HIGHLIGHTS: Venki Ramakrishnan

0:00Hi everybody, tune in to this short version of the podcast which we do every Friday. For the long version, tune in on Wednesdays. Hi everybody and welcome to In Good Company. I'm Nicolai Tangen, 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 and everywhere. So we wanted to find out what is real, what is hype, and how close are we to live forever.

0:40To help us out on this, I'm joined by Sir Venki Ramakrishnan, the noble winner in chemistry, former president of the Royal Society and author of the incredible book, Why We Die. Venki, warm welcome. Thank you. You start your book with the pharaohs of Egypt who believe they could transcend death. Why did you begin there? Well, the pharaohs are an interesting story because humans try to avoid death by a variety of strategies. 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 outlast you and you can occupy other bodies and so on.

1:37So now many thousand years later, how close are we to living forever? I think there's no physical or chemical law saying that our lifespan has to be 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. But saying there's no physical law doesn't mean anything, because, you know, there's no physical law that we can't eventually colonize other galaxies. But if you look at all of the difficulties involved, even in, you know, going to Mars, you realize that it's incredibly hard. And so I put 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 people promoting hype.

2:40What's actually going on inside our cells as we get older? 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, you know, 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 senescence where it doesn't function normally and, in fact, creates, secretes inflammatory compounds. Now, early in 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?

3:25And 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 part of the genetic program, and that can also cause dysfunction. So there are ways that molecular damage can cause dysfunction. Now, this kind of damage then results in the cell itself not regulating itself properly. the organelles in our cell called mitochondria, which have their own DNA, but also interact with the rest of the cell, they also can get damaged quite a lot. So you can see these kinds of damages occur due to all kinds of things, exposure to chemicals, even water alone can cause DNA damage.

4:16That was discovered by Thomas Lindahl, 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. Those mechanisms are never perfect. Demi Sassabis, who won the Nobel Prize for Everfold, he predicts that within 10 to 15 years, there won't be any illnesses left. Any what? Potential. That there won't be any illnesses left? Yes, I know Demis. Potentially. I actually know Demis quite well. And in fact, he asked me to be on the advisory board of one of his companies, Isomorphic Labs.

5:05And I think he's a brilliant guy. However, I would say in this case, maybe he's being a bit over-optimistic. 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, 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. Do the tech people just think that life is a software that can be hacked?

5:55Yes, I think they have that bias whether it's conscious or not. They do have the bias of looking at the entire world as if it's a software problem. And the world is not digital. The world is analog. and I think they simply don't want to confront that. Why is there certainly so much money going into longevity research, like tens and tens of billions? I think there are two reasons. One is the one you pointed out, for example, about Japan, which is true of all societies. All societies are getting older and governments and health agencies are extremely worried. how do we deal with societies where a 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.

6:51Okay. 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 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.

7:40And they simply think that everything is just going to go their way. And these people don't want to die, okay? Why? Why don't they want to die? Well, they love their lives. They like the feeling of control. They think, oh, we solved the problem of payment transactions, so we should be able to solve death. Why are they all men? I do think, 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 I should say maybe it's some male thing, you know, of wanting control and so on. You're right, you know, and I do point out in the book that they're mostly middle-aged men.

8:25Now, in the meantime, we just want some more healthy years. And so where do we start? Well, you know, caloric restriction pathways suggest an obvious answer. So this is basically just being hungry. No, I don't think you need to be hungry. You're right that people on a truly caloric restricted diet, they're hungry all the time. Yeah, which is why I don't do it. No, and nor do I. Okay. But you can eat moderately and you can try to not be obese. You can control your weight. By the way, GLP-1 drugs have now shown all kinds of effects, not just for preventing diabetes or for extreme obesity. And so they could be investigated further as well.

9:11Do you think they'll extend lifetime? They might. I don't know about extending life, but they might make it old age healthier. Do you think gratitude makes you live longer? I don't know if any of these things particularly make you live longer. I think, you know, some things 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. Are you afraid of dying? I think we all are 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.

9:55and I would say, you know, he faced, you know, when he was told, look, now you only have a few days left, you know, he was a little bit sad that it was going to be over, but I think he took it reasonably well. And my brother-in-law, you know, he suffered from a sudden diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, but really, you know, was very measured and, you know, sort of rational about it. 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 I saw in these people.