Memento Mori
Mohan Rao
WHY WE DIE: THE NEW SCIENCE OF AGEING AND THE QUEST FOR IMMORTALITY by By Venki Ramakrishnan Hodder Press, London , 2024, 310 pp., INR ₹ 699.00
March 2025, volume 49, No 3

Professor Venki Ramakrishnan was the winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2009. He has worked for several decades on the intricacies of intracellular mechanisms, of what ribosomes do in our cells. He received the Padma Vibhushan in 2010.

Here he is, with an incredibly readable book looking at why we die, going much beyond the cell he has studied all these decades. And that is a jump he does with ease and wonderful felicity, although sometimes inaccurately as for example his thesis on why life expectancy increased in the West.

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