HIGHLIGHTS: Venki Ramakrishnan

Hi, 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. To help us answer this, I'm joined by sir Venki Ramakrishnan, the Nobel 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 believed 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, you know, outlast you, and you can occupy other bodies and so on. So 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 a 110 to maybe a 120. Only one person has exceeded a hundred and twenty 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 height. What's actually going on inside of ourselves 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 it 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 …