Why We Die
E-book, Czech
Why We Die
A fascinating journey through the biology of life and death
Death awaits everyone and everything. It is an inevitable natural process. The awareness of our own end and the end of all our loved ones is one of the most fundamental human experiences—and one of the most terrifying. The horror is not just death itself, but its very inevitability and irreversibility. Since time immemorial, humanity has therefore sought ways to cope with this awareness and to cheat ageing and death. In recent years especially, biology has made enormous strides in the study of longevity, and an urgent question is coming to the fore: Do we have to die? Biologist and Nobel laureate in chemistry Venki Ramakrishnan has taken this question seriously and takes the reader on a thrilling journey through the biology of ageing, disease, and dying. He addresses the quest for immortality and its scientific and ethical limits. And he answers another, perhaps more important, question: Why do we die?
From a Nobel laureate
What they're saying about the book:
Venki Ramakrishnan is a cautious optimist—he believes that medical research can fundamentally improve the quality of human ageing. At the same time, he warns that we must handle new discoveries with care, so they do not further deepen social inequalities. A stimulating and rewarding book that opens the way to a deeper understanding of the biology of ageing.
- Science
Venki Ramakrishnan
(born 1952) is a British-American biologist and writer of Indian origin. He specialises primarily in molecular biology. In 2009, together with Thomas A. Steitz and Ada E. Yonath, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his research on ribosomes. He wrote about this research in his first book, the critically acclaimed scientific memoir The Gene Machine (2018). He has served as President of the Royal Society.
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