Taking a first step towards hibernation pods :)  Just announced a $58M Series A led by @foundersfund to back the core roadmap reversibly cryopreserve human organs -> help transplant patients + build sustainable business -> accelerate R&D for whole body cryo

this 17 year old homeschooled girl refuted a conjecture that was unsolved for 40 years, and which professional mathematicians worked on for years without solving she was rejected from most graduate programs she applied to, because she did not have a degree

Urgent: we need more lab technicians to scale up coronavirus testing capacity in LA - if you have lab experience and are in LA or willing to relocate please email ldeming.www@gmail.com

this is so absurd

Introducing @cradle_health, co-founded with @huntercoledavis. We're building reversible cryo technologies. Think the hibernation pods you see in space movies for long-term travel - we want to build that. We’ve raised $48M, built a world-class team of scientists and engineers, and achieved electrical activity in previously cryopreserved neural tissue. You can read more about us at cradle.xyz

I feel like each year I realize how much I don’t know and how ignorant I am and it’s *awesome*. Like, how exciting is it that you *don’t* already know all there is to learn?

The world: So, aging is impossible to change, basically there's nothing we can do to... Longevity scientists: We engineered a mouse to live 2x longer than normal! The world: ...as I was saying, aging is impossible to change, there's nothing we can do

Kind of crazy that we don’t know how general anesthesia works

Humans are colonies of nanoscale robots composed of stardust and powered by sunlight.

Who is, to engineers, what Feynman is to scientists? Popular but thoughtful, represents the spirit behind the discipline.

We discovered the electron ~120 years ago. Isn't that kind of crazy? It's cool how much we've done with that knowledge, since.

Is there a good reason why many basic laws of physics are linear or quadratic (for example, F=ma), not much more complex? This might be a silly question - I'm just curious why this isn't true, or what kinds of laws we'd be unlikely to see.

I want a list of books that are good to re-read every year. Most valued: technical books that can apply across disciplines ('How to Solve It' by Polya). Any suggestions?

What are the most interesting concepts that apply both to economics and biology?

This was a hard post to feel comfortable publishing, but I hope this might help someone. I've been sad as a teenager in the past and wanted to share some ways I've learned to deal with those emotions. ldeming.posthaven.com/how-no…

in ~15 years, metastatic melanoma went from a disease with a median 6 month survival time to one where 52% of patients have melanoma-specific survival 10 years out may we all get a chance to work on medical technologies like this - my god! nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NE…

I've decided not to work with Aubrey de Grey or SENS in any capacity moving forward. ldeming.posthaven.com/aubrey @celinehalioua has written about her similar experiences here celinehh.com/aubrey

Looking for Head of Ops for Longevity Fund - $150K+ salary, higher if you’re significantly experienced. Looking for someone smart and capable with 3+ years of operating at a fast-paced startup or VC firm.

I’m curious - what are the most beautiful (ethereal, thought-provoking) websites you’ve seen? Points for artistic value, not words without visual beauty.

Successful people often sound silly b/c they have mental models for everything, often wrong. But interesting thing is they have models for *everything* and update them continuously. The alternate is no model. Is that better?

I'm considering abstaining from Wikipedia / Google for a bit to see if it improves speed of learning about something. Hypothesis is first links/descriptions in both are so low quality that actually impedes learning. No idea what to replace them with. Will report back!

It's cute that cell walls can be made of sugar. Like single-celled organisms are living in their own private gingerbread houses.

Have you ever had a moment of scientific understand that took your breath away and left you wandering dazed for days afterward? For me, it was the phrase 'everything is made of atoms' - one day it went from banal/obvious to a tesseract of beautiful pictures. What are yours?

Wanted: a book recommendation service that shows a distribution of where people spent the most time in a book.

I broke down crying in our office when I got the call. Hard to describe how much this means coming from inside the field. Congratulations to @celinehalioua, team and regulators for breaking open a pathway for regulatory consideration of drugs in this field.

'waking up at dawn, doing math and eating chocolate'

Excited to launch a new fund today: wsj.com/articles/new-venture… I wrote here about my takeaways from the past decade + predictions for the next: longevity.vc

I'm curious if it's possible to make a yeast cell live forever. If you're interested in investigating the problem, ping me at info@longevity.vc

I really wish there was a Stratechery for deeptech in different industries (ie nuclear, neuro, etc) - has anyone written such a thing?

This just dropped - the most important milestone in the history of longevity biotech. loyalfordogs.com/posts/loyal… Thread on what this means below

Looking for a founding team member (head of operations) on a new high impact project - email laura@longevity.vc if interested, or know someone who might be

Looking for people to help a company massively scale up COVID-19 testing capacity - email ldeming.www@gmail.com if you can help. Will need to hire lab techs (recruit + manage) and coordinate supply chain, skills relevant to any above welcome.

After a bunch of failed photo attempts, my friend yelled 'LAURA! THINK ABOUT STATISTICAL MECHANICS!' and I guess this is what pure love looks like.

Advice for ambitious teenagers - ldeming.posthaven.com/advice…

cool new visualization from @OurWorldInData showing what people die from vs what different outlets report about curious how to make reporting about chronic diseases more compelling

I do love a good personal website (ones that feel genuine, surprising, from the heart) Any recommendations?

I hate paper PDFs! Scientists 1. Collect data, put in spreadsheet 2. Make JPEG with spreadsheet 3. Put JPEG in PDF You 4. Extract JPEG from PDF 5. Extract data points from JPEG 6. Put data points in spreadsheet The PDF is noisy, compressed filter on info you want!

I and @celinehalioua are thinking of running a quick longevity startup school next Sunday - anyone interested? If yes, reply below w/ what you'd want to hear about! If we do it, will DM you with a zoom link.

If glass and plastic didn't exist, how fast could progress in biology have gone in the past 100 years? Is there an equivalently useful new material we don't have yet?

Here's a quick summary of interesting things to understand about aging biology, if you're new to the field:

One of the scariest things I've learned about the biotech industry is that there's really no one in charge. Like, I used to think there was some kind of optimized process for commercializing scientific ideas. Sooooooo not true. It's not even an efficient market.

If you are a hospital/physician in LA or SF with patients in need of COVID-19 testing please email ldeming.www@gmail.com, we’ll work to help you.

We need builders to break the longevity barrier this decade. Come build with us. longevity.vc/buildwithus

I’m re-learning probability and statistics, looking for a tutor (ideally stats or math PhD student) able to grade problem sets (for example, Wasserman’s ‘All of Statistics’) and suggest new problems. Please reach out to ldeming.www@gmail.com if interested!

Would anyone be interested in a game theory journal club in the new year? Prob 10 sessions, going through classic papers + thought expts.

Yesterday, I was sitting in a park feeling kind of sad about the fate of humanity. Then an elderly gentlemen walked by, said something about how we should all be more connected, and threw a KitKat bar my way.

What is the most important US law that seemed really insignificant when originally passed?

How much has Hans Zimmer's music indirectly increased US GDP? Curious if more/less than the 'Social Network' + Reznor soundtrack. Including of course memetic associations from Inception/Interstellar/etc.

What is useful to believe when you are young, but harmful to believe when you are older? In aging, we call this antagonistic pleiotropy (genes that are selected for because they help the young, but actively cause damage later)

I'm obsessed w the idea that in 100 years there will be a valid discipline of theoretical biology which you can practice in akin to theoretical vs experimental physics - where it isn't a second-class citizen to experimental work. So interested in what catalyzes it.

What are the most striking and beautiful representations of technology in film, outside of the human computer interaction in the original Iron Man?

It's funny how academic language sometimes differs from other areas. When my smart academic friends say 'I don't know', it usually means they've written a few papers on the subject. 'I have no idea' could mean they've spent a decade pondering something.

Sorry for the late posting! I made a research primer (ldeming.com/longevityfaq) - would love any feedback/thoughts/comments.

me at dinner parties

The Italians in 1545 were *really* excited about solving cubic equations

Who thinks they understand what entropy is? Drop a definition in the replies below :) Ditto heat, voltage, energy

Most of my (smart, technical) friends are losing their minds over GPT-3. Are they wrong? I guess, what's a productive response? Apathy presumably isn't.

What non-obvious ideas learned over decades are hard to describe but important for a 'good life'? Emphasis on non-obvious (or, something that's said a lot, but hard to actually understand).

What are the best books on the history of neuroscience?

Learning high school biology is weird, because you're presented with a bunch of abstractions, and later realize you can't make logical inferences from most of them.

One cool reframe for me recently was anxiety as stuck ambition - a lot of the time when I’m anxious, it’s because I really want something to happen and have a lot of energy towards it, but it (gets stuck bc not enough clarity?) and I end up spiraling. Instead of shoving down the anxiety or trying to turn it off, I can try to support it, see what it’s ambitious towards, and help it unstuck/unleashed toward that goal

Would anyone be interested in a public science library (aka feel free to come study at our office)? We have a bunch of science history/textbooks - curious if would be useful for anyone (or if Google has made obsolete). Would have loved something like this as a kid.

There is no royal road to aging biology. Trying to solve longevity without understanding how biology works is like trying to build a rocket without understanding physics.

Free way to get a pretty good education in any given discipline: read all Nobel laureate lectures (technical and biographical).

Is there a YC for researchers? Curious to hear from folks in academia if such a thing exists.

Have an exclusive on *significant* longevity story that will break next few weeks - very exciting addition to the field. Would love to give to a writer/journalist interested in the space + able to cover it in the right context. DM for more info, thanks!

Every weekend I get really, really annoyed about how little I understand about something. This weekend it's progress in biology research. Argh!

Nobel Laureate Albert Fert, fun description of realizing how inaccessible Ingmar Bergman's work was lead him to physics.

Problem I have in group conversations: 1) don't understand a key concept 2) feel like it would 'hijack' the conversation to chase it down 3) pause all information intake until resolved.

Every Christmas I decide to actually learn topology, read the first chapter of Munkres, and then don't do any more topology until the same thing happens next December.

Also, anytime anyone tries to tell you they know what energy is, you can just tell them Richard Feynman said we don't actually know, it's just a thing that's conserved. When we calculate it a bunch of different ways. I used to get so frustrated by not understanding this.

One thing most people don't realize about longevity research is it's not *just* figuring out what to do - there's an insane amount of engineering to implement in humans. And many of the tools we use to do that are biological in nature.

the last few minutes of the 2025 Jeff Buckley documentary might be the most beautiful I've ever seen, and make me think deeply about how I want the products or things I make feel to others in the last scene of the movie, his mom listens to a voicemail Jeff sent her before his untimely death at age 30. her reaction is extraordinary, particularly in the context of the previous film - the most compelling thing I've seen in a long time, because it feels like the truth captured on camera by that point in the movie, it's clear that they had a complicated relationship. but it's also clear that in many ways she was an incredible mother to him, and that he understood and loved her deeply - the voice memo is so specific and caring. in the clip she listens to the voice memo - it's been 28 years since he died. there's something in her affect - at other times in the movie, she feels at least mildly self-aware about being on camera, or jokes about different situations, but here, it's less so. my notation of the moments is - 1:39:45 - scene starts / she plays recording 1:40:12 - recognition - she can 'hear' her son 1:40:34 - receiving love - it feels like an actual connection captured on camera 1:40:43 - no idea how to describe this emotion that she shows, it is truly extraordinary 1:41:06 - love captured on camera I think there's a thing that's deeply valuable - truth captured on camera - and it's rare to find it so honestly distilled? reminds me of the 'Finding Francis' episode of Nathan for you (+ accompanying Errol Morris article!) newyorker.com/culture/cultur… - obviously very different, but had a similar feeling of 'truth captured on camera' (in a very strange, but compelling way) in flashes whatever I make, I want it to respect, deeply, the heart of what the filmmakers captured in those two minutes

Ernest Shackleton's hiring post - best ever & generated enormous response

Genentech was a California company started by a non-biologist and a tech venture firm

Mostly, my life = bashing my head against Overton windows until they move. Disconcerting to think back to 2011 - what's happening in longevity today seemed both very logical and socially impossible.

Testing this out - we believe many great founders self-select out of starting longevity companies, and would love to help educate / just give you more info about what it entails. Literally, our #1 job this year is just helping people think through this. medium.com/@longevityfund/ca…

I think one of my major frustrations with most scientific papers is they don’t take the semantic concept graph seriously. They treat the summary and conclusion as a place to write marketing material, not to seriously describe the knowledge work which motivated the experiment.

Mental models I used in 2020: barnacles.substack.com/p/my-…

For those who have never experienced it, Paprika by Satoshi Kon is (imho) one of the most beautiful and intricate animated films ever. Spirited Away for adults. A smarter Inception. Note very weird so prob don't watch w/ kids. So sad Kon died before making Dreaming Machine.

I've noticed a few things (particularly young) people tend not to do when they learn about longevity biotech. I think it would be helpful to be aware of some of these things earlier, so collected a few suggestions here. ldeming.posthaven.com/tips-f…

Sometimes I try to define what aging actually is. Then I remember that we can’t define life and death is the absence of that and aging is somewhere in between and then I just go home.

Want to discuss longevity science with friends online (and publicly, so newcomers to the field can learn about it). Any recs for the best platform to do it on?

I'd love to do a weekly science dinner series w/ wholesome curious vibes and a low-BS tolerance / high rigor bar. But I only know 10-20 people with this profile? Curious for recs of people in the bay area who fit this profile and don't network a ton / would be harder to find. In particular, academics who would enjoy oxford High Table-style chatting and (are good at systems thinking?).

I'm going to do a mini lecture series on biology. Just playing around, come if you want to have fun! First one next Monday @ 6 PT. twitch.tv/ldeming

A scientist walks into a bar and orders 10 shots of vodka. “Wow,” says the bartender, “that’s an order of magnitude.”

I'm looking for a thought partner - ldeming.posthaven.com/im-loo… Topics du jour: evolutionary dynamics, physics, and entropy wrt the question 'what is life'?

I feel like ppl underrate burnout from not being able to express genuine curiosity. Not everyone needs to, but some people really really need to have some of that at/outside work or they deeply struggle. Kind of a platitude until you run into it in practice.

Launched fund 2! wsj.com/articles/longevity-f…

I wish all graphs - in every medium - were replace by raw data + tunable assumption parameters to play with

If you were disappointed by the Oppenheimer movie, you can watch the documentary 'The Day After Trinity' which delivers 10x on both the technical inspiration and direct moral impact on the scientists involved post bombing.

GO LOYAL!!!!!!!!!! the ramifications of these FDA acceptances for efficacy data supporting lifespan extension for the longevity field at large are huge. these have been some of the most important milestones ever in the field, and the way in which they are/will impact pharma/startups/everything next gen is still I think massively underappreciated. this changes everything. cried (again) when @celinehalioua called with the news. so, so happy for the team.

Next Monday @ 6pm, will give a Twitch lecture on 'Longevity by the Numbers' If there's a topic you like, mention below! As usual, just experimenting - but this viewpoint is one I care a lot about :)

Want: a 'nature retreat' except nature = giant man-made steel foundries or rocket launches.

Hi all! We launched age1.com. Catalyzing the next generation of longevity companies. Excited to welcome @SpringDiscovery to the first batch. Applications open on a rolling basis, program starts June 4. Thanks @pmarca @felicis @eladgil

I did ~1 week of research on making yeast live forever, and wrote a short post about it. It's not obviously implausible. ldeming.posthaven.com/immort…

Just another Saturday in which I optimistically download ‘Quantum Field Theory for the Gifted Amateur’

I wish there were recreational science discussion clubs in the same way that there are recreational sports leagues.

I'm extremely confused about what the 'scientific method' actually is - I no longer feel like I understand how to classify things as 'scientific' vs 'not scientific'. Has anyone else (who has experienced similar confusion) found enlightening materials / things to ponder?