YouSaid · the spoken record

Laura Deming

lines on the record: 45
first: 2026-01-29
most recent: 2026-01-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Think it is artistically cool if it's educational, but I think it's more just because they think it's so beautiful. It's like if you've never seen a tree, it's like being able to see a tree. It's like, that would be so great, right? You know, it's like this complex factal thing and all this light falling through the sort of tree branches. And I think the Mukler world is like that. It's just, it's a kind of view that's not made accessible to most people. It's hard to conceptualize and you have to do some amount of studying to sort of like build the roles in your mind correctly.”
2026-01-29 · No Priors · Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Aesthetically, I'm just really curious about how to represent the molecular world in a way that people can understand and engage with. I think it's just such a cool and beautiful thing. It's like, you know, we're talking about kindergarten roles earlier. It's like this beautiful kindergarten feels in my mind very colorful, even though it's not literally sort of a place to play around. And I think most people experience it as flat triangles and squares in a biology textbook where it's like, you know, there's an arrow between this triangle and this triangle is just like doesn't make any conceptual sense and it's like confusing and annoying. And so I'm just like, I personally am really curious about how to represent the Mucular world in a way that is really compelling and feels super exciting.”
2026-01-29 · No Priors · Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I think just like one sort of trust one surgeon that we've been working with, the way he described it was just like just making time not a variable changes the whole paradigm. I don't think that will happen overnight, obviously, but like I think the dream would be that like everyone in the ecosystem has the time they need to make the best possible decision, sort of like do things in a way that feels the best for them. A surgeon doesn't have to stay up overnight the same day that they flew out to get the organ to do the surgery. They can wait sort of until it's like the best time for them sort of doing it like literally as soon as they land like they go into operation. It's sort of something that when you really think about it, it's like it's amazing that, I mean, it's incredible that everyone is operating this way right now.”
2026-01-29 · No Priors · Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's such a crazy proposition. And then I also think, you know, right now for matching, it's like everything's done in literally the last minute. It's like someone dies and organ comes available. And like you're just kind of calling around trying to find what patient is available to get this organ. And you don't have that much time to make the optimal match, right? It's sort of like. Who can get to the hospital?”
2026-01-29 · No Priors · Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the thing that feels the most compelling for me is just like the experience of the transplant patient. It's really, I think, constricting, it's like you're waiting for a life-changing surgery and you have no idea when it will even be scheduled and you can't go on vacation or really leave and you have to like move close to the place where you will get surgery and you can't leave a certain radius of like travel distance to that place for fear of losing out on your life-changing surgery. That is such a”
2026-01-29 · No Priors · Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Aging becoming something that, like one of the best, someone who seems one of the best next generation professors chooses to work on without shame or fear of not giving a grant is great. That part of aging being unstream is great. And I definitely. Hope that that happens for car preservation, specifically also for preservation of variety of tissues, including neural tissue and including things related to whole body work, not exclusively, but basically those topics aren't seen as something that you're fine to work on.”
2026-01-29 · No Priors · Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think, for example, coal body reversal cart preservation now seen as just much more kind of reasonable, but whole body reversible preservation, definitely an area where I think there's just so much possibility for conflation with really extreme, it's hard to talk about it rationally. People either love it and they love it so much that they won't question it or it's like they're Worried that thinking about that, associating with it is a little bit too science fiction for kind of where it might be optimal for them to be focused. And so I think like I'm kind of dancing around some things that are still but adtik around it. But yeah.”
2026-01-29 · No Priors · Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think even the field of organ reversal crop preservation really had trouble for a while attracting the resources that would be required to scale it. And I really give a lot of credit to the field pioneers. Like, you know, Greg is an incredible example of somebody who fought tirelessly to make this field a reality and sort of make verification a thing that people were taking seriously. And through a long period where I think it just wasn't kind of something to focus on. But I don't know how to put it, but like in venture, I think my whole job sort of in that part of my life is like picking trends that like sort of feel like, oh, this thing just feels weird or it seems kind of hard to think about, but technically, like there's nothing kind of that corresponds to that.”
2026-01-29 · No Priors · Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's sort of like, you know, even just on the whole, the organ scale, like, this is not a problem that's entirely out in the wilderness. It's something that is even academically tractable right now.”
2026-01-29 · No Priors · Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just going to be versus the car preserved. I mean, there's work from the existing cardiology community, so from John Dishaw's group, and then predated by that also Greg Faheed has done excellent work sort of looking at reversible car preservation in kidneys and showing you can reversible car preserve a kidney, rebarm it, put it into a rat that does not have another kidney. That rat returns normal function after about a month.”
2026-01-29 · No Priors · Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think what we can't accurately expose the models that we use to think about the problem why we think that this is at all possibly in scope and what we're testing to sort of try and get closer to there. And I think the problem is interesting enough that some of 100 sort of like really good people tend to be skeptical at first because there's an intuition that it shouldn't work, but then they'll see a lot of data very quickly where it's like, wait, I wouldn't have thought that was possible intuitively, but that seems to be possible. And so let me think about this from force principles. What's another data?”
2026-01-29 · No Priors · Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the possibility that's difficult, but I think right now I feel good about our ability to communicate around that, which is like, I think if we were like, it's 100% possible to do full body versus preservation, there's no question we're certain, like then we would just be bullshitters and then we wouldn't be able to recruit because there's a lot of technical risk and there's a lot of uncertainty between here and there.”
2026-01-29 · No Priors · Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we can't make a dent on that problem. Like, there's no version of not going through it. Yeah. So this thing is really, it's like if you're serious, that should be doable. And if like you can't do that, then you're not the company to do the long-term thing. So it was nice for us to have a very clear benchmark for ourselves of, you know,”
2026-01-29 · No Priors · Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The last minute, so the patient has to wait within like a two hour radius of a transplant center with pager on them or like a notification device at all times. And so the first product that we're aiming towards is just being able to pause time for the organs. The patient doesn't, you can take as long as you need to get the organ to the patient. And that's very near term. That's not long-term ethical. That's like we're aiming to get that into pre-clinical studies and into the clinic as quickly as possible.”
2026-01-29 · No Priors · Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and it's crazy because it's like they're they're like one of the most precious resources we know of and yet like people regularly charter private jets you know like you're pretty much searching on a private jet to go pick up an organ get it back to patient in time like and you're doing all that at the last minute and scheduling the patient for surgery”
2026-01-29 · No Priors · Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think we have a pretty clear timeline for a first product, which is get a reversibly cry preserved. So basically transplant patients today surprisingly frequently miss organs that are en route to them because there's a timing problem. So like, you know, organs expire very quickly after they become available from a donor. That's unfortunate.”
2026-01-29 · No Priors · Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think initially I was like, we could maybe make some progress and hopefully make some good products. But like the idea of full body cry preservation felt like that would be really far out if that was possible. I mean, I think it, I definitely still wouldn't put like a near-term timeline on it, but I feel like we have a much clearer roadmap, at least to get to begin to get there. And the first steps seem faster than I would have imagined, if that makes sense. The big unknown to get to full body reversible is the brain. It's unclear. Like, like the brain can withstand a lot of change and does withstand a lot of different types of damage or change with age, for example. But it's unclear whether like what kind of injury the brain could sustain in the context of a whole body verse book preservation protocol and then like what level of fidelity it's possible to do so like that that that to be clear is a big unknown on the neuroscience side”
2026-01-29 · No Priors · Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe it's not. We work on the two in parallel. So we both work on scaling up prayer preservation and rewarming technologies to kind of human organ scale. And also in parallel, we work on a sort of whole rat reversible hibernation and intrinsic technologies over from sort of what we learn on the kidney side into the rat context, as well as doing things specifically for rat.”
2026-01-29 · No Priors · Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. Yeah. And so as you increase cooling and rewarming rate, aka spending, therefore, minimal time and kind of the dangerous zone of ice formation, you can correspondingly decrease the concentration of carbon that you're putting in. But if you could instantaneously cool and re-warm, then you wouldn't have to put any CP in. But that's not something that word default assuming is feasible for a large system. So there's still always going to be a component of biology, aka how tissue responds, especially for anxicity perspective to a new chemical agent.”
2026-01-29 · No Priors · Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so let me restate that and then give one caveat just to make sure that I understand you correctly. So a way that you can talk about the trade-off between engineering and biology is that with engineering you can modulate cooling and rewarming rate just to a certain extent. And then that can then change how much what we call crypto agent or kind of chemical that modulates ice formation you add to the system. And you want to minimize the concentration of that crypto agent.”
2026-01-29 · No Priors · Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sort of a lot of theoretical toolkit used in physics to model parts of this question in ways that are actually useful. And it is just not true that you can use equations from physics to think usefully about almost any other problem in biology. There are plugins like in the context of medical devices, but in a context where you're talking about changing the course of terminal illness, which this one is interesting because this doesn't mean lateral change it, but like it gives you the possibility of more time. I think it's one of the most important things about the problem. I don't yet understand how to explain it in a way that is clear, but I think it's one of the most important things to understand about the problem.”
2026-01-29 · No Priors · Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the fact that that's possible is a huge deal. Like, that is not true for most problems in biology. And it gives you a lot of leverage on the problem. This is probably interesting to maybe only like 5% of people watching this, but I think that I'm obsessed with it's just the idea like temperature is such a beautiful conceptual tool, right? It's like temperature as an idea is something that in physics took physics hundreds of years to come up with. It links molecular motion to a high, like a single high level measurable parameter and just tuning temperature sort of tells you about almost like the relative passage of time of like molecules at the nanoscale, which's a highly non-trivial sort of conceptual lever to have on a problem. And in biology, one of the biggest problems is really hard to find powerful conceptual levers on four nanoscale, for manipulating the nanoscale that have anything approaching that degree of sort of leverage. Basically, what that gives you is like you can apply a lot of theoretical”
2026-01-29 · No Priors · Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So actually, I feel like there's this part of the problem that I've been trying to explain externally for a long time. Every time I try to explain it, I think it comes off as not specific or something, but it is actually one of the core reasons why I think the problem is interesting to work on, which is that you can trade off engineering difficulty and biological difficulty to a non-zero degree. Like, not 100%. You can't just use engineering to solve the problem. You absolutely have biological questions. And those questions could come out in the negative for some use cases. So that's not saying you can just make engineering problem, but like you can make your life easier on the biology front by building better engineering tooling.”
2026-01-29 · No Priors · Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tiny embryos. And so that's the last thing which was very surprising to me, which is that we already reversibly cryopreserve tissue, including human tissue, including cold-bodied human tissue, at that very, very small, in a couple hundred cells stage all the time. And we do it for a very long time periods, which I honestly would have first principles been stuck on. Is this possible to do at all? Is it possible to scale up to a large complex biological system that has a lot of vasculature where you're dealing with different material properties, where you have to think a lot about like perfusion and how to sort of diffuse chemicals in and out and how to like get heated out quickly enough. So the idea that you could pulse all molecular motion and then randomly restarted and even a cell would survive that, you know, like from forge principles to me used to seem crazy. We know that works. It's like we already scientists just tried it.”
2026-01-29 · No Priors · Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I swear it's just bad because ice expands, water expands when it forms ice. And that's just hard for your tissue to take without substantial damage. So you want to avoid ice formation. And the cool thing is that there's sort of a temperature below which ice formation stops happening. So basically, if you can traverse, let's say, going below zero degrees or less through to around minus 130. And you can get below that without ice formation, then you're good. The interesting is at that point you're good for quite a long time. So there have been human embryos that were reversibly that were cry-preserved for the latest record was over 30 years. And then we warmed and sort of viably used to create pregnancy and then, you know, sort of like there were kids who were literally cryopreserved for 30 years.”
2026-01-29 · No Priors · Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Talk line would be like avoid ice at all car, like sort of avoid as much as possible. There may be some like something some people might be working on technologies to cry preserve with some sort of like ice formation, but we're focused on regimes where you're basically trying to avoid as much ice formation as possible.”
2026-01-29 · No Priors · Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right I see, yeah. Maybe I can just give a series of facts that I think together sort of make the problem super interesting. So one fact is that ice formation is a stochastic process. So if ice just formed unilaterally in any given material past a certain point of temperature, like, you know, just like go from zero to one, it's like 100% ice, like that might be kind of hard to think carefully about technically. But ice sort of forms through a process of random nucleation and then extension. And this is cool because you can modulate the nucleation, the rate of nucleation and extension to then modulate the probability of ice formation. And because it's probabilistic, if you can do that well enough and you can sort of spend minimal time the temperature range where ice can nucleate, then that gives you a shot at sort of preventing a lot of ice formation. So like the number one”
2026-01-29 · No Priors · Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. It's a city that you kind of define yourself by the people around you. And so I think those kinds of use cases like going to Mars are like those are all kind of things that could happen and could happen with or without company technology for certain like definitions of mind. But I think that the thing that a lot of people will face is just this question of is it worth traveling so far to give up my current social context? And that will put a limit on like how much people want to use this for like I think there's like a real cost that kind of you incur and so it's in my mind it only makes sense for like really serious use cases initially where like you literally would die if or like you know because yeah because you're you're kind of putting on the line like your current like all of your current social reality and like how that will evolve without you versus like you know the other thing that you might want but I mean a lot of people might want to go to mars you know that context just I think I'm a little yeah the cost is pretty significant”
2026-01-29 · No Priors · Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the number one reason that most people wouldn't do that are also just very wary of the idea of hibernation for themselves is.”
2026-01-29 · No Priors · Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, no, sorry. I think this case, what I'm thinking of is some people might imagine that they would love to skip into the future just to see what happens. And maybe, you know, like have their same amount of number of years of life, but like be future shifted by some amount of time.”
2026-01-29 · No Priors · Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, an interesting thing when you start to think about actually applying this technology is sort of what's the experience of the person, not just kind of technically for these, but socially. So like one of the number one reasons most people wouldn't do medical hibernation, and especially that it wouldn't be for the most part recreational thing, is that, you know, I think a lot of people view themselves in part defined by their social context.”
2026-01-29 · No Priors · Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So, like, to give context on technically how we think about this problem. So, our long term goal is reversible whole body cry preservation for medical sort of hibernation. But in the near term, what we work on is reversibly cry-preserving single human organs to help transplant patients get organs more efficiently.”
2026-01-29 · No Priors · Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where you could imagine like a critical trial is being done for a drug that were they eligible for it could make a huge difference for their disease. To give an example of the need to, it's like my sort of co-founder's father-in-law had this happen to him in the sense that he got sort of advanced cancer that would have been treated or treatable or addressable by a therapy that came out basically a couple months after he was no longer eligible for the therapy and he like missed the critical clinical trial by like you know a couple months and so it's sort of like that level of urgency that like someone in that position shouldn't have to you know miss a critical therapy because there's a couple month difference in like when they got their sort of disease and when the therapy became available”
2026-01-29 · No Priors · Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think about our goal as Metastatic melanoma go from being like sort of in a single year, like metastic melanoma went from being something that you had like a six to nine month prognosis, like less than a year of expected survival, to with new combination of immunotherapies, you might have a decade plus of expected survival or like 50% of people sort of surviving over a decade without getting sort of death from LNO. In fact, they're starting to type other things at that point. The tackline is like single years can make the difference between a patient dying of internal illness and like living long enough to make the critical cure. But right now, like, there's no way to press pause on their biological time. What if you had an ambulance to the future, right? Like, what if you could take someone who is on their deathbed and find some way to just sort of hibernate them basically until the sort of critical cure for their disease comes online? And like, you know, in this context, we're not talking about necessarily decades. We're kind of like, you know, much longer than that. Initially, it's just kind of in the context of like when there's a window.”
2026-01-29 · No Priors · Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not a hard sell, but it was not an interesting way. So I think one thing that I love about the field of cry preservation is I think it's very compelling if you like hard, like it's one of those things where if you like the problem speaks for itself. And so I remember telling Cunter about it in our first call and he basically was like, oh, I don't buy it. He told me later that he didn't tell me in the call. But then he went off and thought about it for a couple days and like really thought about what we knew about ice formation, like did, you know, some like basic back of the envelope math and came back and he was like, oh, wait, this seems like actually feasible or like this seems like it's in the realm of possibility in a way that is very different from my initial intuition. And that sort of like conjugation is just so interesting to me.”
2026-01-29 · No Priors · Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's one of the few people where if I ask him a question, he'll come back the next day and give me an answer where he's literally thought through From Force Principles what the correct answer is. I remember at some point I realized that he'd written a doc on like the principles of like, you know, cry preservation, like most people, you know, like would write that from the literature or kind of like citing different sort of sources at various levels of granularity. Hunter went back and like rederived fundamental laws of stat-mac as part of like this is what you should know in crowd preservation doc. I really admire how much he builds up from like really simple models to try to create coherent technical pictures that are more complex. He's like the most fun, interesting, best person to work with ever for sure.”
2026-01-29 · No Priors · Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think just like Cry Preservation is one of the coolest, I think it's not like to pardon the pun, but I think it's one of the coolest, most interesting, best problems ever. From so many different angles, I think you first have counterfactual impact. If you're obsessed with just technical delight, like just Rosh, your technical interest and diversity and the law of technical parts of the problem. And then also, I think from perspective of social impact, I'm just, it was just, it's such an interesting problem from how it's perceived and then what are the different factors of that. It was like zero to one. It was like the I remember just seeing the problem clearly for the first time. I mean, a lot of the people in my life I think had been aware of it, but I just, it took me so long to really, I think, see it clearly for myself. But then it was just like zero to one of like, this is the only thing that I could imagine pouring the next decade of my work into. That was after I kind of done kind of the first set of work with fun. I was kind of like thinking like what is the next, like, like big thing.”
2026-01-29 · No Priors · Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just being very literal. At the time that I was interested in longevity, I think if you ask the average person in the field, what's the big problem? Most people would say, well, we just can't get enough funding for a project. And so that's the big problem. And I just think that literally like when I was a teenager. I solved that problem. Yeah, I was just like literally like I should just get a lot of money to like help push longevity drugs forward and the name for that happened in venture capital to fund, but it definitely wasn't working downstream of the idea of venture capital. That came after this idea of just getting money for projects that should have money and end.”
2026-01-29 · No Priors · Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, what determines how long we live. That was very interesting, right? This idea that almost like if we all lived until 10 years old and then we died immediately at town, I would feel much more confident if the idea that longevity is some kind of imalleuble hard limit. But they do it that there was uncertainty about that. It's just interesting. And sort of like, what are the factors behind that uncertainty?”
2026-01-29 · No Priors · Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Someday we're going to get old. We should do something about this. Yeah, no, that would have been the farm that we had for a little bit. But I remember one thing that really stood out to me was at some point when I was a kid, I was thinking about how long people in my life were going to live and how old they were. And for some reason, it made a lot of sense to me that everyone should live until they were 10 years old and then die immediately at 10 years old. Like I just that like that seemed like the simple hypothesis. I didn't really know how old people were. And so working backwards, I was like, oh, my dad must be like, you know, maybe eight and my mom's younger than him, so like maybe seven. But I think one thing that was really striking was realizing that we don't all live until a certain age and then we die. In fact, we don't know.”
2026-01-29 · No Priors · Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I grew up in a pretty odd setup. So in New Zealand, I was homeschooled. I didn't really have a normal biology class. I was kind of by myself in the house.”
2026-01-29 · No Priors · Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very small technology, but sort of like I think longevity is interesting because it feels like an area where there's a social blind spot around something. And I find those very interesting.”
2026-01-29 · No Priors · Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's two different questions. So, yeah, I come from longevity background, but in my mind, reversible cry preservation is applicable a bit outside of that as well. I don't know. I mean, I think I'm really obsessed with areas that feel like they should be worked on but aren't. And, you know, when I was a kid, I think naively just growing up, that seemed really obvious for longevity. And it's really surprising to realize that it's not the case that most people like are working on that explicitly as a goal. And in fact, that's kind of like, I think longevity and aging occupy this weird realm where because they're not explicitly diseases in a way that's fully socially recognized yet, they're not seen as valid to work on. But like, that's not really for, I think technical reasons on some level. It's more for like classification reasons. Because you can extend the lifespan of sort of many different organisms using technology and how much can you do that in humans. We have no idea. And it could be.”
2026-01-29 · No Priors · Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so the main question is not is this possible to do at all? It's it possible to scale up. Given that's true, why don't you think it's been worked on?”
2026-01-29 · No Priors · Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What if you could take someone who is on their deathbed and find some way to hibernate them until the sort of critical cure for the disease comes online, the ability to freeze time for humans? I didn't actually think that was something you could go work on. So apparently it is. Our long-term goal is reversible whole body cry preservation for medical hibernation. But in the near term, what we work on is reversibly cry-preserving single human organs to help transplant patients get organs more efficiently, making time not a variable changes the whole paradigm. One thing I love about the field of cryopreservation is I think like the problem speaks for itself. Water expands when it forms ice. That's just hard for your tissue to take without substantial damage. And the cool thing is that there's sort of a temperature below which ice formation stops happening. So basically if you can traverse and you can get below that without ice formation, then you're good. We already reversibly cryopreserved tissue, including human tissue all the time. And we do it for very long time periods. There are kids who were literally cryopreserved for 40 years as tiny.”
2026-01-29 · No Priors · Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT