Extract from - March 24 2024, The Sunday Times - UK

'We could live past 120’: the scientist discovering why we die.

Few people know more about how human life works than Cambridge’s Nobel prizewinning molecular biologist Venki Ramakrishnan.
Now he’s pondering life’s most profound question.

​

“You can think of ageing as an accumulation of damage to our cells, their ability to function, their ability to talk to one another, their ability to regenerate,” Ramakrishnan says. “Ageing is an accumulation of chemical defects that causes these cells to start malfunctioning.”

When we are young many of the cells in our body naturally rejuvenate. If they become damaged they divide, the mother cell dying off once it has been replaced by its offspring. But one of the markers of ageing is “senescence”. Senescent cells lose the ability to divide and gradually more and more become damaged and die. This isn’t a problem at first. Cells die throughout our life. “We don’t even notice. You could lose an entire limb and still live. But at the point of death you get a critical failure of systems. It’s the ability to function coherently as an individual that’s gone.”

​

The key to a long life is hardly a secret: eat and sleep well, get some exercise, avoid being hit by a bus and hope that any hereditary diseases skip your genes. Venki Ramakrishnan, a vegetarian who cycles to his Cambridge lab every day, does all these things and, at 71, says he is “philosophical” about his own death. But he also takes pills for blood pressure, high cholesterol and blood clots: magic medicines that extend our lives and are taken by millions of people each day.

​

If he were offered a pill at the end of his days, which rather than merely warding off disease actually circumvented the ageing process itself and granted another ten years of life, would he take it? “We would all be tempted,” Ramakrishnan says. “The will to live longer is deeply ingrained in each of us.” Could such a drug ever exist? “I have the sense that we’re on the cusp of something,” he says. How long could humans live? “I don’t think there’s any scientific law against breaking our natural barrier of 120 years or so. But I would put it in the same category as being able to colonise Mars. There’s no physical law saying we can’t do it. But it’s very difficult.”

​

Few people know more about life — and the cellular workings that drive it — than Ramakrishnan. The molecular biologist won the 2009 Nobel prize for chemistry for his work solving the structure of the ribosome, the part of the cell that reads genetic instructions and uses that information to make proteins. The ribosome is crucial to how our bodies work: it dictates the colour of our eyes, ensures our hearts beat and minds whirr. It was an astonishing breakthrough. 

​

Ramakrishnan was knighted in 2012, elected president of the Royal Society in 2015 and in Queen Elizabeth II’s final honours list he was appointed to the Order of Merit, of which there are only 24 members, among them David Attenborough, the artist David Hockney and the architect Lord Foster of Thames Bank. Now, having made such a success of unearthing the secrets of life, Ramakrishnan is focusing his microscopic gaze on what causes that life to end. He has written a book called Why We Die.

​

The Egyptians built the Pyramids to prepare their pharaohs for the afterlife; Chinese emperors were entombed with terracotta armies to defend their bodies until rebirth. Hindu reincarnation and karma, Christian heaven and hell, Islam’s garden of everlasting peace: these doctrines arose because, as Ramakrishnan puts it, “the knowledge of death is so terrifying that we live most of our lives in denial of it”. The title of his book alone is enough to bring many of us out in a hot panic. 

​

However, as religion’s grip weakens, a void has been left in our relationship with death. Instead of priests and prophets, we are increasingly turning to a group of people — many of them ultra-wealthy men — whom Ramakrishnan calls “immortality merchants”.

​

Ramakrishnan was brought up in Vadodara in Gujarat in a Hindu family, though with two scientists for parents — his father was a biochemist, his mother an experimental psychologist — he had a relatively secular upbringing. “But as the joke goes,” he says, “in foxholes and exam halls, nobody’s an atheist.” 

​

A key hurdle is that evolutionary forces are simply not geared for us to live for ever. “What evolution cares about is for you to propagate yourself, reproduce and pass on your genes,” Ramakrishnan says. “There’s no benefit, in evolutionary terms, to spending a lot of resources trying to live longer.” These forces, however, could be overcome.

​

​