Venki Ramakrishnan
speaker
313 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard 25 Apr
Venki Ramakrishnan’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 Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
That's another way of thinking about it. Yeah, that's true.
Well, I think it started because I wrote my first popular book, which was called Gene Machine, which was about the race for the structure of the ribosome. It was meant to capture some of the frankness of the double helix, which I have to say I read as a student of physics. For the first time, it gave me some idea of the thrill of physics. you know, a biological question.
And I know it's a very controversial book, but it's influenced lots of people, including Jennifer Doudna, who in the preface to her own book says that's a book that really stimulated her to become a scientist. So although it's got its, you know, downsides, you know, Jim Watson can be frank, but also unnecessarily nasty. I wanted to capture the frankness without the gratuitous nastiness.
And so that was my experience of writing that book. And I found I enjoyed the process of writing about a complicated subject in molecular biology for the general public. Then I thought, well, what could I write about now that would be really timely and that I would have something to say? And the thing is, as I mentioned, protein synthesis is central to aging because proteins do a lot of things.
And if the process gets disrupted or becomes less optimal, then it leads to aging. So I was very, very close to the field, even though I don't particularly work on aging. And aging, of course, is a big existential question. We may be the only species that's aware of mortality. Animals may know about death. They can certainly sense death.
But I think there's no evidence that they know about mortality in the sense that we humans know that we're all going to die, that we're not going to live past 120, at least given current medicine and biology. So that's influenced us greatly.
Ever since we were aware of it, if you look at all the ways we try to avoid death, you know, building pyramids and mummifying ourselves, and also a lot of religions actually deal with what happens when you die. And they're all different religions will have different ideas of what will happen, but they all view it as some sort of transition.
rather than a finality so it is a question that's bothered us ever since we became aware of it but It's only in the last 50 years that biologists have made real advances in understanding what is the aging process. It's not just wear and tear. It's much more complicated than that. And what is the aging process?
Why is it that some species live for a day or two and others live for several hundred years or possibly, in the case of plants, even a thousand years or more? And why is there this huge spread? What causes that? What causes us to eventually die? It's a big existential question. Then there's a practical thing, which is societies are getting older. And as societies age, what happens is that
you have to deal with an aging population because fertility rates are going down. The population distribution is being more and more shifted towards older age groups. And if these older people require lots of care or poor health, that's not great either for them or for society. And so there's a big push from governments to do something about improving health in old age.
And that requires understanding the whole problem of aging. And so there's a lot of research, but then now you have injection of a lot of private money. There are 700 companies doing some sort of longevity-based biotech. Billions of tens of billions of dollars going into this. A lot of it funded by tech billionaires from California. And I like to joke that these are guys who...
just are afraid of getting old. They like their life and they don't want the party to end. And so they're funding, they can't buy youth, so they're buying research into aging. And that's also distorting the field. It's generating huge amounts of hype because now there's money involved.
And so I thought as somebody who doesn't have a personal skin in the game, and since it is this big question, I thought I could look at the current state and talk about how we came to our state of understanding, which is interesting in itself, but also what are the realistic prospects and what's just a lot of hype. So I think that's the sort of goal.
And it turned out to be a much bigger problem than I imagined because aging basically encompasses all of biology, right from DNA all the way to cells and tissues and organisms. So- But it was fun to write it.
Yes, I do say that, actually. We all have a skin in the game in that we're all aging, and we'd like to do something about it if we can.
And of course, the other skin in the game I have is I like to say I'm not selling anything, but of course, I'd like the book to sell.
They need to sort of... Oddly enough, I found many unicellular organisms do die. For example, budding yeast. where you can clearly separate the mother cell from the daughter cell, they do die. The mother cell only can undergo a certain number of divisions, and then it's basically senescent and dies. And interestingly, people have even done this with simple bacteria like E. coli.
The trouble with E. coli is you can't tell which one is the mother cell and which one's the daughter cell. But people figured out that when E. coli grows, it grows in one direction. It doesn't grow in both directions at the same time. So there's a new part of E. coli and there's an old part of the E. coli when it's when it grows.
Then when it divides, one half, one daughter cell inherits the new part. The other daughter cell inherits the old part. And if you keep repeating this by very carefully producing these E. coli in thin tubes so you can keep track of it, it turns out that the old E. coli eventually dies. So it's pretty amazing. So I would say almost everything dies, even even unicellular organisms.
But of course, that's not what we mean when we say death. And this actually, you know, since we both have a connection with the Santa Fe Institute, this really, I absorbed this through a series of workshops on aging at the Santa Fe Institute, where they think of aging as a Biological aging is a special case of aging of everything, all complex systems.
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