Laura Deming — On Pausing Biological Time & Preserving the Continuous Self

About this episode

Laura Deming discusses her work in anti-aging and the philosophical implications of preserving personal identity.

Laura Deming is a technologist and venture capitalist focused on anti-ageing and life extension. At 17, she founded The Longevity Fund (followed by age1), the first VC firm dedicated to longevity biotech, after being selected in the initial cohort of Thiel fellows (2011). Today she is also CEO and co-founder of Cradle, a startup pursuing human whole-body reversible cryopreservation. I speak with Laura at Cradle’s San Francisco office. We start with the philosophical question of personal identity, and ask a deceptively simple question: what, exactly, do we want to preserve? From there we explore what a “more humane transhumanism” might look like, the game-theory of 200-year lives, scientific awe as a research tool, embodied thought-experiments to see inside the cell, how the FDA could shave years off longevity-drug timelines, the anti-memetic qualities of reversible cryopreservation, and why it might be the most leveraged problem in longevity. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

People in this episode

Host: Joe Walker

Guest: Laura Deming

Topics covered

• anti-aging
• life extension
• personal identity
• transhumanism
• cryopreservation
• longevity biotech

Keywords

• longevity
• biotech
• cryopreservation
• transhumanism
• FDA
• personal identity
• life extension

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: The Longevity Fund, age1, Cradle

Places: San Francisco

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