Forward Thinking: Is it ethical to live longer?

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 3 April 2024

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Nobel Prize-winning scientist Venki Ramakrishnan considers both why we might live longer, and the dilemmas this raises.

In the last few years, medical advances have led to treatments that really do offer the potential to tackle life-threatening cancers and debilitating diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

In discussion with Nuala McGovern, Venki also explores the questions such treatments raise. Initially, they will be expensive, and we already have a global society in which there is a direct link between life expectancy and affluence; will access to these treatments, or lack of it, increase that disparity? And although your incurable disease may now be cured, what about the rest of your quality of life? Can the planet support an increasingly needy older and older generation? Does trying to live longer become a selfish act?

Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist Venki Ramakrishnan heads a research group at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England.

This is the first in a series of four programmes from the Oxford Literary Festival, presented by Nuala McGovern and produced by Julian Siddle.

Recorded in front of an audience at Worcester College, Oxford.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From the BBC World Service, this edition of the documentary podcast is the first of four programs
0:06.0	forward thinking and new series where we explore ideas that could transform our world.
0:11.0	We're here with a live audience at the Oxford Literary Festival with the Telegraph.
0:15.7	I'm Nula McGovern.
0:17.0	For centuries, scholars, artists, writers, scientists, filmmakers have found inspiration where we are.
0:30.0	In Oxford's spectacular architecture, the city's famous dreaming spires,
0:36.2	and it is quite the place to have conversations about big ideas.
0:41.1	Some of the scholars that Oxford has educated include the poet,
0:44.4	W.H. Auden, President Bill Clinton, Chef Nijella Lawson,
0:48.8	and the scientist Stephen Hawking. And Oxford has also educated 28 Nobel Prize winners. Well, we have our Nobel Prize winner for chemistry with us today. Thank you Ramakrishnan, author of why we die, The New Science of Aging and The Quest for Immortality.
1:07.0	Welcome, Venky.
1:08.0	Thank you.
1:11.0	Now, we all have skin in the game of aging. Some of it more wrinkled than others. Why have you decided to devote so much thought to the concept and the reality of aging?
1:28.8	Several reasons. One is that humans have wondered about our mortality ever since we were aware of it.
1:36.5	We may be the only species that knows that we have an expiration date on our lives. Many other species are aware of death, but not necessarily
1:45.8	about lifespan and mortality. For most of our existence, we couldn't do anything
1:51.2	about it, but now with strides in modern biology
1:55.9	We're beginning to understand the underlying basis for why we age and how that leads to death.
2:03.0	And that's leading to questions about whether we can intervene in that process
2:09.0	and slow it down or perhaps postpone it significantly. So that's one reason. The other reason is that
2:18.4	there's an enormous amount of hype in the field. Some of it is because there's a huge amount of private capital that has gone
2:25.4	into funding aging research. We have a number of billionaires who are reaching middle age and thinking this would be a good thing to invest in.
	...

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