Other species know about death, but they don’t know that there is an expiration date: Venki Ramakrishnan

Nobel Laureate Venki Ramakrishnan discusses mortality, ageing, and longevity at Bangalore Literature Festival, emphasizing the importance of healthy living.

“Humans are perhaps the only species that knows about mortality,” says Nobel Laureate Venki Ramakrishnan at a session titled “Why We Die” at the two-day Bangalore Literature Festival (BLF), which began on Saturday (December 14).

Ramakrishnan, the author of Why We Die: And How We Live: The New Science of Ageing and Longevity, says that though he does not work on ageing himself, he wrote this book to answer this big existential question. “Other species know about death, but they don’t know that there is an expiration date … Humans discovered this at some point and ever since then, we have been obsessed about not dying,” he said, in conversation with historian and writer Manu S. Pillai.

Touching on various aspects of ageing, including how different religions view death, the biology of ageing and the vast sums of money invested in the field, Ramakrishnan adds, “I was irritated by all this hype in the field. And so I thought it would be good for someone reasonably close to the field, but not in the field, to write an objective book.”

Unlike in the past when “death was all around us,” as Pillai says, people live longer, and death is today more compartmentalised. “Does that somehow trigger this anxiety about death?” he asks. Ramakrishnan argues that people have always been anxious about death. For instance, he says, the first emperor of the Qin dynasty, Qin Shi Huang, who ruled China over 2,200 years ago, was terrified of dying. “He used to take all sorts of compounds, many of which were toxic, and that probably killed him,” says Ramakrishnan, adding that mummification, something the ancient Egyptians did, was also “a death denial exercise.”

Pillai and Ramakrishnan also discussed the evolutionary basis of longevity, how lifespan varies between various species, the effects of mutations that accumulate in our body as we age, and the cell’s repair mechanisms before venturing into a somewhat controversial topic: the concept of biohacking, popular among many of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. “They will experiment with themselves in a desperate way to try and stay young. I think they are somehow missing the point of living,” says Ramakrishnan. “They forget that life is about other things.”

At the end of the day, what actually seems to work is to adopt a lifestyle and do things we already know we should be doing: eat well, exercise moderately, sleep well, build a wide social network, and have a sense of purpose. “There are a number of things we can do to try and stay healthy, and also, it makes life more enjoyable,” believes Ramakrishnan.