Laura Deming

Their words

And then I also think um you know right now for matching it's like everything's done at literally the last minute. It's like someone dies, an organ comes available and like you're just kind of calling around trying to find like what patient is available to get this organ and you don't have that much time to make the optimal match, right?

Their words

And it's crazy because like they're the they're like one of the most precious resources we know of. And yet like people regularly charter private jets, you know, like like you're putting a surgeon on a private jet to go pick up an organ, get it back to the patient in time.

Their words

basically transplant patients today surprisingly frequently miss organs that are on route to them because there's a timing problem. Um, so like you know, organs expire um very quickly after they become available from a donor.

Their words

the big unknown to get to whole body reversible is the brain. Um it's unclear like like the brain can withstand a lot of change and does withstand a lot of different types of damage or or change with age for example.

Their words

Basically what that gives you is like you can apply a lot of theoretical sort of um a lot of theoretical toolkit used in physics to model parts of this question in ways that are actually useful. And it is just not true that you can use like equations from physics to think usefully about almost any other problem in biology.

Their words

you can make your life easier on the biology front by building better engineering tooling and the fact that that's possible is a huge deal. Like that is that is not true for most problems in biology and it gives you a lot of leverage on the problem.

Their words

And so that's the last thing which was very surprising to me which is that like we already reversibly cry preserve tissue including human tissue including whole body human tissue at that very very small like you know in a couple hundred cells stage

Their words

but ice sort of forms through a process of random nucleation and then extension. And this is cool because you can uh modulate the like sort of nucleation the rate of nucleation and extension to then modulate the probability of ice formation.

Their words

but I think that the thing that a lot of people will face is just like this question of like is it worth you know traveling so far to give up my current social context and that will put a limit on like how much people want to use this for

Their words

But right now like there's no way to press pause on their biological time. So like what if you had an ambulance of the future, right? Like what if you could take someone who is on their deathbed and um you know find some way to you know just sort of hibernate them basically until um the sort of critical cure for their disease comes online.

Their words

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.

Their words

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 think technical reasons on some level it's more for like classification reasons