Delusions of immortality
In Why We Die, Venki Ramakrishnan demolishes the
crackpots and billionaires behind the anti-ageing industry.
As the biologist Venki Ramakrishnan muses in Why We
Die: “When [today’s tech billionaires] were young, they wanted to be rich, and
now that they’re rich, they want to be young.” For the Silicon Valley elite,
ageing “is just another engineering problem to be solved by hacking the code of
life”. His book delves into that code – inscribed in untold complexity in the
genes, molecules and proteins that lurk inside every human body – and
chronicles the various quests to defy ageing and death, from calorie-restricted
diets and cryonics (corpse freezing) to vampiric blood transfusions.
