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

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 their disease comes online?

The ability to freeze time for humans. I didn't actually think that was something you could go work on, so apparently it is.

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 [chuckles] 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 thirty years as tiny embryos, and so the main question is not, "Is this possible to do at all?" It's, "Is it possible to scale up?"

Given that's true, why don't you think it's been worked on?

Um. [upbeat music]

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 going to 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.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

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, like, very long ago wished-for technologies that I wanted to exist were telepathy and, like, upload, and the ability to, to, to freeze time for humans. I didn't actually think that was something you could go work on, so apparently it is.

[chuckles]

How do you end up working on that or being interested in longevity at all?

There... There's two different questions. So yeah, I come from a longevity background, but in my mind, like, um, reversible cryopreservation is, is applicable a bit outside of that as well. I don't know. I mean, I, I think I'm really obsessed with areas that feel like they should be worked on but aren't. Um, and, you know, when I was a kid, I think naively just growing up, that seemed really obvious for longevity. Um, and it's really surprising to realize that, you know, it's not the case that most people, like, are working on that explicitly as a goal, and in fact, that, like, it's, it's kind of... Like, I think longevity and aging kind of occupy this weird realm, where because they're not, like, explicitly diseases in a way that's fully socially recognized yet, they're not seen as valid to work on. But, like, that's not really for, I, I think, technical reasons on some level. It's, it's more for, like, classification reasons because, like, you know, uh, you, you can extend the lifespan of like, uh, sort of many different organisms using technology. Um, and, and how much you can do that in humans, we have no idea, and, you know, it could be very small 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.