experience that, and I’m further along — I’m about three decades further along. I’m 71, so.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, fair enough. I guess I’ll have to think more about that. And it’s probably unfair to put that on you, to solve such a huge question for me.
Venki Ramakrishnan: Many of these things don’t have an obvious solution, and may not for decades. So I mean, they’re all — but it doesn’t make them less interesting, and I think they are things that we need to think about.
Ross Kenyon: I think people think about them at some level pretty often. I think it structures a lot of their everyday experience, and I think subconsciously they’re thinking about how they fit into the social order around them, and age is a big component of that. Yeah, I have another kind of big one for you. This might be beyond your scope, and it’s okay to be personal or anecdotal.
Venki Ramakrishnan: You know, I wanted to talk about older people in the community, and I think one thing that we do is we tend to sequester older people away from the rest of society. They’re in retirement communities or nursing homes, and people used to die surrounded by their family, usually, in the old days. Now they die in hospitals. And so even death has been kind of outsourced to some location, and I think that’s not a great thing for either the young or the old. I think integrating all generations in society really helps everybody.
It teaches the young what it’s like to be old. It teaches them what’s ahead. The older people can be role models, and older people can then still feel part of society, contribute their knowledge and advice, and take part in society. So that’s something that, as we age as a society, we need to think about — how to integrate generations much better.
Ross Kenyon: I think hiding those unpleasant parts of life — I don’t know that that has served us very well. It certainly makes things easier in the short term. It’s very unpleasant to watch a loved one die or nearly die. But having that dealt with with professionals behind curtains, I don’t know that that prepares you for your own death.
Venki Ramakrishnan: No, no. It’s not at all. It’s not a good thing, I think.
Ross Kenyon: How do you feel about death personally, and dying?
Venki Ramakrishnan: Personally, yeah. I guess it’s like [unclear]. I mean, you know, [unclear] ceasing to exist. The reality is, none of us wants to die, but we have evolved so that we don’t brood about it. If we started brooding about death all the time, it would just be morbid — I mean, literally it would be morbid. And so I think we have evolved to carry on as if we’re immortal.
So I’m planning things a year and a half out. You know what I’m going to do in October of 2025, and I’m assuming I’m going to be there, and that just keeps on going. So it’s not like I said, oh, well, I have a 50% chance of survival up to 2030 or something, and so I’m not going to bother thinking about life beyond that. So I think we’re programmed not to think about death. We’re programmed to bury it.
Ross Kenyon: Of course it’s still there, though. We can never escape it, that feeling of mortality.
Venki Ramakrishnan: I think none of us really wants to die. Of course, we all realize we have to be philosophical. We know we’re going to die, we have to deal with it. But there’s the old joke about who would want to live to be 100, and the answer is, someone who’s 99. And so I think that shows that if there were interventions, if somebody gave you a pill and said, this pill will give you 10 extra years of healthy life, most of us would take that pill. And I take life extension pills — I take statins for cholesterol, I take blood pressure medication. All of those are so that I don’t die sooner than expected of a stroke or heart attack. And so in a way they’re basically life extension medicines, which help me live healthier and longer.
So I think we have a deep will to live, partly because it’s not the death we fear. It’s not being dead that we fear, it’s not existing. That’s what we fear. And our identity is so interwoven with our existence as a living creature that I just don’t think we can escape that.
Ross Kenyon: Does non-existence frighten you?
Venki Ramakrishnan: It doesn’t. It doesn’t frighten me. I haven’t thought much about it. It doesn’t frighten me, but I enjoy life. I like my family and friends, and I like my hobbies, my work. So I wouldn’t want to leave it yet. And so that’s how it is. But I think people often reach a stage, especially when they’re very old or if they’re suffering some terminal disease that’s really causing them a lot of suffering, and at that point they’re willing to let go. But I think each individual has to make that decision themselves.
Ross Kenyon: Something theological I’ve thought about for a very long time: that Christianity has this idea that at the Second Coming humans will be resurrected in body and soul. They will be reincorporated in physical form. And I was talking to a friend of mine who’s a South Asianist scholar, and he was saying this is so weird, because many Eastern religions, specifically Hinduism, which he had studied — the best thing was to escape this. Buddhism too. The goal was to no longer be reincarnated back into a body. This is something to be avoided, and if you can ideally ascend out of this plane, that’s as good as it gets.
And it’s amazing, the difference in [unclear]. I’m hesitant to do too strong of an East-West comparison there, but I always found that to be really striking, because I feel a lot of anxiety about what happens after I die. What I mean by — [unclear] — non-identity, non-personal, [unclear] exist at all. And he’s like, whatever, you blend back in, and that’s the goal anyway. Don’t worry about it.
Venki Ramakrishnan: Yeah, it’s true. It’s not just Christianity, it’s all the Abrahamic religions. So Judaism, Christianity and Islam all believe in a bodily resurrection, and it’s why traditionally those religions insisted on burial, and cremation was considered a bad thing traditionally. And so that’s one view. And then of course Hindus believe that, well, the body might decay, but you have this eternal soul that can flit from one body or even from one species to another. And Egyptians had a combination: they believed in an immortal soul, but they also believed that the body itself would get resurrected, and that’s why they had these pharaohs all mummified and entombed in these fancy tombs.
So I think these are all ways of looking at death as not final, but a transition to something else, either through an immortal soul or even through your body. But they’re ways of saying death is not an end point, it’s a transition to something else. And that’s reflected in our language as well. We often will hesitate to say, oh, my mother died. You know, you say my mother passed on, or my mother passed, or my mother departed, as if she’s gone to some other state and she’s still around but in a different state. So I think that reflects our views about death, and really how much we don’t like this idea of non-existence that we talked about.
Ross Kenyon: All of this discussion is making it difficult for me to pull out a core thesis here about ethically what we should expect with death or living longer. Except it seems to me that, because there are physical limits, or at least there seem to be now, it’s almost a little bit of a moot point for you, because you don’t think we’re going to be able to upload ourselves into some digital infrastructure. That’s probably not going to happen. That bodies are probably not going to persist.
Venki Ramakrishnan: I’m extremely skeptical about all these efforts to preserve our current state indefinitely. For example, there’s this whole field of cryonics, where people freeze bodies and think that, oh well, we don’t know how to resurrect them now, but in 200 years science will have advanced enough that they’ll figure out how to thaw these bodies and also cure whatever it was that they died of, so that they’ll re-emerge as healthy individuals with their minds and memories and everything intact. There’s no evidence that this can happen.
It comes from the fact that we can freeze small things, like cells. People freeze — you can freeze your cells. People routinely freeze fertilized embryos or eggs or sperm for future use. Often young people who are going through chemotherapy will freeze their eggs or freeze their sperm so that they can have babies later. So that happens, and people have frozen things as big as worms, and those worms can be thawed and live. But even a small animal like a mouse — nobody’s shown that you can freeze a mouse and then thaw it and it’ll function just fine.
And then people say, well, okay, we don’t need to do that, we just need to make sure that the neuronal connections are preserved, and then we can extract from those connections essentially their mind and dump it into a computer, and then the computer will have all of our memories and feelings and consciousness and everything about us. It confuses these neuronal connections with the state of the brain. The state of the brain depends on what were those neurons like at the moment of death. And also it assumes that you’re capturing a snapshot right before the person died. But in fact what you have to do is you have to inject all this embalming fluid into somebody and then freeze it. It all takes time. During that time the whole thing is deteriorating.
And I think of it as saying that, oh, if you have a road map of the United States, at any given point you’re going to know exactly what the state of the country was. Well, no. You’ll know what the big cities were, where people tended to live, because you’ll see a big hub of roads going in and out, and you’ll see what the connections are, and so you’ll learn a lot about the country. But you won’t be able to recreate the state of the United States from a road map of the United States. So I think this is a little bit of — well, it’s a lot of hype there, and I’m very skeptical about those.
Ross Kenyon: Even if it did work, I would be very worried about the governance of digital personhood. I don’t know that I would want to be immortal in a machine that humans controlled.
Venki Ramakrishnan: I would, yes. That’s terrifying. And also, what these people — who are mostly not neurobiologists; most neurobiologists pay no credence to these ideas — is that much of our existence and our conscious feeling is driven by interaction with the rest of our body. For example, hormones often drive and determine our feelings. We get pleasure from food, we get even pleasure from exercise, from a good walk, from social company. And a lot of that is due to chemical interactions between the brain and the rest of the body. So the brain doesn’t exist in isolation. And it’s not clear that all of that can be reduced to some sort of circuitry, so that you could provide appropriate electrical signals that would simulate all this stuff. Nobody knows how to do any of that.
And right now, this is all in the realm of science fiction. And of course people will say, well, a lot of things that are true today, like going to the moon and back and all sorts of space travel, all started off as science fiction, and yet we’ve done it. And my reply to that is, if you look at all these ideas that are proposed, a small fraction of them come true. And the vast majority of these ideas are basically crackpot ideas that never actually came to fruition. So just the fact that once in a while some idea happens to work out and be prophetic doesn’t mean that most of these ideas are not wacky.
Ross Kenyon: Are we making progress on the various protein-based disorders that are afflicting people, [unclear]? I think — how do you solve that one? That one really hurts my brain.
Venki Ramakrishnan: I think we are, in the sense we can figure out how to improve, for example, many of the metabolic pathways that are triggered by restricting our calories, and which in animals has been shown to improve symptoms of old age and actually even make us live longer. Many of those pathways do directly affect the whole problem of misfolded proteins and accumulation of bad proteins. For example, the cell’s recycling mechanism, where badly formed proteins are shunted away for degradation — that’s stimulated when we restrict calories, or when we inhibit those pathways that are inhibited by caloric restriction.
So that’s why, for example, certain drugs like rapamycin, which mimics caloric restriction in some ways — not entirely, but some aspects of caloric restriction — that’s why rapamycin seems to have beneficial effects in animals. And of course, rapamycin is also an immunosuppressant. But in your hometown of Seattle, there’s a very famous scientist at UW who’s testing rapamycin in dogs, Matt Kaeberlein.
And the idea of using dogs is very interesting to me because, you know, laboratory animals are held in isolated sterile cages, so they’re not mimicking the natural world and the natural risks of what might happen with long-term use of rapamycin. But dogs are free to wander around, and they’re as diverse as their owners. They live in different houses, different parts of the country, probably fed different diets, totally different environments. So I think that study might tell us quite a lot that’s interesting about how effective is rapamycin and how safe is it to use. And if we can establish that in dogs, then that’s a first step to trying to do trials in humans.
Ross Kenyon: Is there anything you wanted to speak about before we start wrapping up?
Venki Ramakrishnan: No. I think aging is at a stage where there’s a lot of biological research going on, but there’s also a lot of money in aging, because we’re aging as a society. A lot of these billionaires are aging and they don’t like the idea, so they’re funding aging research. And so there’s a lot of action going on, and associated with that there’s a lot of hype. But behind the hype there’s also some real solid science. So I wouldn’t be surprised if we at least started to alleviate some of the distressing effects of aging by studying biology now.
I always say that [unclear] there’s nothing better available on the market that’s been tested in humans than diet, exercise and sleep. You know, if you eat moderately and eat a healthy diet, get regular exercise and make sure you get adequate sleep, that’s better than any medication out there that’s actually been shown to work. But of course, I tried that with my blood pressure and I tried that with my cholesterol for years, and eventually I had to resort to blood pressure medication and I had to resort to statins.
So I think part of the goal of what I call the bona fide aging research community is to come up with things that actually help you beyond what you can do with these natural interventions, and really tackle some of the more distressing aspects of aging, so as to allow us to live healthier. So I think that’s the goal. And if they succeed, I think we’ll all thank them for it in our old age. And this quest for immortality and all this stuff about downloading your brain and things like that — I think that’s all science fiction, and my view is, you know, we’re a long way from that, if ever.
Ross Kenyon: I think you’re just jealous that you don’t have your own blood boy.
Venki Ramakrishnan: Yes, that’s true. I didn’t talk about blood transfusions, where — and this is actually a case where this is real biology, but it was so hyped and misused right away. And this is where they did experiments where they connected, say, rats — a young rat with an old rat — and they found that the blood from the young rat actually improved the symptoms of old age in the old rat. The old rat became healthier, its muscle tone became better, its skin tone became better, etcetera. And conversely, it appeared that the old blood also harmed the young rat. So there are things in old blood that were not so great for the young rat.
So scientists are busy trying to identify — blood has hundreds of factors which do all sorts of things, and some of them might stimulate growth, some of them might inhibit processes that are detrimental. So scientists are busy trying to isolate these factors and trying to understand how they act, trying to see what is it about young blood that has these beneficial effects. Of course, that’s a long ongoing process. But the market didn’t wait for that. So suddenly there were these companies set up that offered to give you young blood as a transfusion and charging, you know, an arm and a leg for it.
And I think this is a case where there were no clinical trials, no real evidence of how much it would improve your life and what it would do. They just took this animal data and immediately started charging people for it. And I think it’s exploiting people’s fear of getting old and dying, and that’s really what these guys are doing.
Ross Kenyon: Do you have any thoughts on the environmental, ecological or climate impacts of aging? Have you thought much about that connection? I think there are close and indirect ways that people can draw some conclusions from what we’re talking about, but I’m wondering if you personally thought about it.
Venki Ramakrishnan: I did think about it, you know, while I was thinking about the social consequences of people living longer. And I think if we’re not careful and the population goes up — so we have this choice between a society with a very slow turnover, and a society that turns over just as fast, but then the population will keep going up. Each new generation happens every 20 or 30 years, but each generation lives much longer. Then you’ll start accumulating people, and then the population will go up, and of course we’re already stressing the earth’s resources.
And so it’s not clear. Of course, what I call the techno-optimists say population has nothing to do with it. We’re going to solve it all technologically. We’re going to come up with green solutions for energy and better ways of living and less impactful ways, and we’ll all be fine, and it has nothing to do with population. I’m not sure they’re right. I think it will actually stress our resources if we consume just as much and there’s simply more of us.
But the thing that’s unknown is how it would change our behavior if we live very long. Would we become more responsible, because we’re on Earth a longer time and we need to live with the consequences of this climate change, and so we might have to become more responsible? So there are different views. I don’t think there’s a fixed answer to your question. I think it’s not something that you can predict very easily.
Ross Kenyon: I thought maybe if humans lived at civilizational scales, maybe they would see a vested interest in greater permanence. But I’m not, actually — I mean, that’s just an idea. I have no idea if that would actually be true.
Venki Ramakrishnan: I have heard that said, but there’s no evidence for it one way or another. You know, that’s the problem.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. People now live the better part of a century. Have they gotten better at thinking longer term? I guess in some ways they have — at least more practice at it — but maybe not at the skills we would need to [unclear]. I’m not sure.
Venki Ramakrishnan: I mean, we’re living longer now and we’re producing more and more throwaway material, throwaway goods, things that don’t last very long. I’m not sure that we’re actually behaving in a more thoughtful way because we’re living longer. I just don’t think that’s true. But of course, it’s an unknowable question.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. But shouldn’t old age connote some amount of wisdom? I thought that was part of the trade-off.
Venki Ramakrishnan: It does, I think. My feeling — you know, my children are in their 40s or early 50s, and at this point, I think they’re just as wise as I am. I don’t think that I have any more wisdom than they do. I think if you’re very young, you lack wisdom, and insurance rates will reflect that. You know, if you’re a teenage driver, insurance companies know you’re rash, you’re impulsive, you don’t have that wisdom. But I think once you reach your mid-30s, or certainly 40, I think you’ve accumulated all the wisdom you’re going to have. You might accumulate more experience and knowledge as you get older, and that could help you, but, yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Maybe not in sufficient quantities to avoid all the problems that we have now. We’ve just created bigger problems. Thank you. Thank you for being here. Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality. You have a Bill Bryson blurb up top. That’s pretty cool.
Venki Ramakrishnan: Yeah, he’s a great guy.
Ross Kenyon: I think there’s a lot of important ideas in there. Thanks for catching me up on the science. I also really appreciate when people are not boosters nor just die-hard critics, that are trying to follow the science and explain it.
Venki Ramakrishnan: Yeah, that is — that is what I’ve tried, is to try and just be objective and neither poo-poo the whole thing nor hype it. You know, try to find that balance.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, make everyone dislike you as you’re disappointing everyone. That’s [unclear] — no allegiance to any particular ideological group.
Venki Ramakrishnan: But I think it’s very important for the public to understand the biology, because understanding the biology of why we die is actually a guide to how we live, or how to live. Because it allows you to take action and do the things that will improve your life, because there are good reasons for it. You know, we talked about diet, exercise and sleep. Biology explains why those things work, and so once we know why they’re effective, it’s a motivating factor to implement that in our lives. And it also allows us to see through things which couldn’t possibly be true, given what we know about biology. So I think it is—
Apart from curiosity — all of us, of course, are curious about, why is it we age? Why do tortoises live 200 years and we live, you know, a hundred years at the most, and butterflies live for weeks? So why is there this huge variation in lifespan? What is it that causes aging? So apart from all the curiosity, it’s also a practical guide to implementing the things that will actually give you a healthier life, rather than giving you a recipe of doing this, that and the other without really an explanation for why those things would work.
Ross Kenyon: I think that’s a very good way to sum it up. And thank you so much for being here. I really enjoyed chatting with you, and thank you again for your time.
Venki Ramakrishnan: Thank you.
Ross Kenyon: Thanks so much for listening. If you could please subscribe and give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts, or a rating on Spotify, that’d be much appreciated. It helps us get our content out to more people. You can sign up for our newsletter at nori.com. Follow us on social media. We will catch you next time.
