Venki Ramakrishnan

People who study the biology of aging have found it striking that some of the age-old advice, exercise, eating moderately, and getting enough sleep, affect many of the major pathways of aging.

The work I do, which is about how proteins are made and how that...

production of proteins is regulated by the body is very closely connected with aging.

Because when those processes break down, they're one of the main causes.

They're one of the fundamental causes of aging.

Yeah, absolutely.

I'll give you two, I'd say two things about that.

One is, although all living things are made of the same material, they're all made of DNA and proteins and, you know, cell membranes and things like that.

They have vastly different lifespans.

For example, a butterfly or an insect might live only for days.

And at the other end, you have some whales and sharks that live for a few hundred years.

Tortoises can live for 200 or more years.

And that means there's probably a Galapagos tortoise around now that was around when Darwin first observed them.

150 years ago that's to me is amazing so why is it that

Although we're made of the same thing, we all have such different lifespans.

That's one of the interesting questions about the field.

But I want to go beyond that.

It's not just living things that age and die.

Aging and death is a property of complex systems.

For example, companies have a growth phase, a plateau, and then decay and death.