| Nobel laureate Venki Ramakrishnan on the science of aging

| Shalini Kathuria Narang

| From philosophy to physiology – Nobel laureate Venki Ramakrishnan spoke about his latest book, Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and The Quest for Immortality, at the annual South Asian Literature and Arts festival last month at the Menlo College in the Bay Area.

Ramakrishnan spoke candidly with author Angela Saini in a talk titled Science of Death. This summary has been edited for length and clarity.

Writing about Aging and Immortality

I work on protein synthesis (how genetic information is used to make proteins). Proteins carry out many functions of life. As we age, this ability to make proteins, at the right time, in the right numbers, and in the right quality, breaks down. It’s one of the causes of aging.

The reason for my writing this book was twofold. All governments and major organizations are terrified because we’re facing a demographic cliff. People are living longer, and fertility rates are plummeting. There are fewer young people joining the workforce that would support this growing population. Governments, charities and other research organizations are very interested in understanding the cause of aging and if people can stay healthy for longer.

Support independent journalism on aging

But at the same time, there’s this strain of people who really don’t like the idea of aging or dying. They have an enormous amount of money. They’re used to getting their way. They are now using their money to fund aging research. Human beings are easy prey for people who will hype up all sorts of things as anti-aging revenues. I was annoyed by all this anti-aging hype and thought it would be a good idea to write a book about the biology of aging. What’s real, what can we expect in the future that’s actually possible, what might be longer term possibilities, and what’s simply quackery.

Life Expectancy In Humans and Other Species

In the 1500s, Michelangelo lived to be 90 years old. Even in olden times, people did live to be in their 80s and 90s, maybe even 100. The average life expectancy has increased, but most of that is by improving infant mortality, childhood nutrition, the combat against infectious diseases, better nutrition, sanitation, and public health. We have made progress in treatment of heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. With dementia, we haven’t made quite the same strides.

Originally, life expectancy was 40, then it went up to about 60, and it’s gone up to about 80. At the high end, called maximum lifespan, it’s not clear that’s changed a lot. It’s just that more people reach something close to the maximum, whereas in the old days, many would die of all sorts of other conditions before they had a chance to reach the maximum. The question is: How flexible is that maximum? If you look at animals, the maximum lifespan varies enormously. There are insects that only live a day or a few days, there are butterflies, which live a week or a few months. And then, there’s the Galapagos tortoise, the bowhead whale, and the Greenland shark, which lived for several hundred years.

If you look at humans, the oldest human on record is a French woman named Jean Carmont, who lived to be 122, and she actually had a cigarette and a glass of port every day after lunch. It’s not something I would recommend for a long life. She was just extraordinarily lucky. Both accidental luck as well as possibly having good genes. I think she was a happy person. That probably helped as well. The thing that she did that I do recommend is that she had about a kilogram, or two and a half pounds, of chocolate every week. There’s a tradeoff between the things you enjoy, that make you happy, and those things might also kill you.

Anti-Aging Therapeutics

There’s a general problem with therapeutics for aging. There are no good, long-term trials. That’s what the field really badly needs.

There are some drugs like rapamycin, which affects the mTOR pathway. Rapamycin is a FDA-approved immunosuppressant. If you take rapamycin, you’re more prone to infections, and it can have a number of other side effects.

There’s a lot of people touting metformin, for which the data is very big. Another new and trendy drug is GLP-1 Agonists. These are all that affect the same pathways for caloric restriction. But they all have side effects. If you’re morbidly obese or diabetic, it’s a no-brainer that drugs will help. But if you’re healthy, you should know that GLP-1s have side effects. More work needs to be done to understand side effects like muscle loss. As you get older, frailty is a problem. The problem of muscle loss, falling, and [injury] becomes more and more serious as you get older. Wait to get results from careful scientific studies and proper trials.

The problem with anti-aging therapeutics is people who really want to take it feel that they’re running out of time and don’t want to wait for clinical trials. They’re willing to pop these pills without the data.

Californian Tech Billionaires Pouring Money into Anti-Aging Therapies

When they were young, they wanted to be rich, and now that they’re rich, they want to be young. It’s a natural tendency. Let’s be honest: most of us if we were told, here’s a pill that’ll give you 10 years of extra healthy life. Most of us would take it. For example, I’m taking high-blood-pressure medicines and statins because I’m hoping it’ll keep me healthy and alive for longer.

Does Chasing Youth Come at the Cost of Living a Meaningful Life?

Having a finite life gives you the drive to do something, because you know you don’t have infinite time or even a very long time. There is also [Parkinson’s] law that work expands to fill available time. If you have 6 months to do a project, you’ll take 5 months and 29 days. And if you have a month to do the same project, you’ll do it in 29 days. When you’re young, you’re looking at everything fresh for the first time, have fewer biases, and are not as dogmatic. You’re more open to new ideas and new ways of thinking. And that’s part of the reason that many people do really innovative work when they’re young. As we get older, we accumulate wealth, power and influence. Rich people live 15 years longer than poor people in the U.S., and if you were to live longer, you’ll create this sort of, greater divergence between rich and poor in society, political power, and economic power. I don’t think it’s a recipe for a harmonious society.

Heredity and Healthy Longevity

Genes affect longevity. It means that if one or more of your parents are long lived, then you’ve won some of the lottery of life, but there’s the other 50%. You can always do things that compensate for genetics.

Three things that an individual can do that’s better than any supplement on the market today. These are to eat a moderate diet that’s healthy, exercise regularly both aerobically as well as resistance training for your muscles, and get enough sleep, typically eight hours or so. Because these three things together are synergistic.

Shalini Kathuria Narang is a Bay Area-based independent writer and software professional. She writes about health, wellness, education and technology.