Vox Populi:

In “Why We Die,” biologist and Nobel laureate Venki Ramakrishnan explores the science of aging and life extension.

IN 2023, tech mogul Bryan Johnson revealed that he had been receiving blood plasma exchanges from his 17-year-old son, in the hope that siphoning his son’s young blood into his middle-aged body would help him combat aging and cheat death.

Johnson might be an extreme outlier, but his quest exemplifies a common human trait: denial about our mortality. As Venki Ramakrishnan writes in his new book, “Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality,” searching for the secrets to longevity has “driven human civilization for centuries.” Humans may be unique among animals in our ability to understand and anticipate death, and ever since we evolved into this awareness, we’ve struggled to accept it. We espouse religious beliefs about reincarnation or the everlasting immortal soul, we attempt to live on through offspring and legacy, and, of course, since antiquity, we have searched for eternal life.

Ramakrishnan, a Nobel Prize winner in chemistry who has spent his career studying how cell proteins are made, is primarily occupied with that last coping strategy in his fascinating book. For much of the 20th century, serious scientists dismissed gerontology, or the study of aging, as the provenance of cranks and loons. But in this century, it’s become a major research priority. In the past 10 years alone, Ramakrishnan writes, more than 700 startups have invested billions of dollars into solving this greatest human problem.

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