Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming

**Laura Deming** (0:00)
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?

**Sarah Guo** (0:08)
The ability to freeze time for humans. I didn't actually think that was something you could go work on, so apparently it is.

**Laura Deming** (0:14)
Our long-term goal is reversible whole body cryopreservation for medical hibernation. But in the near term, what we work on is reversibly cryopreserving 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 cryopreserve tissue, including human tissue, all the time. And we do it for very long time periods. There are kids who were literally cryopreserved for 30 years as tiny embryos. And so the main question is not, is this possible to do at all? Is it possible to scale up?

**Sarah Guo** (0:59)
Given that's true, why don't you think it's been worked on? Hi, listeners. Welcome back to No Priors. Today, I'm really excited to be here with Laura Deming, previously the founder of the Longevity Fund, and now the co-founder and CEO of Until. We're gonna talk about how Until is progressing the frontier of reversible cryopreservation, or freezing living things and waking them back up, beginning with human organs progressing to small animals and hopefully making progress on the whole body. It sounds like science fiction, but we'll talk about some of the scientific challenges, where we are today, and the implications if this is possible. Thanks so much. Welcome, Laura. Laura, thanks so much for doing this.

**Laura Deming** (1:45)
Yeah, thanks for having me.

**Sarah Guo** (1:46)
I've been so looking forward to this since our Pantheon Watch Sessions. We're talking about upload and the nature of consciousness. But one thing that you don't know is that my very long ago wished for technologies that I wanted to exist were telepathy and upload, the ability to freeze time for humans. I didn't actually think that was something you could go work on. So apparently it is. How do you end up working on that or being interested in longevity at all?

**Laura Deming** (2:14)
There's two different questions. So I come from a longevity background, but in my mind, reversible prior preservation is applicable a bit outside of that as well. I don't know. I think I'm really obsessed with areas that feel like they should be worked on but aren't.
When I was a kid, I think naively, just growing up, that seemed really obvious for longevity. It was really surprising to realize that it's not the case that most people are working on that explicitly as a goal. In fact, I think longevity and aging can 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 that's not really for, I think, technical reasons on some level, it's more for classification reasons. Because, you know, 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, you know, it could be very small for 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.

**Sarah Guo** (3:17)
Perhaps I was just, I'm sure this is true, not very observant as a school-aged child, but I don't think I even understood aging was like a concept that I should consider at all. Like, and so how did you end up thinking about it in any depth?

**Laura Deming** (3:31)
I grew up in a pretty odd setup. So, you know, I was in New Zealand, I was homeschooled. I didn't really have a, like I didn't go to a normal biology class. I was kind of, you know, by myself in the house.

**Sarah Guo** (3:43)
I imagine you like staring at a field of sheep and then being like, someday we're going to get old. I should do something about this.

**Laura Deming** (3:49)
Yeah, I know that would have been the farm that we had for a little bit. But I remember one thing that was 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. 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. That seemed like some hypothesis. I didn't really know how old people were. Working backwards, I was like, oh, my dad must be like maybe eight and my mom's younger than him, so 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 what determines how long we live. That was very interesting, this idea that like, almost like if we all live until 10 years old and then we died immediately at 10, I would feel much more confident with the idea that longevity is some kind of inalienable hard limit. But the idea that there was uncertainty about that, it was really interesting and it's like what are the factors behind that uncertainty?