There are dozens of inspiring startups spun out from leading labs on the biology of aging like Turn Bio, Retro Bio, Altos Labs, Rejuvenate Bio, Cyclarity Therapeutics, and others. It'll be captivating to see how they go through clinical trials and ultimately what succeeds and fails.
You never know. Right now we pump out a million biology papers a year, far too many to make sense of without at least very strong narrow AI. If we put all those papers into such an AI and asked it to cure or ameliorate aging, who knows what it might find.
And literally in the 13 days since I posted this comment, AlphaFold 3, another huge breakthrough, was released. Venki may be a pessimist about conquering aging in the lifetimes of people around today, but he may have to revise his predictions. He says AlphFold 2 happened decades earlier than was expected and still stuck to his pessimism. It is now used by every biology lab in the world. Then _four whole years!!!_ later Deepmind released AlphaFold 3, which cannot only predict proteins but drugs as well. So another massive breakthrough. And that's not even taking into account what generative AI can do for drug discovery. I get it, Venki is 7 or 72. He's not sure if he'll make it, which of course will affect you decision-making. But his own father is 98, so...dude, if you have that genetics and god fortune, that's like 30 more years. None of us know what the world will look like in 2055. Nobody.
Frankly speaking, Venki Ramakrishnan DID NOT really deserve the Nobel Prize on the Ribosome. I consider the following scientists had ENORMOUS contributions, much more than Venki, in the field : Harry F. Noller, University of California at Santa Cruz, Peter B. Moore of Yale University. Yusupov et al (2001), from UC Santa Cruz and Ogle et al (2001), from Venki's MRC group in Cambridge, were both printed in the same issue of Science, May 4, 2001, back-to-back. However, Noller's life-long contributions on Ribosomes makes Venki look like a pigmy in the field, really. Also, way back in 1976, James A. Lake of UCLA had published a paper titled 'Ribosome Structure Determined by Electron Microscopy...' for small & large subunits and monomeric ribosomes, all verified by crystallography. Richard Brimacombe's group at Berlin also had published their Cryo-electron Microscopic study in 2000. Possibly, it was Venki's political support from his past mentor Thomas Steitz of Yale and the US clout, that resulted in Venki being chosen against more deserving candidates. Actually, Debi Prasad Burma et al (1985) Archives of Biochemistry and Biophysics had first showed in their seminal paper from BHU that in the ribosomes, it was the RNA and NOT any of the associated proteins that carries out the catalytic function.
