Center for the literary arts in New York State
WHY WE DIE
Venki Ramakrishnan
4:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 31, 2026
Venki Ramakrishnan, Nobel Prize-winning structural biologist, is the author of an acclaimed new book for mainstream readers, Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality (2025).
Bestselling author Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods) called it, “Utterly fascinating,” and said, “Venki Ramakrishnan's ability to take the most challenging subjects and make them clear, enthralling and packed with insights fills me with awe.” LitHub called him “a knockout writer.”
Ramakrishnan shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on the nature of ribosomes, the molecular machines found in all living cells that synthesize proteins by translating the genetic information carried by messenger RNA. As the site within living cells where the genetic information is read to synthesise proteins from amino acids, improved understanding of the ribosome has yielded many fundamental biological insights.
Venki was knighted in 2012 and served as president of The Royal Society from 2015 until 2020. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, Leopoldina and EMBO, and a Foreign Member of the Indian National Science Academy.
Cosponsored by The RNA Institute at the University at Albany and the Honors College.
Reviews
"For a book about death, Venki Ramakrishnan's Why We Die is joyfully alive. The story he tells is one of aging and death, but along the way he covers a huge range of biology, evolution, genetics, chemistry, and medicine. This is science writing at its finest: readable, authoritative, and impactful. The vignettes of important discoveries and the scientists that made them enliven the text, and show the personal side of the science of aging. As a scientist who studies dead things, this book gave me a whole new perspective on that one inevitable thing in every organism's life." -- Steve Brusatte, professor and paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh and New York Times bestselling author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs
"Why We Die is a crisply written, captivating and clear-eyed view of death, and how to defeat it. From research on starvation diets, young blood and cryonics to the longevity of naked mole rats, Nobelist Venki Ramakrishnan introduces us to a cast of extraordinary characters in his quest to fathom how elastic lifespan could prove to be.
I believe Why We Die will be his enduring legacy, yet deep down, suspect most of us would still rather achieve immortality through not dying." -- Rodger Highfield, author and science director of the Science Museum Group, London
(Photo credit: Kate Joyce and Santa Fe Institute)
Free and open to the public.
Books will be available for sale.
A signing will follow the conversation.