No PriorsHow Until is Engineering Away Time in Organ Transplants | Laura Deming
CHAPTERS
- 0:00 – 2:14
Medical hibernation as an “ambulance to the future”
Laura Deming frames the core sci‑fi-sounding idea: pausing biological time so patients can survive long enough to reach a forthcoming therapy. She positions reversible whole-body cryopreservation as the long-term goal, with immediate focus on organs where the clinical need is acute and measurable.
- •Vision: reversible whole-body cryopreservation to buy time for critical cures
- •Near-term wedge: reversible cryopreservation of single human organs for transplant
- •Core promise: making time “not a variable” reshapes medical decision-making
- •Immediate obstacle: preventing damaging ice formation during cooling/rewarming
- 2:14 – 3:31
Why longevity felt “obvious” but socially underworked
Sarah and Laura discuss how Laura’s early interest in longevity came from noticing a social blind spot: aging isn’t treated like a disease, so fewer people work on it as an explicit goal. The conversation highlights how classification and legitimacy, not just technical feasibility, shape research attention.
- •Longevity as a socially undervalued target because aging isn’t fully recognized as a disease
- •Large uncertainty in what’s possible in humans despite strong effects in model organisms
- •Laura’s attraction to “should-be-worked-on but isn’t” problem areas
- •Social perception can suppress work even when technical paths exist
- 3:31 – 4:39
Origins story: homeschooling, first-principles curiosity, and mortality uncertainty
Laura recounts her unusual upbringing in New Zealand and the early realization that lifespan is not a fixed, universal cutoff. That uncertainty—why people live different lengths—became a motivating scientific question rather than a philosophical one.
- •Homeschooling and self-directed learning shaped deep curiosity
- •Childhood realization: longevity isn’t a deterministic hard limit
- •Interest centered on what drives variance in lifespan and mortality
- •Mortality uncertainty as a prompt for scientific, not purely emotional, inquiry
- 4:39 – 5:26
Founding the Longevity Fund: taking the “funding is the bottleneck” literally
Laura explains the Longevity Fund as a straightforward response to what researchers said they lacked: money to push projects forward. Venture capital became the mechanism after the underlying intent—resource allocation to neglected projects—was already clear.
- •Motivation: researchers repeatedly cited lack of funding as the biggest constraint
- •Action bias: solve the bottleneck directly by organizing capital
- •VC structure was a tool, not the original goal
- •Focus on enabling projects that “should have money and didn’t”
- 5:26 – 6:20
The pivot to cryopreservation: a uniquely compelling technical+impact problem
Laura describes cryopreservation as a rare mix of technical delight, leverage, and societal consequence—an area that went from fuzzy to “the only thing” she wanted to pursue for a decade. She also notes how the field’s perceived weirdness contrasts with its underlying tractability.
- •Cryopreservation as high “counterfactual impact” and technical diversity
- •A ‘zero-to-one’ moment of seeing the problem clearly
- •Perception gap: sounds like sci-fi, but key pieces already work at small scales
- •A long-term “decade” problem that still admits concrete near-term milestones
- 6:20 – 10:09
Choosing a co-founder: Hunter Davis and first-principles rigor
Laura explains why Hunter was a natural co-founder: he rebuilds understanding from fundamentals rather than relying only on literature. His initial skepticism turned into conviction after back-of-the-envelope modeling of ice formation physics.
- •Hunter’s approach: derive from first principles (even stat mech) to form coherent models
- •Initial reaction: skepticism that the concept could work
- •Conversion mechanism: quantitative reasoning about ice nucleation and feasibility
- •Co-founder fit based on shared taste for deep technical clarity
- 10:09 – 12:43
Use cases beyond medicine: why ‘skipping into the future’ is socially costly
Sarah raises recreational and space-travel motivations (e.g., Mars), and Laura argues the binding constraint may be social rather than technical. Leaving one’s social context behind makes elective hibernation less attractive, at least initially, compared with urgent medical scenarios.
- •Non-medical motivations: future-skipping curiosity, long travel, Mars missions
- •Primary limiter: losing social context and identity anchored in relationships
- •Early adoption likely driven by survival/medical urgency rather than recreation
- •Human preference uncertainty: people may choose it even if happiness outcomes are unclear
- 12:43 – 14:26
Cryobiology basics: ice nucleation is probabilistic, so engineering can ‘outrun’ it
Laura lays out key scientific facts: ice formation is stochastic and can be mitigated by controlling nucleation and minimizing time in dangerous temperature ranges. If you can traverse into regimes where ice no longer forms (around deep cryogenic temperatures) without crystallization, long storage becomes feasible.
- •Ice forms via random nucleation + growth; probability can be managed
- •Strategy: minimize time in the temperature range where ice can nucleate
- •Ice expansion damages tissue; avoiding ice is central
- •Below certain temperatures, ice formation effectively stops—enabling long-term stasis
- 14:26 – 15:56
Proof it works at small scale—and why scaling is the real problem
The discussion emphasizes a surprising anchor: human embryos (and other tissues) can be cryopreserved for decades and remain viable. This shifts the question from ‘is it possible at all?’ to ‘can we scale to large, vascular, heterogeneous organs with controlled perfusion and heat transfer?’
- •Empirical anchor: embryos cryopreserved >30 years and later lead to pregnancies
- •We already restart life from a paused molecular state at small scales
- •Scaling challenges: vasculature, heterogeneous material properties, diffusion/perfusion
- •Thermal challenges: extracting heat fast enough without inducing damage
- 15:56 – 19:20
Why this biology problem has unusual ‘physics leverage’
Laura argues cryopreservation is special because temperature links nanoscale molecular motion to a single controllable parameter, enabling useful physical modeling. Unlike many biological problems, you can trade engineering improvements (cooling/rewarming control) against biological limits (tissue tolerance) to meaningfully move the frontier.
- •Temperature as a powerful abstraction relating molecular motion to a measurable control knob
- •More physics-style modeling applies here than in most of biology
- •Engineering can partially substitute for biological unknowns (but not fully)
- •Device/tooling improvements can unlock regimes that reduce biological damage
- 19:20 – 20:29
Engineering–biology tradeoff in practice: cryoprotectants, toxicity, and heat transfer
They translate the abstract leverage into concrete knobs: faster cooling/rewarming reduces time in the ice-danger zone, allowing lower cryoprotective agent (CPA) concentrations. But CPA toxicity and the infeasibility of instantaneous thermal control in large systems keep biology in the loop.
- •CPA role: suppress ice formation; drawback: toxicity at higher concentrations
- •Faster cooling/rewarming can reduce required CPA dose
- •Large-system constraint: instantaneous cooling/rewarming isn’t assumed feasible
- •Success demands joint optimization of protocols, devices, and tissue compatibility
- 20:29 – 21:48
Roadmap and parallel tracks: human organs now, whole-rat reversibility in parallel
Laura explains Until’s approach: develop organ-scale preservation/rewarming while simultaneously pursuing reversible whole-rat hibernation, cross-pollinating learnings. She notes that timelines look clearer now than at founding, but whole-body reversibility hinges on the brain as the biggest unknown.
- •Two parallel R&D lines: organ-scale tech and whole-rat reversible hibernation
- •Translation loop: organ learnings inform whole-body work and vice versa
- •Early steps feel faster than expected due to clearer roadmap
- •Major uncertainty: brain fidelity and tolerable injury in whole-body protocols
- 21:48 – 24:33
Execution and leadership: a concrete transplant product as the credibility milestone
Laura describes how a near-term organ-transplant product provides urgency, clarity, and a recruiting narrative despite long-term uncertainty. The team aims to “pause time” for donated organs to reduce expirations and scheduling chaos, creating a benchmark that validates the broader mission.
- •Current transplant reality: organs expire quickly; logistics are frantic and expensive
- •Near-term goal: extend organ viability to remove last-minute constraints
- •Leadership principle: be honest about long-term uncertainty while sharing clear models
- •Benchmark logic: if organ preservation can’t be improved, whole-body claims aren’t serious
- 24:33 – 27:14
Why the field stayed small: stigma, antimemetics, and resource scarcity
Sarah presses on why reversible organ cryopreservation hasn’t drawn more attention despite academic results. Laura credits pioneers (e.g., Greg Fahy) and points to sociological barriers: the topic’s association with fringe sci-fi narratives makes rational discussion and mainstream funding harder.
- •Existing evidence: academic kidney vitrification with functional recovery in rats
- •Pioneer effort required to legitimize vitrification and sustain the field
- •Sociological barrier: topic is hard to discuss rationally—polarizes believers vs skeptics
- •Mainstreaming hope: make cryopreservation an acceptable, fundable research direction
- 27:14 – 29:06
What changes when ‘time isn’t a variable’ in transplantation
Laura paints the future operational impact: patients aren’t confined near transplant centers, matching can be optimized rather than rushed, and surgical teams can plan safely instead of operating in a constant emergency mode. The broader paradigm shift is turning transplantation from last-minute scramble into a schedulable system.
- •Patient experience improves: less ‘house arrest’ near transplant centers
- •Better matching: more time to select optimal recipient rather than whoever is available
- •Operational sanity: fewer overnight emergencies, fewer rushed flights and procedures
- •System-level shift: time buffer enables higher-quality decisions across the ecosystem
- 29:06 – 30:47
Closing curiosity: making the molecular world intuitively visible
In the final exchange, Laura shares a separate fascination: better representations of molecular reality. She critiques textbook abstractions as flattening and unintuitive, and imagines more compelling, artistic ways for people to grasp molecular complexity.
- •Problem: molecular biology is often taught as flat symbols and arrows
- •Goal: represent molecular reality in a compelling, intuitive way
- •Motivation is aesthetic as well as educational—molecular ‘beauty’ made accessible
- •A call for new visualization/communication tools for science
