'We Are Not Programmed to Die,' Says Nobel Laureate Venki Ramakrishnan (wired.com) 86
In a recent interview with Wired, Nobel laureate Venkatraman Ramakrishnan discusses his book Why We Die, in which he argues that death is not genetically programmed but rather a consequence of evolution favoring reproduction over longevity. Here are some of the most thought-provoking excerpts:
WIRED: Professor Ramakrishnan, the crucial question in your book is why we die. But exactly what is death?
Venki Ramakrishnan: By death, we mean the irreversible loss of the ability to function as a coherent individual. It is the result of the failure of a critical system or apparatus, for example, heart, brain, lung, or kidney failure. In this sense there is an apparent paradox: When our organism, as a whole, is alive, millions of cells within us are constantly dying, and we do not even realize it. On the other hand, at the time of death, most of the cells in our bodies are still alive, and entire organs are still functioning and can be donated to people in need of transplantation. But at that point the body has lost the ability to function as a whole. In this sense, it is therefore important to distinguish between cell death and death of the individual.
Speaking of death and aging, you say in your most recent book that you "wanted to offer an objective look at our current understanding of the two phenomena." What was the biggest surprise or most deeply held belief that you had to reconsider while writing and researching this work?
There have been several surprises, actually. One is that death, contrary to what one might think, is not programmed by our genes. Evolution does not care how long we live, but merely selects the ability to pass on our genes, a process known as "fitness" in evolutionary biology. Thus, the traits that are selected are those that help us survive childhood and reproduce. And it is these traits, later in life, that cause aging and decline. Another curious finding was the fact that aging is not simply due to wear and tear on cells. Wear and tear happens constantly in all living things, yet different species have very different lifespans. Instead, lifespan is the result of a balance between the expenditure of resources needed to keep the organism functioning and repairing it and those needed to make it grow, mature, and keep it healthy until it reproduces and nurtures offspring.
Do you think there is an aspect of the biology of aging that is still deeply misunderstood by the general public?
Certainly the indefinite extension of life. Although in principle there are no laws or constraints that prevent us from living much longer than we do currently, great longevity or "eternal youth" are still far off, and very significant obstacles to increasing our maximum life expectancy remain. We must also beware of the pseudoscience -- and business -- around the concepts of "anti-aging" or the "reversal of aging." These are often baseless concepts, unsupported by hard evidence, even though they may use language that sounds scientific. Unfortunately, we are all afraid of growing old and dying, so we are very sensitive to any claim that promises to help us avoid it. [...]
What do you think are the social and ethical implications of our desire to live longer?
Ever since we became aware of our mortality, we have desired to defeat aging and death. However, our individual desires may conflict with what is best for society. A society in which fertility rates are very low and lifespans are very high will be a stagnant society, with very slow generational turnover, and probably much less dynamic and creative. The Nobel Prize-winning South American novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who recently passed away, expressed it best: "Old age on the one hand terrifies us, but when we feel anxious, it is important to remember how terrible it would be to live forever. If eternity were guaranteed, all the incentives and illusions of life would vanish. This thought can help us live old age in a better way."
Venki Ramakrishnan: By death, we mean the irreversible loss of the ability to function as a coherent individual. It is the result of the failure of a critical system or apparatus, for example, heart, brain, lung, or kidney failure. In this sense there is an apparent paradox: When our organism, as a whole, is alive, millions of cells within us are constantly dying, and we do not even realize it. On the other hand, at the time of death, most of the cells in our bodies are still alive, and entire organs are still functioning and can be donated to people in need of transplantation. But at that point the body has lost the ability to function as a whole. In this sense, it is therefore important to distinguish between cell death and death of the individual.
Speaking of death and aging, you say in your most recent book that you "wanted to offer an objective look at our current understanding of the two phenomena." What was the biggest surprise or most deeply held belief that you had to reconsider while writing and researching this work?
There have been several surprises, actually. One is that death, contrary to what one might think, is not programmed by our genes. Evolution does not care how long we live, but merely selects the ability to pass on our genes, a process known as "fitness" in evolutionary biology. Thus, the traits that are selected are those that help us survive childhood and reproduce. And it is these traits, later in life, that cause aging and decline. Another curious finding was the fact that aging is not simply due to wear and tear on cells. Wear and tear happens constantly in all living things, yet different species have very different lifespans. Instead, lifespan is the result of a balance between the expenditure of resources needed to keep the organism functioning and repairing it and those needed to make it grow, mature, and keep it healthy until it reproduces and nurtures offspring.
Do you think there is an aspect of the biology of aging that is still deeply misunderstood by the general public?
Certainly the indefinite extension of life. Although in principle there are no laws or constraints that prevent us from living much longer than we do currently, great longevity or "eternal youth" are still far off, and very significant obstacles to increasing our maximum life expectancy remain. We must also beware of the pseudoscience -- and business -- around the concepts of "anti-aging" or the "reversal of aging." These are often baseless concepts, unsupported by hard evidence, even though they may use language that sounds scientific. Unfortunately, we are all afraid of growing old and dying, so we are very sensitive to any claim that promises to help us avoid it. [...]
What do you think are the social and ethical implications of our desire to live longer?
Ever since we became aware of our mortality, we have desired to defeat aging and death. However, our individual desires may conflict with what is best for society. A society in which fertility rates are very low and lifespans are very high will be a stagnant society, with very slow generational turnover, and probably much less dynamic and creative. The Nobel Prize-winning South American novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who recently passed away, expressed it best: "Old age on the one hand terrifies us, but when we feel anxious, it is important to remember how terrible it would be to live forever. If eternity were guaranteed, all the incentives and illusions of life would vanish. This thought can help us live old age in a better way."
Maybe.. (Score:5, Insightful)
But the code to live seems to have a hell of a lot of bugs.
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Re:Maybe.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Feature not bug. The design specification is "live until reproduces and ensures good chance for next generation to reproduce too"
There's nothing in that design specification about "lives beyond 50" and many reasons, including resource competition with children, to think that dying off soon after 50 is a good way to support the second part of the specification.
Re:Maybe.. (Score:4, Funny)
There's nothing in that design specification about "lives beyond 50" and many reasons, including resource competition with children, to think that dying off soon after 50 is a good way to support the second part of the specification.
This is why I take food from my friend's children when they're not looking. I plan on living well passed 50 and I don't need that competition!
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Not even sure it's a feature. If you are unlikely to live beyond 50 as a result of various factors, then there's a negative cost to building mechanisms for you to live beyond 50, as it will take resources which will decrease chances of survival earlier in life. Prior to the 1930s people regularly died from infections. I wouldwager that a large number of people here you are taking to would be dead but for antibiotics and similar things. Add in traumatic injury, starvation and malnutrition and humans at the p
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Uh, there's a specific part of the design about making sure you die after 50. The whole system of having a lit fuse at the end of your DNA?
Telomeres are ~10,000 base pairs repeating blank data (TTAGGG) at the end of your DNA. The act of cell replication (in humans) snaps off 50-200 pairs and shortens your DNA. Once the cell runs out of telomeres to snap off, THE PROCESS CONTINUES and it keeps snapping off meaningful parts of your DNA. Your skin cells replicate a lot and eventually you get thin fr
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This is overly direct causality thinking and overlooks transitive benefits.
Older individuals often mentor, advise, and guide younger generations - supporting not just immediate reproduction, but higher-quality, more sustainable reproduction across generations. They can also shape longer-term thinking and more stable environments, which indirectly improve conditions for successful procreation.
By your logic, we might as well argue that "writing down accumulated knowledge in books doesn’t support optimal
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This is overly direct causality thinking and overlooks transitive benefits.
Older individuals often mentor, advise, and guide younger generations - supporting not just immediate reproduction, but higher-quality, more sustainable reproduction across generations. They can also shape longer-term thinking and more stable environments, which indirectly improve conditions for successful procreation.
I don't want to negate that, but I think there are real questions about how long is ideal for that benefit. We can see now in the USA (last three presidents at least) what the risks are if older generations retain power too long. America would be much better off if there was a strict automatic death at 65.
Taking that thought a bit further, I think the clear approach of death and inability to work effectively before that very much encourages the passing on of knowledge. That's something which comes directly
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Majority of those are actually user faults.
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you just died (Score:1, Troll)
1 second ago, you died. The next you, who you strongly yet falsely .. believe is the previous you, will only live for about 1 second. You only believe you're the previous you because of the data in the neurons of the brain and body you occupy. If you instantly body swapped, or died you'd have no idea. The present is all you know.
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You only believe you're the previous you because of the data in the neurons of the brain and body you occupy. If you instantly body swapped, or died you'd have no idea.
I strongly (yet perhaps falsely) believe you've read and been influenced by Greg Egan's short story "Dust", or perhaps "Permutation City". :)
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CGP Grey: The Trouble with Transporters [youtube.com]
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"The present is all you know."
False.
"You only believe you're the previous you because of the data in the neurons of the brain and body you occupy. "
That is literally what causes "knowing". We know the past possibly as well as we know the present. It's all "data in the neurons". Sure, neuron memory is imperfect, but both for the present and the past.
And what is the purpose of this thought exercise? It only appears interesting because you've left a great deal out. How could it be known that you died one
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According to the theory in my previous comment, you failed. I'd like to take credit for coming up with that, but it was my prior self.
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If you meet the Buddha, kill him
Same applies to meeting your prior self. Could be a time travel or from an evil dimension.
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Yeah, be just like that guy, "I plan to live forever or die trying."
He's old now, but one of the few that still live.
Well, no (Score:3)
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What gene activates to bump us off? If your theory was strong, death would occur pretty suddenly and around the same age for everyone. The same way for example puberty and menopause is precisely timed. Everyone would die around age 75 to 85 (aged enough to be able to secure their grandkids into adulthood in case something happened to the first generation) or something like that. There are dozens of other ways evolution could have handled the resource competition issue, such as increasing the level of caring
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Well, death does occur around the same age if you ignore accidents, edge cases and the early victims of the lack of universal healthcare. This is why we can talk about life expectancy.
Why you think it would be "sudden" when applying it to the whole population?
Re:Well, no (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, death does occur around the same age if you ignore accidents, edge cases and the early victims of the lack of universal healthcare. This is why we can talk about life expectancy.
Why you think it would be "sudden" when applying it to the whole population?
We don't see many 250 year old people - oh wait, we don't see any.
I think that "we are not programmed to die" is not the right concept. We are not programmed to live forever is much more accurate. Certain vital parts, such as the calcium phosphate in bones, just doesn't survive the wear and tear of even the lifespans we have now. Collagen in ligaments the same. We wear out.
All that said, There is a huge problem with life extension. It all happens on the "old" end. If we could spend infinity at 25 years old, great. But we don't. When dealing with the inevitable wear and tear, we're probably going to look a little grim at a thousand years old and up.
I've also wondered on a personal level, why so many people are obsessed with the idea of living forever. I don't even want to do that.
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"around the same age" can mean any age. For example 40, 80 or 120. It doesn't have to be 250.
Life extension does not happen only on the "old" end. You can stay younger for longer most likely by just adjusting your life habits:
https://www.nia.nih.gov/news/l... [nih.gov]
And there are teams that work on reversing aging too.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.c... [medicalnewstoday.com]
Forever is a long time, but if I could live in a healthy young body, in a nice environment with a nice life, I see no reason why I wouldn't want to live longer than no
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"around the same age" can mean any age. For example 40, 80 or 120. It doesn't have to be 250.
Life extension does not happen only on the "old" end. You can stay younger for longer most likely by just adjusting your life habits: https://www.nia.nih.gov/news/l... [nih.gov]
And there are teams that work on reversing aging too. https://www.medicalnewstoday.c... [medicalnewstoday.com]
Forever is a long time, but if I could live in a healthy young body, in a nice environment with a nice life, I see no reason why I wouldn't want to live longer than normal.
One of the interesting things about life extension is that you get used to it really quickly. Let's use my 250 number for giggles. No matter how long we live, it will seem too short. You won't feel like you've suddenly tripled lifespan, it will just seem like a new normal. And we'll long for 500 years, a thousand years, infinite years.
There are a whole lot of physiological things that will need to change - one example is bone structure, (It would be cool to have a titanium foam skeleton) I have a bit of
Quantum Immortality (Score:1)
Pretty depressing really, hopefully dementia takes hold so we end up not caring.
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Even more frightening is the concept of Quantum Immortality. Quantum Mechanics essentially predicts the we will each experience an immortal life, getting older and more decrepit as we go, in our own universes, so we see all our loved ones die off. Pretty depressing really, hopefully dementia takes hold so we end up not caring.
Yah, I cannot fathom the concept of immortality. Truth is, the afterlife of the angry desert god sounds like a version of hell to me. Worship him on earth, so that you can worship him forever.
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What gene activates to bump us off?
As is usually the case with nature, there's no one single mechanism that handles it any well-defined fashion. If evolution was a programmer, you'd have fired it immediately, because his output stinks -- not functional or elegant.
But to answer the gist of your question: one mechanism is telomeres [jax.org] in your DNA that function rather like the TTL [packetpushers.net] field in an IP packet -- at each cell division, they telomeres in the new cells are a bit shorter than the telomeres of their parents, and when the telomeres are final
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Well, the code was generated by AI, that's why it's so messy and inefficient, but the telomeres thing is just a basic analog copy error, and it should be possible to periodically clean up the degradation, thus effectively enabling practically eternal life (for those who can afford it) once we have the right amount of DNA manipulation technology and expertise.
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but the telomeres thing is just a basic analog copy error
I think it may have started out that way, but the error turned out to have a beneficial side effect (cancerous-tumor suppression) so the bug was promoted into a feature and now is included as standard.
it should be possible to periodically clean up the degradation, thus effectively enabling practically eternal life
That does seem plausible, although I'm skeptical that practically eternal life will be as desirable as people imagine. Even if the body can be kept young and healthy (and the procedure doesn't cause cancer as a side effect), I suspect the mind will start to suffer after too many decades of operation. You'll
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Well, yes, the going slowly insane thing is a big risk, especially since sentient beings that live that long tend to amass a lot of physical wealth and social power, but on the plus side they still won't be literally immortal without some other unrelated technological advancement, and the vast majority of them will probably eventually just get bored enough to self terminate without purposefully causing a lot of collateral damage.
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Oh, and the procedure will cause cancer as a side-effect, but by then the technology will have advanced to the point that it will be trivial to correct along with the rest of the errors.
Re: Well, no (Score:3)
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The post you replied to only offered telomeres as one example of how cells are programmed to die. Your entire post is completely unrelated to that.
Re: Well, no (Score:3)
What bumps us off may not be an active gene but the consequence of NOT running the same genes when we are younger. This is why Yamacka factors reverse aging in laboratory cells and make this author a crackpot who disagrees with nobel prize winning science.
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Doesn't have to be one gene and there doesn't need to be an "activation" to "bump us off".
"The same way for example puberty and menopause is precisely timed."
So, not at all precise.
"Everyone would die around age 75 to 85..."
If your faulty logic were correct.
"There are dozens of other ways evolution could have handled the resource competition issue, such as increasing the level of caring for offspring while at the same time abrogating the offspring's concern for parents."
So sorry there's nothing to eat, chil
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This whole argument was stupid to begin with, and now your statements have enabled this discussion to evolve to an even greater level of stupidity. Anyway, if evolution actually built-in an "expiration date" and programming for us to die, it would be easy to increase longevity. Saying evolution programmed us to die, means our ancestors encountered a scenario wherein dying early offered a species-survival advantage. It means there was a time when humans, or some other ancestral species, lived to say 200 year
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We are programmed to die
We aren't "programmed" to do anything unless you think of God as a computer programmer.
Most of us don't consider our bodies as our living identity. Its our consciousness, spirit, soul or whatever else you call it that we want to have live forever. Hooking our permanently unconscious body up to life support is not our idea of eternal life.
I am not sure you can define life without death. Because change both creates and destroys. There are lots of things with (almost) eternal life, they are called rocks. The
Consciousness (Score:2)
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DNA works pretty much exactly like a programming language. You can write if-sentences with the DNA, and you can write "return" to stop the function execution. You can also write never ending loops and counters to loop only for a certain amount of times. But it is extremely difficult, because running the code consumes building blocks. It is very easy to write code that consumes all blocks and gets stuck and kills the whole organism. Also the operations are not always exact, so you need to write backup system
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But the code was not written by god, it was written by our parents.
The code wasn't "written" by anything other than random chance.
DNA works pretty much exactly like a programming language
If its code than so is any chemical reaction.
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Correct, and apex predators would never die until they rendered their entire food supply extinct. Aging is a requirement for evolution to work, it's built in.
"If you'd bothered researching a bit more rather than putting out a book simply because you won a nobel prize you'd have found this is already a well known and understood phenomena."
I suspect lack of research is not the issue, it's saying something sensationalist even though it's untrue. I won't know for sure because I'm offended by the stupidity as
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There's a difference between being programmed to, and having a sizable number of bugs in your DNA that result in death anyway, and "deciding" (in this case evolution favoring) not to fix any of them because it works out better.
Given there's no single cause of death after a certain age (not even the reduction in telomeres during cell division is reliable [wikipedia.org]) it's better to suggest that evolution favored those where the bugs weren't fixed.
THAT SAID: Whatever the mechanism, I don't think you're entirely wrong tha
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Fruit flies (Score:5, Interesting)
Some years ago, I read about an interesting experiment: They only allowed fruit flies to reproduce near the end of their lifespans. Thus pushing evolution to care about them living longer. IIRC it took surprisingly few generations to triple their lifespan.
Basically, evolution doesn't care how long you live, as long as it's long enough to raise your kids to adulthood. Anyone read Heinlein's book "Methuselah's Children"?
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Ah, so let's do this to humanity. I think there's a name for this...
Oh yeah, extinction.
Re: Fruit flies (Score:1)
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You don't need Eugenics to encourage people with serious genetic diseases to have fewer children. You can just do it anytime. Whereas Eugenics doesn't encourage anyone: it forces undesirables to have no children, because someone (who is not an "undesirable") says they must disappear from the world.
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You can just do it [encourage people with serious genetic diseases to have fewer children] anytime.
That's eugenics.
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The real problem with trying to "optimize" humanity, from a genetic sense, is that we have no idea which genes will be beneficial to survive some potential species-ending event.
The best solution could come from mutated genes that derive from a serious genetic disease.
Without being able to see the future, I would argue that the more genetic diversity we have available, the more resilient our species will be.
Perhaps if we had a "spare" Earth/Universe and infinite time, we could perform all possible combinatio
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Perhaps if we had a "spare" Earth/Universe and infinite time, we could perform all possible combinations of genes to determine which genome would be ideal for all situations. Maybe we ARE such an experiment.
We do. We're living in it. That's exactly what they are doing. The Matrix has you Neo. But in this case you're a genetic experiment rather than a battery.
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Who's going to "do" this? "Us"? You're going to decide who reproduces when?
And to be clear, evolution may or may increase human life span in this instance, but if it did it would do so through natural selection. The natural selection that humans have already defeated.
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Some years ago, I read about an interesting experiment: They only allowed fruit flies to reproduce near the end of their lifespans. Thus pushing evolution to care about them living longer. IIRC it took surprisingly few generations to triple their lifespan.
If we are to follow this logically then socially we should be shaming people for having children early and avoid mating with the children that are born of young parents. To that end, it is only logical to make all forms of contraception free. In short, if you parents aren't at least X years of age then you are viewed as inferior. Also, IVF would likely need to go out the window.
This seems like an evolutionary sound plan to extend human or even move the age range for procreation with the possible side effect
Time to go digital (Score:3)
Biology is such a shitty way to run an intelligence, it's inhumane.
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Sounds like a plausible hypothesis. (Score:2)
Interesting.
But more pressing an issue for me is: When are the complete and 100% gene-compliant biomods coming? I want to turn back my clock 30 years and replace some parts of my lobsided scull and sceleton. Along with 150+ years of lifespan and perhaps optimized pheromone system to make things easier with the ladies.
Anybody working on this?
Death is a gift (Score:1)
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Not really. We could grow a lot more food if we wanted if we just pay for it. It is the same with fresh water. We are not running out of fresh water, we are running out of cheap fresh water. You pretty much need just carbon and energy and you can create food anywhere. And you can get more energy with money.
What you will run out of is money to buy the food. There is not enough work for everyone to earn money. You could overcome this problem with some kind communism, but that is another story.
Distinction without a difference (Score:2)
"In a recent interview with Wired, Nobel laureate Venkatraman Ramakrishnan discusses his book Why We Die, in which he argues that death is not genetically programmed but rather a consequence of evolution favoring reproduction over longevity".
Yes - through genes that program death.
Did anyone think this? (Score:3)
Did anyone think we were "programmed" to die?
We're complex biological machines and break down over time. I wouldn't have described it as "programming" any more than I'd call it "programming" that the engine in my car will eventually wear out.
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Yes, all of science "thinks" that. No one calls it "programming" though, that's just stupid.
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Let me double-post this here: there's a specific part of the design about making sure you die after 50. The whole system of having a lit fuse at the end of your DNA?
Telomeres are ~10,000 base pairs repeating blank data (TTAGGG) at the end of your DNA (every chromosome). The act of cell replication (in humans) snaps off 50-200 pairs and shortens your DNA. Once the cell runs out of telomeres to snap off, THE PROCESS CONTINUES and it keeps snapping off meaningful parts of your DNA. Your skin cells replicate a
Two ways (Score:2)
I look back at how I was often used as a cog in someone else's pointless machine because I was "building my career", etc. Today, I have more wisdom, especially big-picture wisdom, that enables me to better avoid the waste and choose more useful-to-myself/society productivity, even if ot
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We are programmed to have no blood (Score:2)
I believe that it is possible that a mid-life half liter of blood from a young bone-marrow compatible donor could provi
wut? (Score:2)
"...death is not genetically programmed but rather a consequence of evolution favoring reproduction over longevity..."
What is evolution other than genetic programming? Death isn't genetically programmed, not continuing to live is. What an insight.
He missed the obvious (Score:2)
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It's just BS to garner attention. Should be disregarded in its entirety.
Evolution favoring reproduction (Score:2)
Regardless, accumulated replication errors during cell division would cause the body to fail. Apart from the brain, that doesn't grow new cells. so even if you live to 900. You won't be aware you're still alive.
longevity escape velocity (Score:2)
longevity escape velocity - some ASI assisted breakthrough extends human life by 7 years. Then the next lifespan breakthrough occurs within 7 years. repeat.
Now let's see who will complain about AI copyright issues, you want copyrights longer than a human lifespan or a human lifespan longer than copyright?
poobah (Score:2)
Evolution is not design, even if it seems like it, so we are not "programmed" to do anything.
Why couldn't gene selection favor death? (Score:2)
Remember, the unit of selection is not the individual or phenotype. The unit of selection is the gene.
From their point of view, that means if you have two kids, they are "worth" as much as yourself. Throw in their kids, and other peoples' interests might be more valuable to your genes than you are! Your genes to you: "Time to stop taking their food, and die instead."
Nobody is surprised when a drone gives their life for the queen. So don't be surprised if you see the same computation happening elsewhere.