Venki Ramakrishnan, 72, has been watching as ageing science and the hype around it has exploded.
The microbiologist based in Cambridge, in the UK, is a Nobel laureate for his work on the ribosome – where our cells make proteins using the information encoded in our genes – and former president of the world’s oldest scientific academy, the Royal Society.
In his new book Why We Die he writes that in the last 10 years alone, more than 300,000 scientific articles on ageing have been published, and more than 700 start-ups have invested tens of billions of dollars into ageing research.
There have been some real scientific breakthroughs, deepening our understanding of the fundamental causes of ageing, Ramakrishnan says. But despite what companies that have jumped on the bandwagon will have you believe, “we’re not there yet” when it comes to translating that research into real-life treatments, he says.
The global market for therapies associated with longevity and anti-senescence (senescence means biological ageing) was valued at US$25.1 billion in 2020, and is projected to reach US$44.2 billion by 2030, according to Allied Market Research.