291 | Venki Ramakrishnan on the Biology of Death and Aging

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 30 September 2024

⏱️ 81 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Aging and death happen to the best of us, but there are increasing efforts to do something about it. That effort requires that we have some reasonable understanding of why aging happens, and what processes are involved. You will be unsurprised to learn that it's complicated. Venki Ramakrishnan, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on the ribosome, investigates what we know about aging in his book Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality. We talk about aging and death, and manage to get some thoughts in about ribosomes. Venki and many other great communicators will be speaking at New Scientist Live, which takes place at ExCeL London between 12 - 14 October 2024, and is also streamed live as well as on-demand.

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Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/09/30/291-venki-ramakrishnan-on-the-biology-of-death-and-aging/

Venkatraman (Venki) Ramakrishnan received his Ph.D. in physics from Ohio University. He is currently Group Leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, England, and is a Fellow of Trinity College. He previously served as President of the Royal Society of London. He shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work uncovering the structure of the ribosome.

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Transcript

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0:31.5	conditions apply need Need to hire?
0:34.0	You need indeed.
0:35.0	Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.
0:37.0	I'm your host Sean Carroll.
0:39.0	Is it possible that listening to the Mindscape Podcast
0:42.0	will help you live forever.
0:44.4	As we like to say here at Mindscape, sure it is possible, it is not especially likely,
0:49.8	but it's not necessarily unlikely that listening to a podcast like this or more generally just doing things to keep your mind active not just active doing the same thing over and over again but doing different kinds of things. Thinking about things in new ways,
1:05.0	being exposed to new ideas and ways of thinking can help you live just a little bit longer
1:11.0	as well as of course more down to earth things like eating
1:14.4	less food and exercising and stuff like that.
1:17.4	It's a fascinating subject, right?
1:19.2	We human beings, not only are we going to have only finite lifespans but arguably we are the only
1:25.9	species that knows that we have finite lifespans so we are aware of our own
1:31.0	mortality so it's perfectly natural that we human beings would like to extend it, right?
1:36.2	On the one hand, we have an instinct built in, we want to survive and live. On the other hand,
	...

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