Ramteen Arablui
speaker
199 appearances
7 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 13 Aug
Ramteen Arablui’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
No one had studied aging scientifically before. And here was this famous scientist saying he wanted to take it on. But Metchnikov didn't just want to study aging. He wanted to cure it.
And the world ate it up.
Since the beginning of human civilization, people have been obsessed with staying young, even living forever. Today, that obsession is tied up with media, medicine, and money.
We spend billions of dollars on anti-aging products.
We're told to look younger.
We question whether older people are fit to lead.
But what if these are the wrong questions? Is aging something we even need to cure? And what does it mean if we can't? I'm Ramteen Arablui.
On this episode of ThruLine, we're not going to answer the question of aging, but we are going to tell you the story of someone who tried.
Coming up, our producer Devin Katayama tells the story of Eli Meshnikoff.
I'm Ramteen Arablui. And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR.
Thanks to Leslie Kossoff, Susan Evans, Sam Evans, Carol Hacker, Stefan Hubinoff, and Anandita Balero. Also thanks to Sasha Solieva, Zakhar Kinserski, Artem Kuznetsov, Peter Balanon-Rosen, Anya Steinberg, Thomas Liu, and Laurent Lasablier for their voiceover work.
So the other day I was reading this book about the first crusade. It's a moment in history that anyone who knows me knows I have long been obsessed with. And in one passage, there was a detailed description of what the city of Antioch was like then. There were details about the way the streets looked, the size of the citadel, how loud the central market was.
But there was something noticeably missing. No description of what it smelled like. It was weird because I register a lot of thoughts and memories in my head through smells. I'm sure you do too. And I realized I almost never stopped to think about how or why I smell things. Like why does a rose smell like a rose?
Would the people in medieval Antioch have described the smell of a rose the same way I do? Well, Christina Kim, a reporter and producer on the ThruLine team, has been thinking about those kinds of questions a lot over the last few years. The other day, she even described smell as a superpower that allows us to time travel.
Yeah, she went deep on some of the big questions about our sense of smell and ended up on this winding historical journey. And now you get to go on it too. Christina is going to take it from here.
I'm Ramteen Arablui, and you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR.
Thank you to the American Academy of Achievement for their permission to use excerpts from their interview with Dr. Linda Buck. And special thanks to Hiro Matsunami, Dwayne Jethro, Melanie Bohi, Elise Perlstein, Connie Chang, Natalia Fiedelholz, and Yolanda Sanguini for sharing their time and expertise. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vocal. Audio was mixed by Maggie Luthar.
Thanks to Johannes Dergi, Kiara West, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell.
And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on this show, please write us at doolineatnpr.org.
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