Laura Deming

Laura Deming was born in New Zealand in 1994.⁠[1]

Her father is American and worked as an investment manager; her mother is Korean and raised the children. In an October 2018 podcast she said that her father had been a public-markets investor, so she knew a good deal about the idea of investing from an early age.⁠[2][3]

A Digital Trends article introducing the first Thiel Fellows in May 2011 instead describes her as a “CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry native.”⁠[4]

She grew up in Remuera, Auckland, in New Zealand and was home-schooled by her parents. She taught herself calculus, probability and statistics as well as French literature and history, and developed an interest in mathematics, physics and the biology of aging.⁠[5][1][6]

Her speaker biography on a Milken Institute conference page states that at 8 she realized that everyone was going to die of a disease called aging; her TEDMED speaker biography likewise states that she had wanted to cure aging since the age of 8.⁠[7][8]

When she was a child, an elderly grandmother came to stay with the family and was in constant pain from arthritis; she recalled that she “just couldn’t figure out” why her grandmother was unable to play tag with her, and at 11 the episode set off her interest in the science of aging. After her maternal grandmother Bertie developed neuromuscular problems in her 70s and 80s, she decided to dedicate her life to combating the aging process.⁠[5][1]

She first wanted to work on cancer; her father pointed out that aging is the root cause of cancer, and she turned to aging instead. In a 2018 podcast she recalled him saying that cancer is a subset of aging.⁠[2][3]

At 11, encouraged by her father, she emailed Cynthia Kenyon, a molecular biologist who studies aging, and received a reply within five minutes. When her family was visiting the Bay Area, she asked to visit Kenyon’s laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and was allowed to; shortly after the visit she asked whether she could work in the laboratory, and Kenyon again agreed.⁠[5][6][9]

At 12 she persuaded her family to move to the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry so that she could work with Kenyon; she later said that in retrospect it had been a great sacrifice on their part. She came to San Francisco to join a laboratory studying aging; the biography on her personal website states that she moved to the United States at 12 to take graduate coursework at UCSF. In a 2018 podcast she recalled that she had come from New Zealand at 12 on the strength of a random email to a professor, the first thing she had ever sent to someone outside her family, and that the professor responded.⁠[2][10][11][3]

In Kenyon’s laboratory she took part in research on the biology of aging, helping with experiments on “super worms”; the laboratory genetically engineered worms to live ten times longer than normal. Her TEDMED speaker biography states that she worked on nematode longevity at UCSF’s graduate school.⁠[2][5][8]

She entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) at 14 and majored in physics (Course 8).⁠[12][2]

At MIT she worked as a researcher for various biotechnology laboratories and projects, including the laboratory of Lenny Guarente, and was part of the Greek system. Her personal website states that she has worked in “the Kenyon, Guarente, Weiss and Firestein labs” on a number of topics, including aging and synthetic biology. Her TEDMED speaker biography states that she matriculated at MIT at 14 to work on artificial organogenesis and bone aging.⁠[6][4][11][8]

She later called her time at MIT the “most fun I’d ever had,” but she was frustrated by how slowly laboratory science was turned into applications and eventually left. In a 2018 podcast she recalled that at 16 she was a sophomore at MIT with perhaps $1,000 in her bank account, and that she had by then worked in aging laboratories for about four years.⁠[2][3]

She founded The Longevity Fund in 2011 and describes it as the first venture capital firm dedicated to funding high-potential longevity companies. The fund grew out of her pitch for a venture fund backing aging-related startups; she was too young to sign contracts legally, so her father signed the paperwork on her behalf. She recalled that for two years she gave the same pitch, and that she learned to tie it to a very concrete business case, which was what brought the fundraising together.⁠[13][11][6][2][9]

Accounts of her age when she started the fund differ: BioSpace says she was 17 when she began, and in a 2017 TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry interview she said she was 17 when she started fundraising; The New Zealand Herald says that by 16 she had founded her first venture capital firm; and the question list on the 20VC episode page refers to her as a 16-year-old looking to raise a fund to invest in longevity.⁠[9][6][1][14]

She recalled in 2018 that seven years earlier there were perhaps three companies that had been started with the aging brand on them; asked about the ethics of longevity and whether people actually want to live longer, she said that when she started the fund she never thought people would ask those questions.⁠[3]

On May 25, 2011, Peter ThielPeter ThielPeter Thiel is an American entrepreneur and investor, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and the first outside investor in Facebook. He is a partner at the venture capital firm Founders Fund and founded the Thiel Fellowship, which funds young people to leave college and build new things; his public skepticism of higher education, his support for Trump in 2016, and his funding of litigation against Gawker Media have drawn controversy.Open the full entry announced the first 24 Thiel Fellows: the program had planned 20 fellowships but chose 24 from more than 400 applicants under 20, each to receive $100,000 over two years together with mentorship. Laura Deming was listed in the “BIOTECH” group with Darren Zhu and Alexander Kiselev.⁠[15]

When selected she was 17 and headed IP Immortal, which Digital Trends describes as her go at anti-aging research. An MIT Alumni Association article quotes the Thiel Foundation’s biography of her: “Laura Deming wants to extend the human lifespan for a few more centuries—at the very least.” The biography adds that she planned to disrupt the current research paradigm by changing the incentives embedded in traditional funding structures, and that with her fund IP Immortal she planned to commercialize anti-aging research, bringing therapies out of the laboratory and into the market sooner. The article also notes that the MIT Admissions blog wrote that she, a former Course 8 major, would be following suit and leaving MIT for the program.⁠[4][12]

Accounts of her age when she left MIT differ: TechCrunch and BioSpace in 2017 give 16, Vice in 2018 says two years after she entered, and a 2019 Financial TimesFinancial TimesThe Financial Times (FT) is a London-based English-language business and financial news organization, known for its salmon-pink newspaper and its motto “Without Fear and Without Favour.” It was owned successively by the British Pearson group and Japan’s Nikkei Inc., and today digital subscriptions are its main source of revenue.Open the full entry article gives 17.⁠[6][9][5][2]

The first Longevity Fund closed in 2013. She said in 2017 that it raised a grand total of $4 million and invested in five companies that proved out the strategy, and that all of the companies in that portfolio had raised Series A rounds of $30 million or more. Her first investment was in Unity Biotechnology, which is developing a drug that targets senescent cells.⁠[16][6][9][2]

At TEDMED 2013 she gave a talk titled “How can science and business team up for the long (health) haul?” Her TEDMED speaker biography describes her as a partner at The Longevity Fund, based in San Francisco, working to find and fund therapies that extend the human healthspan, and as having recently become a board observer at Navitor Pharmaceuticals.⁠[8]

In August 2017, at 23, she announced that the second Longevity Fund had closed at $22 million, with plans to back eight to ten companies. She was the sole general partner, supported by back-office staff and outside experts who review deals so that no single person evaluates every one; some advisors take equity, while others, especially graduate students, prefer to be paid up front. The firm spent up to six months with each deal, tracking a company before it was even raising money. She declined to discuss the fund’s limited partners, including whether Peter Thiel had invested.⁠[6][9]

She argued that aging is a young science in which many venture capitalists once saw nothing, and that anyone who believes in cancer companies should also care about aging companies; she added that bringing investors on board, once the biggest challenge, was now a non-issue. On August 17 of the same month the portfolio company Unity Biotechnology closed a $35 million Series B financing, bringing its total financing to $151 million.⁠[6][9]

On March 16, 2018, Tyler CowenTyler CowenTyler Cowen is an economics professor at George Mason University and chairman and faculty director of the Mercatus Center; in 2003 he co-founded the economics blog Marginal Revolution with Alex Tabarrok, he has written books including The Great Stagnation and Stubborn Attachments, and he hosts the podcast Conversations with Tyler. He appeared on the Lex Fridman Podcast in 2021.Open the full entry recommended on the Marginal Revolution blog the Longevity FAQ that she had written, calling it “essential reading for our time.” The FAQ opens by stating that she runs Longevity Fund and spends a lot of time thinking about what could increase healthy human lifespan, and describes itself as her overview of the field for beginners; the section Cowen quotes explains that a fraction of cells become senescent and that studies found mice from which these cells were removed were healthier in old age and had a longer healthy lifespan.⁠[17]

In March 2018 she launched Age 1, an accelerator funded separately from The Longevity Fund, investing $500,000 in each startup (she declined to say what stake it takes in return) in batches of three to five companies for four months, with applications accepted on a rolling basis; the accelerator had no formal headquarters but provided co-working space, and its startups were to present to invited investors in the Bay Area on October 5. Its backers, who also serve as mentors, included Marc AndreessenMarc AndreessenMarc Andreessen is an American entrepreneur and venture capitalist, a co-founder and general partner of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). While in college he helped develop the graphical web browser Mosaic, then co-founded Netscape and Loudcloud (later renamed Opsware), and has long served as a director of Meta; he has also published essays such as “Why Software Is Eating the World.”Open the full entry and Felicis VenturesFelicisFelicis (whose funds and earlier brand use the name Felicis Ventures) is a venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, California, founded in 2006 by former Google product manager Aydin Senkut; it has invested in companies including Shopify, Canva and Adyen.Open the full entry, and its advisors included Elad GilElad GilElad Gil is an entrepreneur, investor and author of High Growth Handbook. He co-founded Mixer Labs and Color, worked at Google and Twitter, runs the multistage investment firm Gil & Co, and co-hosts the No Priors podcast with Sarah Guo.Open the full entry. It focuses on late-onset conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease and diabetes, and she said she also wanted to see “more work on the role of the circadian or other developmental clocks in longevity.” The TechCrunch article counts her among the youngest fund managers in the United States.⁠[18]

The Longevity Fund later wrote that it started the accelerator in 2018 to test the hypothesis that founder-driven companies would be critical to building the moonshots of the longevity field; the experiment did well, and its subsequent fund was branded age1 to reflect this focus. The age1 website states that she created the AGE1 accelerator in 2018.⁠[16][19]

In August 2018 Vice wrote that the latest venture to employ her talents was Pioneer, an organization that aims to find and accelerate young talent through an online tournament in which candidates vote on one another’s proposals; those selected receive $5,000 and a trip to San Francisco to meet investors. The same article states that The Longevity Fund had raised $27 million to date.⁠[5]

In the article she says that she never felt gender to be an obstacle herself but acknowledges that it is one for others; she credits much of her success to luck and says that there is “so much talent out there” that goes unrecognized.⁠[5]

On September 26, 2018, she and Daniel Gross, who launched Pioneer, were guests on Product HuntProduct HuntProduct Hunt is a product-discovery and launch community founded by Ryan Hoover in 2013 and operated by Product Hunt, Inc. Makers present new products, while users vote, comment and review them and discover tools through categories, forums and AI search. AngelList announced its acquisition in 2016; as of November 2026, its official website lists Rajiv Ayyangar as CEO.Open the full entry Radio, hosted by Ryan HooverRyan HooverRyan Hoover is an entrepreneur and early-stage investor who founded the new-product discovery community Product Hunt in 2013, served as its CEO until 2020, and sold the company to AngelList in 2016; since 2017 he has run the early-stage venture fund Weekend Fund.Open the full entry, in an episode titled “Finding the world’s lost Einsteins and putting an end to aging.”⁠[10]

On October 23, 2018, Y Combinator published a podcast interview with her, introducing her as a partner at The Longevity Fund. She was 24 at the time; she said that the fund keeps a secret list of drugs on the market and other things that it thinks, based on the evidence, might be having an impact on lifespan, and, asked about the fund’s terms, described its approach as founder-driven.⁠[3]

On November 25, 2018, 20VC, hosted by Harry Stebbings, aired an interview with her covering her path from physics at MIT to founding a longevity fund and her time in the Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry, the difficulty of raising a first-time fund, the shortage of young biotech founders, how to avoid groupthink in biotech investing, and portfolio construction and reserve allocation for riskier biotech. The episode page introduces her as Founding Partner of The Longevity Fund, having raised $26 million across two longevity funds and founded Age1, a four-month accelerator for longevity companies; her most recent investment was System1, and her favorite book is Mark TwainMark TwainMark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, an American humorist, journalist, lecturer and novelist. He is known for his travel narratives and for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, novels set in the Mississippi River world of his boyhood.Open the full entry’s The Mysterious Stranger.⁠[14]

In June 2019, at 25, she managed about $37 million in assets at The Longevity Fund. Unity Biotechnology, the fund’s first investment, had gone public in 2018 and was valued at more than $350 million in 2019, and companies she had invested in had raised more than $500 million in follow-on funding, including from Jeff BezosJeff BezosJeff Bezos is an American entrepreneur and investor who founded Amazon in 1994, led it as chief executive for many years, and became its executive chair in 2021. He also founded the spaceflight company Blue Origin, bought The Washington Post in 2013, and set up philanthropic funds including the Bezos Earth Fund.Open the full entry and Peter Thiel. An article in The New Zealand Herald that gives her age as 25 states that she leads a $39 million Longevity Fund.⁠[2][1]

She prefers to talk about “health span” rather than immortality, expects the first therapies to bring “maybe a couple of years at max,” and fears most that early trials fail and funding disappears in a hype cycle; she also said: “Ageing without illness - that’s the goal.” She said that zero dollars were going into anti-aging in 2011. The Financial Times article states that about $4 billion had been raised in the past couple of years, roughly half of it by Calico, AlphabetAlphabetAlphabet is an American technology holding company formed in 2015 through a restructuring of Google, whose businesses include Google as well as companies in autonomous driving, life sciences, and early-stage technology investment. The group reports its businesses as Google Services, Google Cloud, and Other Bets.Open the full entry’s anti-aging subsidiary founded in 2013, with the rest spread across about 20 deals a year (CB Insights data).⁠[2][1]

She has no PhD, which she said had become an “active red warning sign” for some investors. Asked about Elizabeth HolmesElizabeth HolmesElizabeth Holmes is an American entrepreneur, the founder and former chief executive officer of the defunct blood-testing company Theranos, who was convicted in 2022 of defrauding investors, sentenced to 135 months in prison, and has been serving her sentence in Texas since May 2023.Open the full entry of Theranos, she said she “can’t understand how you would do fraud.” Aubrey de GreyAubrey de GreyAubrey de Grey is a biomedical gerontologist who created the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), a framework for rejuvenation research, and co-founded the Methuselah Foundation, SENS Research Foundation and LEV Foundation.Open the full entry has called her an “utter genius.”⁠[2]

On August 28, 2020, TechCrunch announced that she would appear at TechCrunch DisruptTechCrunch DisruptTechCrunch Disrupt is a technology and startup conference organized by TechCrunch, combining interviews, product demonstrations, startup competitions and industry networking for founders and investors.Open the full entry, describing her as a venture capitalist focused on life extension who backs biological research used to reduce or reverse the effects of aging; her investments included Unity Biotechnology, which had developed an osteoarthritis treatment, and Celevity, which is focused on dog life extension.⁠[20]

On November 10, 2020, she started the Substack newsletter “Barnacles,” described as “Casual observations about science and thinking,” whose first posts included “My mental models: 2020 edition.” Her personal website lists it as her new blog, with earlier writing kept in a Posthaven blog archive.⁠[21][22]

In August 2021, at 27, she and Celine Halioua posted accounts on their blogs and on Twitter of their experiences with Aubrey de Grey as young scientists trying to gain a foothold in the longevity field. In her post she writes that when she was 17 de Grey wrote to her from his work email that he had an “adventurous love life,” that she had known him since she was 14, and that as a teenager she almost left the field several times because of things like this. She wrote: “I’ve decided not to work with Aubrey de Grey or SENS in any capacity moving forward.”⁠[23][24]

She also writes that the SENS board was aware of harassment claims and had hired a firm to investigate them, but accepted a donation of about $25 million while the investigation was under way; she says that the problem might be an open secret in the longevity community, but that young people on the internet have no access to that information while de Grey is still mentoring minors, and that they were therefore making their experiences public.⁠[24]

The SENS Research Foundation then placed de Grey on leave, stating that the leave would last pending the outcome of an investigation; de Grey denied the allegations in a post on Facebook. In September 2021 the executive summary of an independent investigation commissioned by the foundation and conducted by the law firm Van Dermyden Makus was released; STAT wrote that the investigation found that de Grey had made offensive sexual comments to two prominent young entrepreneurs in the longevity community and that the summary gave corroborating evidence for the earlier allegations. The report does not name the two; she and Halioua confirmed to STAT that they were the two complainants. STAT also wrote that de Grey had been removed as the foundation’s chief scientific officer the month before; the foundation’s board said in a statement that the behavior detailed in the report was “simply unacceptable” and apologized to the individuals subjected to it.⁠[23][25]

In September 2023 she published a letter on The Longevity Fund’s website announcing a new fund with a new name, age1, and welcoming its new general partner, Alex Colville, and his team. The letter states that she started the fund in 2011 and that it had funded some of the first companies in the field to go public and to get plausible drug candidates into patients (all for age-related diseases rather than longevity directly).⁠[13]

In the letter she divides the longevity field into three stages, pioneers (2013–2023), dominant players (2023–2050) and generic players (after 2050), argues that the best longevity companies will come from mission-oriented founders, often first-time or early-career founders with unconventional backgrounds, and sets out three axioms: that longevity is technically possible, economically possible and desirable. The letter closes with “Build now, age later.”⁠[13]

age1 writes checks of $500,000 to $4 million for longevity companies, and its website states that it helps “contrarian founders build generational biotech companies.”⁠[19]

In June 2024 Cradle, the cryopreservation startup she co-founded with its chief scientist, Hunter C Davis, emerged with $48 million to develop and prove the feasibility of human whole-body reversible cryopreservation; the company said it had demonstrated the recovery of electrical activity in neural tissue and held that pausing and restarting biological functions on demand is a solvable problem.⁠[26]

The founder letter the company published on June 3, 2024, has one part written by her and one by Davis. In hers she writes that she started her career afraid of death and wanting to create technologies to eliminate it, but that close to two decades later she has changed; that she is not sure what it means to preserve the continuous self and that society will need to make a call about what it wants; and that technologies giving people much more agency over their health could create different worlds. She also writes that she feels incredibly angry when she finds problems that could help patients but are not worked on because they seem uncool or have not been well evaluated.⁠[27]

On May 6, 2025, she took part as CEO of Cradle in the session “The Roadmap to Longevity” at the Milken Institute’s 2025 Global Conference. The biography published for the conference describes her as a full-time partner at The Longevity Fund and co-founder and CEO of Cradle, which is developing medical hibernation for patients with terminal illnesses.⁠[7]

In September 2025 Until Labs, a San Francisco-based company previously known as Cradle, announced a $58 million Series A led by Founders FundFounders FundFounders Fund is a venture capital firm founded in San Francisco in 2005 by Peter Thiel and his former PayPal colleagues Ken Howery and Luke Nosek. Run by partners who were entrepreneurs themselves, it argues that founders should keep more control and is known for betting on difficult technology projects in areas such as space, defense, and artificial intelligence. It was Palantir’s first institutional investor, has invested in SpaceX many times since 2008, and its other notable investments include Facebook, Airbnb, Stripe, and Anduril; as of March 2026 it had raised nine early-stage funds and four growth funds.Open the full entry, with Lux CapitalLux CapitalLux Capital is a U.S. venture capital firm founded in 2000 by Peter Hébert, Josh Wolfe and Robert Paull, with offices in New York and Silicon Valley. Focused on emerging science and technology, the firm backs companies in fields including life sciences, artificial intelligence, robotics, manufacturing, aerospace and defense through fund investments and by helping to found companies.Open the full entry and Field Ventures joining, bringing its total funding to more than $100 million. The company plans to use the funding for an organ cryopreservation product to help transplant patients and surgeons access the organs they need, which it calls an important step in its long-term roadmap to medical hibernation.⁠[28][29][30]

Lux Capital’s portfolio page states that Until builds perfusion systems, cryoprotectant formulations, controlled-rate freezers and vitrification and rewarming protocols, that its current focus is preserving donated organs at subzero temperatures without ice formation and rewarming them for transplant, and that its long-term goal is whole-body reversible cryopreservation; its mission is to “build the medical infrastructure to pause biological time.”⁠[30]

As of November 2026 the Until Labs team page lists her as CEO and co-founder and Hunter Davis as CSO and co-founder, and the age1 team page lists her as co-founder and venture partner and Alex Colville as co-founder and general partner. Her personal website says that she is currently interested in reversible cryopreservation, the qualia of mathematics and understanding, and philosophies of the future, that is, what we want to preserve over time.⁠[31][32][22]

She said in 2018 that her relatives had generally lived to about 80 or older, and that her grandmother, then in her mid-90s, was still living.⁠[3]

In the same podcast she said that for now her diet was simply to try to eat low sugar, that intermittent fasting was hard to maintain with her sleep cycle, that she does not take caffeine, and that she mainly reads books and papers; she also said that after a friend claimed to have eaten only whipped cream and bacon for a month and felt fine, she thought it was nonsense and tested the idea by eating only cookies for a month, that the cookie diet worked very well in the short term but seemed a bad idea for the long term and she would not recommend it to anyone, and that she should have done blood tests.⁠[3]

The biography on her personal website states: “Since I was a kid, I’ve been fascinated by the idea that longevity is a mechanism we can manipulate.” The interests she lists include mathematical descriptions of biology (Rashevsky, Rosen, Baez), information theory and physics (entropy and entanglement), and classical music and economics, which she was just starting to learn about.⁠[11]

In the blog post “What it’s like to be 28” she writes that she moved to the valley about a decade earlier and has worked in laboratories for about 16 years; she writes that she invests deliberately in close friends and family, spends little time with people she dislikes or finds boring, values unclear work and intuition and respects tradition more than she used to, understands her own mind better and has practical tools for stress, and is more cautious about love, which feels stronger when it happens and lets her be more herself.⁠[33]

In the blog post “Transcendent Joy” she writes that she is naturally good at persisting with projects that take more than a decade and that she feels an intense, almost transcendent joy, sometimes like a punch in the gut, when she understands the scientific world; visiting Isaac Newton’s house as a child, sitting in an undergraduate physics lecture hall at MIT, visiting Los Alamos and hearing a talk by the physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed all moved her strongly, and the emotion she saw on other people’s faces at the Western Wall in Jerusalem reminded her of how she felt at Newton’s house. She also wonders whether the response is valuable at all, suggesting that it may come from childhood conditioning, a misplaced religious impulse or hedonism.⁠[34]

A page on her personal website headed “Beliefs / Values” and marked “old? in flux” states that she loves ideas intensely and is willing to devote her life to some of them, believes in a bright, limitless future that depends on the choices people make, believes in beauty, sees other people as fellow travelers, believes in telling loved ones “I love you” every time, is both playful and serious, lives each day as though it could be her last, sees learning as experiencing beauty with increasing precision, and believes that great gifts come with responsibility; she writes that she grew up free of conventional rules and, having heard from others what was impossible, now works to unlearn those limits.⁠[35]

Her personal website describes itself as “Personal blog for Laura Deming. I like science and startups.” On it she writes that, outside her organizational work, she is trying to understand why biology produces so many different things and why they constantly interact.⁠[22][36]

In the blog post “Understanding biology, quickly” she writes that reading papers alone has limits, since “A paper is to a reproducible result as a mouse is to a human”; she suggests spending roughly 20–30% of the hours one expects to give a field on building manipulable mental models: listing numbers relevant to the subject and solving a problem with each in one’s head, visualizing the phenomenon among familiar cellular objects, turning to basic equations or simulations where intuition is weak, and concentrating on such visualization, often for 30 minutes or more. She writes that she dances and moves to make mental space for thinking, and recommends Cell Biology by the Numbers, William Bialek’s Searching for Principles, Principles of Physical Biology and David Goodsell’s illustrations.⁠[37]

In the long post “Immortal Yeast: a week’s worth of research” she spends a week on the question of whether an immortal yeast could be made: her first estimate was a project of five or more years for a technical team that could be tested along the way, and her conclusion after the research was that the idea is not obviously infeasible and that researchers see no clear barrier. The post explains that she uses the BioNumbers database as a reference and keeps a Roam graph on aging.⁠[38]

Her personal website also has a page, “Bacteria Bionumbers,” which she describes as an example of working through that question “in a very amateur way”: it makes rough quantitative estimates of how bacteria exchange information through quorum sensing, conjugation, transduction, nanotubes, transformation and gene transfer agents, lists membrane vesicles as an open question, and raises comparisons with communication between cells in multicellular organisms, with neurons and with human communication in the internet age.⁠[39][36]

The biography on her personal website states that The Longevity Fund had raised $26 million and backed Unity Biotechnology, Precision Biosciences, Metacrine, Navitor and Alexo Therapeutics.⁠[11]

The portfolio page of The Longevity Fund’s website lists the websites of 16 companies: alxoncology.com, anagenex.com, ardatx.com, conception.bio, deciduoustx.com, faunabio.com, generalproximity.bio, gordian.bio, loyalfordogs.com, metacrine.com, navitorpharma.com, precisionbiosciences.com, reservoirneuro.com, rubedolife.com, science.xyz and unitybiotechnology.com.⁠[40]

She was named to the Forbes “30 Under 30,” appeared in the National Geographic documentary The Age of Aging and has spoken at TEDMED and the Singularity Summit. The Aspen Ideas speaker page describes her as partner and founder of The Longevity Fund and as a venture capitalist and scientist dedicated to curing age-related diseases, and lists her 2024 session “You Can Live Longer!”.⁠[41][8]

Personal website: https://www.ldeming.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[22]

Blog (Posthaven archive): https://ldeming.posthaven.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[22]

Substack newsletter Barnacles: https://barnacles.substack.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[22]

X: Public account: https://x.com/laurademing (opens in a new window).⁠[36]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laura-deming-b255362a/ (opens in a new window).⁠[31]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[42]

The Longevity Fund: Official website: https://longevity.vc/ (opens in a new window).⁠[16]

age1: Official website: https://age1.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[32]

Until Labs: Official website: https://www.untillabs.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[31]