Santa Fe Institute's 30th Annual Ulam Lecture Series with Venki Ramakrishnan

Night #1

My Adventures in the Ribosome: the Cellular Machine that Reads our Genes

For The Santa Fe Institute’s 30th Annual Ulam Lecture Series, Venki Ramakrishnan will give two back to back talks on August 25th and August 26th. For this first talk, Ramakrishnan will provide a history of molecular visualization, as well as take us through his work at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, where his team determined the atomic structure of the 30S ribosomal subunit and its complexes with ligands and antibiotics.

Everyone is familiar with DNA, but by itself, DNA is just an inert blueprint for life. It is the ribosome — an enormous molecular machine made up of a million atoms — that makes DNA come to life, turning our genetic code into proteins and therefore into us, the “Gene Machine.”

For this work, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 2003, a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2004, and shared the 2009 Nobel prize in Chemistry.

Night #2

Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality

6:30 p.m. Book Signing – Why We Die
7:30 p.m. Lecture

The knowledge of aging and death has driven human culture, including our religions, ever since we became aware of our mortality. For much of our existence there was not much we could do about it. But over the past few decades, biology has made major advances in our understanding of the causes of aging, opening for the first time the possibility of intervening in the process. At the same time, the combination of longer lives and reduced fertility rates means that many societies are faced with an aging population. This has led to large investments in aging research from governments and private industry funded largely by tech billionaires, resulting in both real advances and a large amount of hype. In this talk, Venki Ramakrishnan will discuss some of the key findings about why and how we age and die and prospects for the future. He will also explore the possible consequences of societies with extremely long-lived populations.

Venki Ramakrishnan is on the scientific staff of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. He has a long-standing interest in the structural basis of protein synthesis in the cell, which involves translation of genetic information on mRNA by the ribosome. For his work, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 2003, a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2004, and shared the 2009 Nobel prize in Chemistry.

The 2025 Santa Fe Institute Community Lecture Series is free to attend thanks to generous sponsorship by the McKinnon Family Foundation.