William Morrow will publish a new book by Venki Ramakrishnan, the scientist who won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Ramakrishnan’s Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality is coming next year, the press announced in a news release, describing the book as a “narrative of uncommon insight and beauty” and “a groundbreaking exploration of the science of why and how we age and die.”
Ramakrishnan was born and raised in India and educated there at Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, and later at Ohio University and the University of California, San Diego. From 2015 to 2020, he served as president of the Royal Society, the prestigious U.K. science academy.
He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009 alongside Thomas A. Steitz and Ada Yonath for their studies of ribosomes, molecules found inside animal cells. In 2018, he published a book on the subject, Gene Machine: The Race to Decipher the Secrets of the Ribosome.
In Why We Die, Morrow says, Ramakrishnan “takes us on a riveting journey to the frontiers of biology, asking whether we must be mortal. Covering the recent breakthroughs in scientific research, he examines the cutting edge of efforts to extend lifespan by altering our natural biology. But might death serve a necessary biological purpose? What are the social and ethical costs of attempting to live forever?”
Why We Die is slated for publication on March 19, 2024.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
