Charles Simonyi Lecture in which Nobel laureate Venki Ramakrishnan, with Marcus du Sautoy, discusses the science of ageing and its social and ethical consequences.
Venki Ramakrishnan is at the Oxford Playhouse on Friday 6 November, as part of the 2026 Charles Simonyi Lecture. He'll be joined on stage by Marcus du Sautoy, and the whole evening is built around ageing and immortality.
If you're not familiar with the name, Ramakrishnan is a Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist. He grew up in India and moved to the US at 19, eventually joining the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge in 1999. His work there focuses on the structure and function of the ribosome—the cell's protein factory—and how antibiotics block bacterial ribosomes. He shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and served as president of the Royal Society from 2015 to 2020. He's also written two books: the memoir Gene Machine and Why We Die, which is exactly what this talk is about.
The Simonyi Lecture works by pairing a scientist with a public intellectual to look at a subject from two angles. Here, the science of ageing is the starting point, but the conversation moves into the social and ethical consequences that come with it. It's less of a lecture and more of a discussion between two people on a stage, so you'll get the biological side of things alongside the broader questions about what it means to grow old.
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It starts at 5:00pm at the Oxford Playhouse on Beaumont Street, and tickets go from ÂŁ5.00, though there's a transaction fee on top. The talk is recommended for ages 12 and over, so it's one you can bring a teenager along to if they're into science.
