On Immortality

A dialogue between physician and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee and fellow Pulitzer winner Elizabeth Kolbert, with ICE at Dartmouth director Marcelo Gleiser


We live in an age when geneticists are working to advance our life span and improve our quality of life—but are we also inadvertently engineering the sixth mass extinction in the Earth’s history? Physician and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Emperor of All Maladies) and fellow Pulitzer winner Elizabeth Kolbert (The Sixth Extinction) join Dartmouth theoretical physicist and ICE Director Marcelo Gleiser for a fascinating dialogue on life and mortality, from the human to the planetary scale. Will living longer lives redefine what it means to be human, and how much will it matter if our planet itself is in peril?

Recorded at the 92nd Street Y in New York City on October 4, 2018.