The Life Eternal

THE QUEST FOR IMMORTALITY AND THE SCIENCE BEHIND IT ARE EXPLAINED IN LAYPERSON'S TERMS IN THIS BOOK BY THE NOBEL LAUREATE VENKI RAMAKRISHNAN

- Shobhit Mahajan

WHY WE DIE

The New Science of Ageing and the Quest for Immortality

by Venki Ramakrishnan

HODDER & STOUGHTON

In the third century BCE, Emperor Qin Shi Huang of China, he of the terracotta army fame, was obsessed with immortality. He sent his men all across the country to look for the “elixir of life”. Unfortunately, one such elixir had too much mercury and caused his death. Fast forward to the 21st century and we now have tech billionaires having the same obsession with eternal life.

The average life span of humans, for most of our history, has been quite modest. As late as the 1950s, it was about 45 years, and it is only now that an average human can reasonably hope to live to her seventies. This is mainly due to a phenomenal decrease in infant mortality, enhanced food production due to chemical fertilisers and, of course, modern medicine. However, the human body, like most biological systems, does degrade with age. It is the wear and tear of our body that is the focus of this fascinating new book by the Nobel laureate Venki Ramakrishnan.

At the heart of any biological system is the cell. Hundreds of millions of years of evolution has ensured that this amazing piece of exquisitely finetuned machinery functions flawlessly most of the time. Although it has the ability to repair any damages, the chemical damages can reach a point where it starts to malfunction.