Nicolai Tangen: Hi everybody and welcome to In Good Company. I'm Nicolola Tangan, the CEO of the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund. Now longevity is one of the hottest topics in the world right now. Billionaires are pouring money into it. You know, when they were young, they wanted to become rich and when they are rich, they want to become young. The wellness industry is selling it and opinions about how to live longer are everywhere. So we wanted to find out what is real, what is hype and how close are we to live forever. To help us answer this, I'm joined by Sir Weni Rama Krishnan, the noble winner in chemistry, former president of the Royal Society and author of the incredible book Why We Die. Weni, warm welcome.

Venki Ramakrishnan: Thank you.

Nicolai Tangen: You start your book with the pharaohs of Egypt who believe they could transcend death. Why did you begin there?

Venki Ramakrishnan: Well, the pharaohs are an interesting story because humans try to avoid death by a variety of strategies. Plan Plan A is simply to try not to die. Plan B is to try to believe that even if you die, your whole body will be resurrected and you will go to some paradise. And plan C is that maybe your body will decay but you will have an immortal soul that will, you know, outlast you and you can occupy other bodies and so on.

Nicolai Tangen: So now many thousand years later how close are we to living forever?

Venki Ramakrishnan: I think there's no physical or chemical law saying that our lifespan has to be uh what it is today. I mean if you look at it today we can expect at the most to live to be about 110 to maybe 120 years. Only one person has exceeded 120 years. Uh but saying there's no physical law doesn't mean anything because you know there's no physical law that we can't uh eventually colonize other galaxies. But if you look at all of the difficulties involved even in, you know, going to Mars, uh, you realize that it's incredibly hard. And so I put a this long life extension, hundreds of years in that category, you know, which is highly unrealistic today, despite what, you know, you may hear from various uh people promoting hype. Before we uh kind of dig deeper, how do you define aging?

Venki Ramakrishnan: Aging is I would say the gradual loss of function of our systems. That is from our molecules, cells, tissues to the entire body. It gradually loses function due to accumulation of damage and changes with time.

Venki Ramakrishnan: And and that's how I would define aging. Now, it has external manifestations. You know, you you can't walk as fast. you don't you're not as strong, you're more resist more susceptible to infections, you know, so there are many external manifestations, but underneath it are these accumulated damages to our cells, tissues, and ultimately comes from our molecules.

Nicolai Tangen: Well, you are 74. I can't see so many external manifestations in you. But

Venki Ramakrishnan: well, I I'm lucky because I have a dark skin in a northern climate. So that gives a superficial uh you know illusion. But if you if you were to look at the inside of my body, you you would find it's quite old.

Nicolai Tangen: Well, we should talk about that later. But it seems like two ideas are getting a bit blurred, right? So extending life means slowing the aging process and then rejuvenating cells means making old cells young again. So what's the kind of that difference between the two?

Venki Ramakrishnan: Okay, so most uh anti-aging strategies have to do with preventing damage or slowing down uh the you know damage and and dysfunction. Okay. And but some one class of strategies involves trying to get cells to go backward in development. And if you the way to think about it is a fertilized egg can develop into every kind of tissue in the body. That's what it does, right? And the if you look at the early embryo, it has many cells, but each of those cells could become any type of tissue. Those are called pluripotent stem cells. But as the embryo develops, the stem cells become specialized. So some cells can only make cells of the blood system, others can only make cells of the nervous system and so on. There are many types of cells but still a small class of cells. Now the way but this process normally never goes backwards except in real life it does. For example, the child born of, you know, old parents like 30-year-old parent, uh, it starts the clock from zero, right? And in fact, the child born of a 40-year-old woman is not older than the child born of a 20-year-old woman. So, at some point, you know, there is this resetting. The resetting is not completely perfect but because there's a lot of selection involved in birth you know all the any cells that are defective or simply don't make it uh to a full grown uh child. So that's the process that people are trying to reverse. And the first proof was when John Girden took a skin cell from a frog

Venki Ramakrishnan: and took the nucleus and put it into an egg and could grow a completely brand new frog that was a clone of the original frog. This showed that you could actually reset the clock in a skin cell and make it develop into a whole new frog again. And then Yamanaka showed that only introducing four genes into uh some cells, any cells can can make it go backwards all the way to that early form of a stem cell.

Venki Ramakrishnan: And that's the logic people are trying to use. Now, of course, you don't want to make all your organs go backwards all the way back to pluropotin stem cells because that there would be a big confused mess and you would get tumors and so on. But people are asking, can you make this program go backwards just a little bit so that the cells still maintain their identity? the skin cell stays a skin cell and the muscle cell stays a muscle cell or the liver cell stays a liver cell and but but it's slightly backwards in development

Venki Ramakrishnan: you know has gone backwards so you can think of it as a way of trying to reverse the aging clock and that is a an exciting area but you know making it work in humans in a safe and effective way it's not clear how long it'll take

Nicolai Tangen: no What's actually going on inside our cells as we get older?

Venki Ramakrishnan: Well, many things happen. So, one is that our molecules get damaged and a primary source of damage is if you damage your DNA so that uh you know it it is problematic. It results in two things. One is the cell can sense the damage and it can send the cell into a program called scinessence where it doesn't function normally and in fact creates secretes inflammatory compounds. Now early life this is a cancer prevention mechanism because if you have to damage DNA you don't want that cell to hang around because it may mutate into a cancer cell right and so this is a mechanism to get rid of these cells where damage is sensed but if the damage persists it can also alter the genes that are you know part of the genetic program and that can also cause dysfunction. So there are ways that you know molecular damage can cause dysfunction. Now this kind of damage then results in the cell itself not regulating itself properly. The organels in our cell called mitochondria which have their own DNA but also interact with the rest of the cell they also can get damaged uh quite a lot. So you can see these kinds of damages occur due to all kinds of things. Exposure to chemicals even water uh alone can cause DNA damage that's that was uh discovered by Thomas Lindal

Venki Ramakrishnan: uh for which he won the Nobel Prize. So just the act of living causes damage but we have sophisticated repair mechanisms that constantly repair the damage but at some point the damage starts accumulating with age.

Nicolai Tangen: Those mechanisms are never perfect.

Nicolai Tangen: Talking of which so um a century ago uh most people died when they were 50 or before and today the average uh is roughly 80. You mentioned one person had made it to above 120. So why has that ceiling not moved?

Venki Ramakrishnan: Okay, this there's a difference between the average and the ceiling. So life expectancy has doubled in the last 150 years, but that's mostly due to improvements early in life. For example, infant mortality has gone down. Uh you know, many infectious diseases uh can now be cured. So and accident rates have have been reduced dramatically. So all of those things mean that we can live to an older age. So the average has gone up. Okay. But even in the 1500s, Michelangelo lived to be almost 90. So it's not, you know, that nobody lived to be an old age in the in olden times. It's just the average was low. and and we solved it by public health and vaccination and nutrition and medicine. Okay, those are the four uh big things. But as you get older, then aging starts to kick in and that we've not actually uh made a lot of progress in. And so the maximum lifespan has not actually changed a lot. It's changed a little bit because you know people do live longer and so more of them make it to over 100. For example, the number of people over 100 is increasing everywhere.

Nicolai Tangen: I think the prime the prime minister typically in the past sent letters to everybody turning 100 and then suddenly became just too much work. Right. In Japan, they produce more diapers for old people than for babies.

Venki Ramakrishnan: Yes. That's that's a whole another problem. What is happening is society is getting older but but people the fertility rates are going down.

Nicolai Tangen: Yeah.

Nicolai Tangen: So society is becoming skewed towards an older population. But how do we crack this 120 year barrier? What do you think you will crack it?

Venki Ramakrishnan: Well, I think I think if you slow down aging, uh it's unlikely that you'll get huge gains. What you will get is more and more people uh reaching say 100, okay, or beyond. I think the uh way that people might be able to crack the 120 is by this kind of reprogramming uh which is you know trying to get cells to essentially reverse uh effectively reverse their aging uh their biological age uh by resetting uh some of these clocks. But al although it's been demonstrated in animals, there are real problems getting it to work uh in humans.

Nicolai Tangen: Why?

Venki Ramakrishnan: Because you know the way that they introduce it in animals is either they have transgenic mice which turn these genes on or off. And by the way, we don't know if these genes are really safe over the long run. Some of them are anko genes for example which can cause cancer. Uh the other other way to do it is by packaging these genes inside a viral shell. These are called adnoviral vectors and then you introduce them. Now the problem is that these genes have to go into all of the cells in the tissues of interest and do it sort of uniformly. And all the evidence says that for example when they target a pancreas only some cells you know some clusters of cells in the pancreas are reprogrammed and other cells are not reprogrammed. Okay. Now in mice this still causes some benefit. It still produces some benefit but you can see if you want to do it in humans you have to be able to do it in a much better controlled uh and safe way you know. So I I don't think I think there's a lot of excitement and there's a lot of hype. I personally don't think it's around the corner as far as humans are concerned. And we also don't know for example in mice it didn't actually increase the longevity of the mice. You know these reprogrammed mice they they just older mice looked healthier uh by various criteria than younger mice but it didn't increase their lifespan. different organs age at different rates. Uh what organ what organs age uh the quickest?

Venki Ramakrishnan: I I think it would vary quite a lot depending on the person. You know, you could imagine for example, if somebody's a heavy smoker, then maybe their lungs are aging faster than or somebody's a heavy drinker, maybe their liver ages faster. I just don't know. uh I I think there the one of the more interesting papers on it simply showed that if you apply most standard markers then different organs in in people were had different biological ages.

Nicolai Tangen: Talking of these markers these hallmarks of aging um what what are the what are the most important ones? I think you you typically talk about 12 of them but what are the most important ones?

Venki Ramakrishnan: I don't think you can say one is more important than the other. my as a molecular biologist I think you know modific damage or modification to DNA is fundamental and and really drives a lot of the rest. Uh however they're all important in their own uh frame. For example, damage to mitochondria is is a thing in itself and you know loss of stem cells is is is a factor in itself. Of course, you could say underlying it all, maybe the primary cause is is damage to our uh DNA and and the response to that DNA damage.

Nicolai Tangen: How is AI changing the pace of discovery?

Venki Ramakrishnan: I think AI uh is very very good at recognizing patterns in large data. And so for example in my field of structural biology uh it has really revolutionized the ability to predict structures just from the sequence uh that you can get from just sequencing the gene for example and u but I think with aging aging is a complex multifactorial process it's not just one thing I mean I mentioned DNA damage that's not the only thing you know There are all sorts of things that that are interconnected and how to make sense of that uh is not clear and what sort of data you would feed uh to AI to train it uh is also uh not clear. However, what I can say is that AI has been advancing so dramatically that it's hard to predict anything about AI. What are the kind of things you can do now in your lab which you couldn't do?

Venki Ramakrishnan: Well, I I mentioned for example you could predict structures. Uh another thing uh that you could use it for is for looking for patterns in genes. For example, one obvious thing is if you sequenced lots of centinarians, you could then ask AI to look at the genomes and ask does any pattern emerge here? You know that makes sense. For example,

Nicolai Tangen: Deosabis who won um the Nobel Prize for AFold he uh predicts that within 10 to 15 years there won't be any illnesses left.

Venki Ramakrishnan: Any what?

Nicolai Tangen: That there won't be any illnesses left.

Venki Ramakrishnan: Yes, I know De I I actually I actually know Deis quite well and in fact he asked me to be on the advisory board of one of his companies, Isomorphic Labs and I I think he's a he's a brilliant guy. However, I would say on this in this case maybe he's being a bit overoptimistic and and the reason I say that is not because AI won't give us clues about you know potential drugs or even causes for example uh of diseases. But I think going from there to having treatments is a complicated process and it doesn't happen in the digital world. It happens in real people. You have to have real medicines, real, you know, which you make. So all of that stuff is in the analog world and I think that is going to take longer.

Nicolai Tangen: Do the tech people just think that uh life is a software that can be hacked.

Venki Ramakrishnan: Yes, I think I think they have that bias whether it's conscious or not. uh they do have the bias of looking at the entire world as if it's a software problem

Venki Ramakrishnan: and the and the world is not digital the world is analog and uh I think they simply don't want to want to confront that

Nicolai Tangen: why is there suddenly so much money going into longevity research like tens and tens of billions

Venki Ramakrishnan: I think there are two reasons one is the one you pointed out about for example about Japan which is true of all societies All societies are getting older and governments and you know health agencies are extremely worried. How do we deal with societies where huge fraction of the population is quite old and there's a smaller and smaller fraction of the population that's of working age that can support them. Okay. So the one solution is to try to put money into aging research and this is the the goal of this is not what you described earlier of living for a very long time but rather to make your life health as healthy as possible but not necessarily extending life but more increasing health span rather than lifespan. Okay, the fraction of life you're healthy. That's one reason and that's a very widespread reason everybody will sign up to it. Okay, but the other reason is that there is a group of people who just have these grandiose visions. Okay, and it's all based on the fact that they made billions of dollars in their 20s before they were mature. and they simply think that everything is just going to go their way. And these people don't want to die. Okay? I mean,

Nicolai Tangen: why why don't they want to die?

Venki Ramakrishnan: Well, they love their lives. They like the feeling of control. Uh they think, "Oh, we solved the problem of of uh payment transactions. So, we should be able to solve death."

Nicolai Tangen: Why are they all men? I I do think that, you know, they're all middle-aged men, often married to younger women, by the way, which is a strong incentive to want to live longer, but but I should say, um, maybe it's some male thing, you know, of wanting control and so on. You're right, you know, and and I do point out in the book that they're mostly middle-aged men.

Nicolai Tangen: Tell me tell me a bit more about these men. What do they have in what more do they have in common?

Venki Ramakrishnan: They they like control. They like power. uh they like uh obviously they like wealth uh and so they're used to having everything their their way. You know if they want to buy an island they can buy an island. If they want to buy off a government sure they can fund some politicians campaigns and then you know give them uh money and then you know suddenly the regulations disappear. Okay. So I excuse me for being a bit cynical but you can see this in operation in today in the US right so um I think I think they're used to that kind of power and they also have these grandio visions you know they feel like we're the only intelligent species in the universe or maybe and therefore we need to populate the universe and they there's a there's a fantastic book by Adam Becker called uh more everything forever and it's about these people who just want more of everything and they want to conquer space, galaxies, etc. But I don't know if they really mean it or if they're saying that so that it sounds like a noble cause. Okay. And the real reason is they simply want more power and they don't want to die.

Nicolai Tangen: Now, one of these um uh Bezos backed ventures is called Altos Labs, right? uh $5 billion, a whole bunch of Nobel winners.

Venki Ramakrishnan: I should say that the one of the driving forces behind it was actually Yuri Milner, who is another tech billionaire.

Nicolai Tangen: Yeah.

Nicolai Tangen: Yeah. Yeah. What are they betting on?

Venki Ramakrishnan: I I think they Well, you know, officially their stance is that they don't they're not interested in extending life, but they want to extend health. And in fact, Rick Clausner, I was at the opening of the Altos Lunch in Cambridge, and Rick Clausner, who's, you know, their chief scientist, said, um, look, our goal is not for people to live forever. Our goal is for everybody to die young after a long time. Okay? So, my my immediate reaction was, if somebody is young, why would they suddenly die, you know? I mean, this is a a little bit of a paradox. You're saying, "I'm going to keep everybody healthy, and then suddenly they're going to drop dead." Doesn't seem likely to me. I think what you'll end up doing is postpone that, you know, slow decay and decline uh to a later stage in life. Uh but anyway, uh that that's a a point of that's debatable, but that's their stated goal. M

Venki Ramakrishnan: but I have a feeling the people who are funding it are interested in two things. One is they think there's a lot of money in aging and so you know if you hire the best scientists you which they did some of the top scientists in the field uh were went to Altos because of the resources and the salary offered was far better than anything you could get in academia and and so uh they're their bet is if we hire some top scientists they will come up with useful stuff that then we can monetize eyes in the longevity uh business. And so that's a a clear, you know, standard, you know, investment strategy. But the other strategy is deep down they think, well, maybe these guys will crack the problem and, you know, maybe we'll end up uh living not forever, but maybe a much longer time.

Nicolai Tangen: We have another got a few other players who tried to crack it. Kico, New Liit, Brian Armstrong, Brian Johnson. What are your reflections?

Venki Ramakrishnan: I I I mean, I do know of Brian Johnson, who's another tech billionaire who spends $2 million a year uh apparently on uh his own longevity. He monitors his aging. He does all sorts of treatments and so on. And you know, he seems a pleasant enough guy from watching his interviews, you know, and I I think it's fine if he does that. And uh he looks pretty young for a guy in his late 40s. Uh but my son is almost 50 and he looks just as young without any of those longevity treatments. So, so I, you know, the trouble of Brian Johnson is no control experiment. is it's one guy who's mixing up all sorts of different things and then how do you even judge whether something is working or not you know in one person when you mix everything up?

Nicolai Tangen: Let's move um tax. So stem cells kind of deserve their own uh chapter here. Um you say in your book that an 80 year-old has the 200s amount of stem cells compared to a newborn. Um now what are the genuine breakthroughs in this area?

Venki Ramakrishnan: Well the the the big breakthrough in stem cell research will come from reprogramming. Okay. So if they can implement reprogramming safely in humans and and you know demonstrate first of all they need to do a lot more research on animals before

Nicolai Tangen: it has worked in mice right

Venki Ramakrishnan: it has worked in mice but remember it's very limited experiment and even in mice the reprogramming is highly heterogeneous that is even in the same organ there clusters of cells that get reprogrammed other cells don't get reprogrammed Okay. Uh there's one interesting experiment that's being done in Boston which is about uh trying to restore um you know regeneration of tissue trying to regenerate eye tissue by injecting these factors directly into the eye. And uh maybe this can restore damaged or aging tissue like you know many diseases are in old age cause retinal degeneration which can lead to blindness. So uh and that's actually been approved for clinical trials. But again you know many things that work in mice fail in clinical trials. I mean that's almost the norm. And so you you have to you have to simply wait and see what happens.

Nicolai Tangen: So hundreds of clinics already sell stem cell injections.

Venki Ramakrishnan: Oh well I think you know people for example when scientists found out that you know if you connected an animal old and young rat and exchanged their blood supply the old animal seemed to benefit from the blood of the young animal. And immediately there were companies that were starting to sell young blood, okay, from to, you know, from they would get blood from young donors and sell them at a huge markup to rich uh old men.

Nicolai Tangen: Do you think uh uh there is something to it or is it just

Venki Ramakrishnan: No, I I I I'm highly skeptical.

Nicolai Tangen: Okay. Another area is uh cryopreservation. So basically you freeze yourself and hopefully you wake up later.

Venki Ramakrishnan: Yeah, this this is currently I would say in the realm of science fiction. Uh it's not because cryopreservation itself has no basis. For example, we can freeze eggs. We can freeze even embryos. We can certainly freeze, you know, lots of even small larve uh of of worms and so on. So, so there are many things we can freeze and the the method of freezing depends on cooling them to very low temperature like liquid nitrogen temperature without the water freezing into ice. Okay? Because if it freezes into ice, ice is expands compared to water. So, it destroys all the tissue around it. That's why you know if you freeze your strawberries in your freezer and you thaw them again, they don't look like fresh strawberries. Okay? So um the the the reason you can do it with small things is because you can transfer the heat fast away from it fast enough before the water has a chance to form ice crystals. So you get essentially uh you know a a sort of native state. Now nobody has been able to freeze even a small animal like a mouse. Okay? And there was some report about a mouse brain being frozen. Then when I looked at it, it's not a whole not even a whole mouse brain. It's only a a section of a mouse brain. A thin section of a mouse brain they've been able to freeze. Okay? So I would say to these people, when you can freeze a mouse and thaw it so that it can run around again, uh then come and talk to me. I'll be interested. Until then, it's just, you know, I I I think of it as nonsense.

Nicolai Tangen: In the meantime, if we gave you $3 billion to conduct research into whatever you wanted, where would you where would you have put that money? What's the most promising part in for you mean for aging research?

Nicolai Tangen: Yeah.

Venki Ramakrishnan: Okay. I would put it into three or four areas. One is we know that caloric restriction uh does help

Venki Ramakrishnan: with aging. Okay. And and it's been this has been true in many species. It has some consequences which are not always good but maybe you can separate those. So I would put money into caloric restriction pathways. That to me is the most promising short-term goal. Okay. Then you know we talked about old and young blood. Well one possibility is to try to ask what is in old blood and what's in young blood. what are the differences and what how do they promote aging or prevent aging you know so uh so that's another area I I talked about cells that sense damage and go into into this state called scinessence and that's a natural process that's very useful uh throughout our lives but as we get older the the number of scinsesscent cells increases too much beyond our body's ability ability to clear them. And so there are efforts to target scinesscent cells for destruction. Again, it's a question of being able to do it in the right amount and you know and and not damage all our other cells. Uh so that's another promising area. And then the fourth is the part that we talked about which is cellular reprogramming. And I think that is perhaps one of the more exciting long-term goals. and and I think you know that's another area where uh you could you could you know do a lot of useful research

Nicolai Tangen: now in the meantime um we just want some more healthy years and so uh where do where do we start

Venki Ramakrishnan: well you know caloric restriction pathways suggest an obvious answer one is

Nicolai Tangen: so this is basically just being hungry

Venki Ramakrishnan: no I don't think you need to be hungry I I you're right that People on a truly caloric restricted diet, they're hungry all the time.

Nicolai Tangen: Which is why I don't do it.

Venki Ramakrishnan: No. And nor do I. Okay. But you can eat moderately and you can eat, you can try to not be obese. You can control your weight. By the way, GLP1 drugs have now shown all kinds of effects, not just for preventing diabetes or for extreme obesity.

Venki Ramakrishnan: And so they could be investigated further as well. And they

Nicolai Tangen: do you think they'll extend do you think they'll extend lifetime?

Venki Ramakrishnan: They they might uh I don't know about extending life but they might make it old age healthier. Uh but but they have consequences. For example, you have muscle loss, you have other side effects. So people need to figure out how to use them safely. You know, if you're going to try to give it to healthy people, you have to try to make it uh safer. But anyway, uh you so I would say caloric restriction suggests an obvious answer which is you know don't overeat. Why does it work?

Venki Ramakrishnan: It works because it turns on pathways that are involved in recycling uh you know defective uh molecules and defective organels uh and generally speak and affects your protein synthesis. So you don't make you know misfolded proteins. So there there are lots of thing there are lots of things it affects in our metabolism uh that benefit us as we age. The the other thing I I I should mention is sleep.

Nicolai Tangen: Yeah. because a lot of recycling and repair happens in our sleep cycle and people underestimate the importance of sleep and uh that's another uh you know very important uh aspect and of course the third one is exercise and exercise you know we talked about rejuvenation and regeneration of tissues and so on and exercise actually stimulates that

Nicolai Tangen: let's just sleep first how much do you sleep

Venki Ramakrishnan: I try to get about eight hours of sleep a day.

Venki Ramakrishnan: And you know, if I get less than 7 hours, I don't function very well.

Nicolai Tangen: There is this saying uh when you're young, you sneak out of your bedroom to go to parties, and when you get older, you sneak out of the parties to get back to bed. Why

Venki Ramakrishnan: I unfortunately [laughter] I was I was I was a sleepolic, if you like, even when I was young, you know. So maybe

Nicolai Tangen: why why do we appre appreciate sleep more when we get older?

Venki Ramakrishnan: I I don't know. Maybe maybe, you know, we're just not as energetic and not as you know, we don't have the same stamina as we did when we were when we were young. But but as I pointed out, you know, uh not only I but even my son and and I believe also my grandson, uh you know, we all like our sleep. You know, I'm not sure we're all night party animals.

Nicolai Tangen: No, sleep is beautiful. What about exercise? How much do you exercise?

Venki Ramakrishnan: I try to ex you know firstly I I ride my bicycle about uh a few kilometers each way uh to work every day but apart from that I go to the gym and I do a combination of weight training and uh cardio uh I don't my knee is not great I used to be a runner but now I uh mostly do a an elliptical cross trainer uh which as somebody from Norway you'll you'll appreciate it sort of mimics mimics crosscountry skiing, you know,

Nicolai Tangen: much better for much better for the joints.

Venki Ramakrishnan: Yeah.

Nicolai Tangen: Uh but talking about Norway, what about ice bars and cold plunges and zonas?

Venki Ramakrishnan: You know, the trouble with all of these things is they come from one or two observations which may or may not be even validated and there's no control experiment. Okay, I would be very very skeptical uh of those sorts of uh treatments. I I doubt that they do much to be honest.

Nicolai Tangen: Well, hey, they do a lot for me. I did both both an ice bath and um and sauna this morning and it makes me feel uh

Venki Ramakrishnan: Oh, if it makes Okay, so let me let me address that. Anything that makes you feel good is probably okay, probably good for you at some at some level because a lot of it a lot of aging is related to stress. you know there's I'm sure people who are happy probably uh you know have less stress and less you know damage to their systems and so on. I mean up to a point you know if you like drinking I wouldn't say you know go go out and get drunk every day. I I'm not sure that's a good idea but but if you you know if a cold plunge in a sauna makes you feel good that's great you know you should do it.

Nicolai Tangen: Let's move to to the ethics. Um, now if we could double the the lifespan tomorrow, do we do we actually want to?

Venki Ramakrishnan: I think it would cause huge changes in society, not all of which will be good for society. Uh, for one thing, you know, changes in society uh require turnovers of generations. Old generations don't, you know, older generations don't voluntarily change society. Often change is driven by the young. And so um so you you you might end up with a very stagnant society. The other is that as old people as people get older they accumulate wealth, influence and power. And of course these three things go together. And so you will have the same group of people controlling society without turnover. And that is not a recipe for for for good society. you know because people who are entrenched in power have no reason to change and and you know may not act in the best interests of everybody and I should point out that if you look at great discoveries in science and mathematics they're almost all done by young people okay and you know people in their 40s or younger and um you know yes there are a few exceptions here and there but even those people often did great work when they were young. It's just that they've uh continued. And interestingly, you know, Ishiguro, the famous uh novelist, pointed out that even in literature, this is true that you know, generally speaking, people who are younger uh you know, t people tend to write their greatest works when they're younger. And one example he gave was Toltoy. You know, War and Peace was written when he was in his 30s. you know, that's supposed to be this big, profound novel and yet was not written by an old man. So, you know, I I I wonder what it'll do to, you know, society generally if we have everybody living for a very long time and especially combined with drop in fertility rates where uh you're not you're not replacing them with young.

Nicolai Tangen: During COVID, we treated the old people first. Was that wrong?

Venki Ramakrishnan: Well, it wasn't wrong because they were by far at the greatest risk. So, uh, you know, the the likelihood of dying of COVID doubled every eight years of life, you know, roughly speaking. And so, an 80-year-old was many many times more likely to die than say a 40 year-old or a 30-year-old. So I I I think it it if you wanted to save lives, you know, that was not not not a bad thing to do.

Nicolai Tangen: The rich people already live uh you know a decade and even some places more than that longer than the poor.

Venki Ramakrishnan: Yeah. 15 years in the US and about 10 years in the UK.

Nicolai Tangen: So what reflections do you have around that or or extending it further for rich people?

Venki Ramakrishnan: I I think it it it creates a serious problem especially if let's say you have advances in in aging research and you have treatments that are highly sophisticated and expensive. Uh then you can imagine a two-tier society where rich people can get all of the latest and fancy treatments and will live even longer than they do now. And so the disparity in power because as I pointed out people accumulate power and wealth will be even more and moreover their children will also be at an advantage. So you you may end up creating a multi-tiered society, you know, or at least a two-tiered society where, you know, there's one rule for the very rich and it's not just even wealth, but it's even years of life and then another uh situation for uh the rest of society and especially for the poor.

Nicolai Tangen: Mickey, let's uh uh talk a bit about you here at the end. You trained you grew up in India. you trained as a physicist and then switched to biology. Why why is physics uh a good place to start? or or is it?

Venki Ramakrishnan: Well, I'm not sure I you know, I think it uh well, it didn't hurt me, but I'm not sure it's necessary. Uh except that one thing physics does is it trains you very well in mathematics and in quantitative thinking. Uh and that can be useful. But I can tell you physicists who be try to become biologists without really becoming biologists but staying as physicists they don't tend to do very well. Okay. Uh the best physicists best people who have gone from physics to biology are people who stopped being physicists and really learned how to think like biologists because biology involves a different way of thinking. it's a different scale and different kinds of problems. uh for example physicists almost there's no such I never heard of a control experiment in physics because the experiment itself is designed so that you know it it's designed to be extremely simple and answer a particular question and in biology the system is so messy that you you have to do control experiments you know and and so that's one one concrete example but there are many other ways and for example everything in biology requires thinking in evolutionary terms and that's doesn't come quite naturally. Physics is a generally a highly reductionist uh you know science although now you know many physicists are going into complex systems and so on but but traditionally it has been a highly reductionist science. So I think there are cultural differences and you have to bridge those differences if you want to succeed in making that transition.

Nicolai Tangen: Do you think with the advent of AI that having a broad curriculum uh is more or less an advantage?

Venki Ramakrishnan: My view is having a broad curriculum is always an advantage because it really gives you an understanding of the different areas of science, different ways of thinking and so on. And uh one worry I have is that we are going to uh simply delegate everything to AI which would be a recipe for making humanity stupider. Uh I think and more ignorant and I think what we really should be doing is is leveraging AI so that it's a another powerful tool in our armory. I mean computation was a tool uh you know all sorts of modern robotics is a tool uh you know we have all sorts of tools chemical tools you know biological tools and and I I think we should think of AI as another uh powerful tool.

Nicolai Tangen: What did you learn as a president at the Royal Society?

Venki Ramakrishnan: Well I learned a lot of things. One is how to convey science to the general public. how to convey the importance of science to not only the public but to the government. And you know I became president at a very particular moment in British history when it had voted to leave the EU and then towards the end of my term we had the global pandemic. uh and so you know I had to deal with uh really quite serious issues as president and I think uh the fact that I was an American uh citizen who had come to Britain and I didn't have a I didn't grow up here and didn't have a network of people here I I thought that might have been a disadvantage but on the other hand it made me viewed as somebody with no axe to grind you know somebody who you know was perhaps an out something of an outsider but therefore objective. Uh so it it may have helped me as much as it hurt me.

Nicolai Tangen: Why is uh music so important in your life? And uh your son is a professional chist and a music professor as well. So he

Venki Ramakrishnan: Yes, you you you've clear you've clearly done some homework on me [laughter] anyway. No, we I've always enjoyed music and I think you know music is one of those universal uh things. I don't quite understand. You know, Steven Pinker in his book sort of dismissed music. You know, he thought it was a just an artifact of no evolutionary significance. I think he's wrong. And I think music is a demonstration of very very high cognitive ability. And so you can see how evolutionarily it's it's important. uh but more than that I think music really we have evolved to so that music has some deep uh you know emotional and physiological triggers in us and you you know you can easily change a person's mood with music and affect their physiology so so I think there's something profound about music

Nicolai Tangen: do you think it makes you live longer

Venki Ramakrishnan: I don't know but it can certainly make your life the life you have far more pleasurable. So,

Nicolai Tangen: do you think gratitude makes you live longer?

Venki Ramakrishnan: I don't know if I don't know if any of these things particularly make you live longer. I I think, you know, some things you you do because they're worth doing, not just because everything everything is not about living longer. It's about enjoying life while you have it, right?

Nicolai Tangen: Are you afraid of dying? I think we all are at at some level but I think you know I mean my father and my brother-in-law both died in the last year and a half and my father was almost 99 and I would say you know he faced you know when he he was told look now you only have a few days left uh you know he was a little bit sad that it was going to be over but I think he took it reasonably well and and my brother-in-law you know he suffered from sudden diagnosis of pancreatic cancer but really you know was very measured and you know sort of rational about it. So I so I hope if you know not if but when my time comes that I'll face it with the same kind of you know equanimity or rationality that that I saw in these people.

Nicolai Tangen: You had a Freudian slip there and said you know if you die do you do you believe in afterlife? I no I I I I don't but uh No, I meant I meant when when I died. I I don't know if it was a Freudian slip. It's just it's been uh tremendous to uh speak with you. What a what an incredible experience. A big thank you for taking the time.

Venki Ramakrishnan: Thank you very much for having me.