Published by Daniel Shur and Eric Dai
Interviewing visionaries dedicated to giving humanity control over biology. All problems are solvable, including aging and death.
Listen on Apple Podcasts50 min
Reprogramming molecules are getting dosed into patients for the first time, with the goal of restoring function lost due to aging. I‘ve had over 30 recorded conversations about the longevity space and didn’t realize this is happening so soon! We sat down with Dr. Jamie Justice, the geroscientist running the $101M XPRIZE Healthspan competition, and she told us there are five teams pursuing reprogramming, and hundreds pursuing other approaches. The $101M prize is to be awarded to teams that can restore muscle, cognitive, and immune function by 10 to 20 years. We discussed how the longevity field has a serious hype problem. We‘ve found hundreds of interventions that can extend lifespan in model organisms (reprogramming among them) and yet none have been translated into humans.The XPRIZE is changing that, by challenging the field to get out of the lab and into the clinic. $101M for those that can show results now, not in a decade, is a huge incentive to turn the hype into reality.
50 min
AI is accelerating the pace of progress for benevolent scientists and nefarious actors alike. We discuss how DARPA is preparing to defend agriculture & civilians from novel biological threats, and why such defense requires training foundation models for biology. We also dive into why DARPA is betting on blood as the operating system for the body, lessons from GLP-1s for human enhancement, how to create computers out of neurons, and much more. Dr. Michael Koeris directs DARPA's Biological Technologies Office (BTO), the group that leverages biological properties and processes to revolutionize our ability to protect the nation’s warfighters. Prior to DARPA, Dr. Koeris was a highly successful biotech entrepreneur, holds over a dozen patents, and was a professor of bioprocessing. DARPA is a research & development agency within the Department of War. Created in response to the launch of Sputnik in 1957, DARPA represents America’s commitment to never again face a strategic technical surprise. The agency has funded many transformational technologies, including mRNA vaccines which were pivotal during COVID.
1 hr 16 min
Kris Borer is an entrepreneur, angel investor, and author of the new book Radical Life Extension . We discuss why Kris rejects incrementalist approaches to radical life extension, and his argument that supplement, lifestyle interventions and small-molecule "geroscience" drugs offer only minor improvements at best to life span. We cover the four part plan to cure aging spanning traditional drugs, advanced bioengineering, tissue/organ replacement, and biostasis (cryopreservation), and we dive deep for the first time on the podcast into replacement: body transplants, lab-grown organs, chimeric organ donors and even... brain replacement. Resources & Links: Kris’s Book: Radical Life Extension Longevity Biotech Fellowship Repair Biotechnologies The Economic Laws of Scientific Research Tomorrow Biostasis
1 hr 3 min
Jonathan Anomaly is a co-founder of Herasight and former PPE professor. Herasight is pioneering polygenic screening for embryos, to help parents undergoing IVF select embryos for health, intelligence, height, and other traits people care about. We discuss the ethics of embryo selection and radical life extension. Jonathan has a Nietzschean view of humanity: within each of us we have the opportunity to either envy greatness in others, or seek to cultivate it within ourselves and in the world. In an era of total biological control, humanity can transcend its limitations and become something better. Watch on YouTube . Read the transcript .
38 min
Twelve months ago, we didn’t have working antibody design models. Now we have models that can compress 18 month design timelines down to one month, and agents that can collapse weeks of work by expert protein designers to an afternoon. This is an exciting time. Simon Kohl is a former Google DeepMind research scientist on the Nobel Prize–winning AlphaFold 2 team, and is now the founder and CEO of Latent Labs, a startup that is building a future where AI agents can design safe, effective and personalized drugs at the push of a button for every patient. With 3 frontier models released in just 9 months, this future is coming quickly.
1 hr 5 min
Elliot Hershberg is a partner at Amplify Partners and author of the popular blog Century of Biology. In this episode, we talk about GLP-1s as a breakthrough moment for biotech, why drug development is starting to behave like software, and how falling discovery costs could finally free biotech startups from selling themselves to pharma. We also talk about Elliot’s "massive markets, medium prices" thesis, the rise of consumer and "n-of-one" medicine, and Sid Sijbrandij going founder mode on his cancer by measuring himself, using AI to build a pipeline of personalized therapies, and is now disease-free. Thank you to SynBioBeta for hosting us at their conference, where we recorded this episode, and several others we’ll be releasing soon! Check out Elliot's blog at centuryofbio.com
1 hr 21 min
Dr. James Peyer is founder and CEO of Cambrian Bio. James has spent two decades working to bring the first longevity drug to market. In this time, he’s brought over $500M into the field as a whole, and now has multiple drugs in clinical trials that could plausibly prove to be… the first true longevity drugs, or gerotherapeutics. In today’s episode, we dive into the history of the geroscience field. We discuss what makes geroscience’s approach to drug development so unique, how to unlock the flywheel of innovation that will get us longevity escape velocity, and Amplifier Therapeutics' “zone 2 in a pill”... which might prove to be the first ever true, longevity drug.
1 hr 26 min
Nathan Cheng is an activist who has dedicated his life and career to defeating aging and death. After going through an existential crisis and dropping out of a Physics PhD, Nathan discovered the longevity movement and became one of the most prolific activists in the space. He is a founder of Longevity Biotech Fellowship, Vitalism Foundation, Longevity List, Longevity Marketcap and a General Partner at Healthspan Capital. In this conversation, we reflect on the absurdity of questioning people like Nathan why they choose to dedicate themselves to fighting aging (when it’s the thing that kills over 100k people per day), why longevity is underinvested into, and much more. Resources: Longevity Biotech Fellowship: https://www.longbiofellowship.org/ Vitalism: vitalism.io Join us at Vitalist Bay! vitalistbay.com
1 hr 10 min
Today’s guest is Kexin Huang. Kexin recently raised $13.5M from Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures in partnership with Anthropic, to build Phylo - a research lab studying agentic biology. Phylo’s first product is Biomni, the world’s first open source IBE or Integrated Biology Environment for conducting agentic biology research. They intend to do for biology what the IDE did for software. Kexin completed his PhD in Computer Science at Stanford, where he was advised by Jure Leskovec on artificial intelligence for healthcare and biology. As a PhD student Kexin garnered over 10,000 citations, published in Nature and earned six best paper awards at leading machine learning conferences, all this before the age of 30. Kexin has earned a reputation as one of the brightest minds in AI for life sciences. You’ll see why in today’s conversation.
1 hr 15 min
Two young Harvard professors are coming for the supplements industry. Dr. Jonathan Gootenberg and Dr. Omar Abudayyeh run a joint lab at Harvard Medical School, have co-founded 4 biotechs, and raised over $300M to develop genetic medicines and diagnostics. But what surprised me most: they think like consumer tech founders, not academics. They start with what people actually want and work backwards from there. And best of all? They’re totally longevity-pilled. In this week’s episode of the Free Radicals podcast, we discuss the biology of aging, the future of longevity therapeutics, and how Harvard can bring legitimacy to the supplements industry. As PhD students at Harvard in Feng Zhang and Aviv Regev’s labs, Jonathan and Omar pioneered research on programmable targeted genetic engineering with CRISPR. Now Jonathan and Omar lead a joint lab at Harvard, where they develop molecular and artificial intelligence based approaches to program biology, unravel cellular aging, rejuvenate hair, develop next-gen therapeutics, and decode biological complexity with virtual cells.
55 min
Today’s guest is Dylan Livingston, the 28 year old founder of the Alliance for Longevity Initiatives, known as A4LI. With A4LI, Dylan has created America’s first and only lobbying group focused on advancing longevity initiatives in Washington DC. Since its founding, A4LI has created a longevity caucus composed of 8 congresspeople, and hosted leaders like Dr. Oz, Newt Gingrich and Matt Kaeberlein at their summits. A4LI also played a key role in garnering bipartisan support to advance Montana’s Right to Try legislation, which expands the right for consenting patients to utilize safe experimental medicines in Montana. In this episode, we discuss how Dylan gets bipartisan support for healthy life extension initiatives, what it’s like selling politicians on longevity, and A4LI’s role in accelerating longevity towards its ChatGPT moment.
1 hr 19 min
Dr. Michael Ringel is a leader in pharma and biotech who spent over 25 years at Boston Consulting Group, where he served as managing director and senior partner, advising top pharma companies on R&D strategy. Michael is now the Chief Operating Officer at Life Biosciences, a company founded by Dr. David Sinclair, to treat aging with partial epigenetic reprogramming. Earlier this year, Life Bio earned FDA clearance to proceed into human clinical trials with their lead candidate, marking the first time that humans will be administered an epigenetic reprogramming drug, which may be the holy grail of longevity. Michael also sits on the US board of the Hevolution Foundation, an organization that is investing up to one billion dollars per year into longevity research, and is also on the board of the American Federation for Aging Research. In this episode, we discuss Michael’s insightful paper on why aging is an optimization by evolution, why that means it’s malleable, how Life Bio is going into the clinic with the first epigenetic reprogramming therapies to reverse diseases of aging, and how to push the longevity field forward. Why We Age by Michael Ringel: https://www.nature.com/articles/biorev202121 Hastings Center Report: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hast.5007 And check out Michael's band on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/7hfcgDpc3SuCHfEAIhwWYr
2 hr 4 min
Jose Luis Ricón Fernández de la Puente is the author of the popular blog Nintil, and Head of Theory at Retro Biosciences. Jose is a prolific blogger, covering a wide breadth of topics across economics, philosophy, progress studies, science funding, and of course longevity. His writing has been published in a16z Future , Works in Progress and by the Adam Smith Institute , and his writing previously won him a fellowship with Emergent Ventures, Tyler Cowen’s competitive program for intellectually ambitious projects. In this interview, you’ll hear how insightful Jose is about deeply technical topics in biology, and you’ll see why Retro Bio was eager to bring him on as their head of theory (the only role of its kind in the entire biotech industry). Our conversation is wide ranging, spanning a deep dive on Retro’s work to replace and engineer microglia to rejuvenate the brain and how our cells have the ability to turn back the aging clock but choose not to. We also covered the technological stagnation and why biological engineering is the new frontier of progress, as well as philosophical topics like transhumanism and how a future of total biological control might impact our values and way of life. Retro Biosciences was seeded with $180M by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to develop therapies to prevent and reverse age-related disease, and is widely recognized as one of the leading AI for longevity companies. Previously, we hosted Rico Meinl, the head of Applied AI at Retro, so make sure to give that episode a listen as well.
1 hr 16 min
Retro Biosciences was seeded with $180M by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to develop therapies to prevent and reverse age-related disease, and is widely recognized as one of the leading AI for longevity companies. Today’s guest is Rico Meinl, the Head of Applied AI at Retro Biosciences. In this episode, we discuss Retro’s work with OpenAI to engineer 50x more effective Yamanaka factors, what it means to build foundation models that can reason across natural language and protein sequence, and why the bottlenecks in biology are more experimental than computational. We also get into the biology of aging and how AI can enable therapies that dramatically advance healthy lifespan.
1 hr 21 min
Christopher is a serial entrepreneur who has dedicated himself to solving aging after his last startup Mana Health was acquired by NBC Universal. His company Matter Bio is developing therapies to enhance DNA damage repair to slow the rate of aging, and to treat cancer through novel bacterial delivery mechanisms. In today’s conversation we discuss the theory of aging as information loss, which Chris contends is primarily mediated through DNA damage, how to unlock new approaches for longevity through large scale genomics studies, and the evolving business of biotech.
1 hr 9 min
Raiany Romanni-Klein is a Harvard and Brown-trained bioethicist focused on understanding why secular people like to narrate death and aging as good things, and quantifying the economic impacts of such narratives. She worked with legends like George Church and Steven Pinker on her PhD, and also played a central role in designing the $101 million dollar XPRIZE for Healthspan, the largest science prize ever awarded. Raiany is also the founder of a new think tank designed to study and streamline progress in America’s science and technology, and most recently published a paper demonstrating that delaying overall biological aging by just one year could yield $27 trillion dollars in net present value. Today’s conversation is focused on the ethics and economics of longevity.
1 hr 44 min
Martin Borch Jensen is a scientist, entrepreneur and longevity advocate. He is the co-founder and CSO of Gordian Biotechnology, a company whose platform enables the simultaneous delivery and testing of hundreds of therapeutics in individual animals. They have raised over $60M from top investors like Founders Fund, Horizons Ventures, Fifty Years and the Longevity Fund. They also recently announced a partnership with Pfizer to apply Gordian’s proprietary mosaic screening platform to accelerate the discovery of therapeutic targets for obesity. Martin is also a prominent voice in the longevity community and activist. As founder and president of Norn Group, a do tank for longevity, he launched the Impetus Grants program, which has deployed roughly $34 million to scientists across 145 projects, with funding decisions made within 3 weeks to enable speed. In our conversation today, we cover the state of the longevity field, its major bottlenecks, theories of aging, the role of AI in longevity, and much more.
1 hr 44 min
Today’s guest is Karl Pfleger. After spending a decade as one of the first AI researchers at Google from 2002 to 2011, he has dedicated himself to the cause of rejuvenation biotechnology for nearly a decade. He is a philanthropist, community builder, and prolific angel investor with over 35 investments into rejuvenation biotech startups. His website, agingbiotech.info , provides valuable information to the entire field, and his talks and X posts are highly insightful and influential within longevity. Karl has deeply researched and nuanced takes, and those really show in this conversation. We’ll cover why epigenetic reprogramming won’t solve aging, Karl’s investment strategy and what distinguishes true rejuvenation technology, and why better diagnostic technologies could be the key to personalized aging interventions.
1 hr 17 min
Dr. Daniel Ives is the founder of Shift Bioscience. Shift has built a novel single-cell aging clock that has enabled them to run high-throughput screens to discover genes that regulate aging, with the goal of identifying a therapy to systemically reverse aging. We’ll dive deep into Shift’s latest work on SB000, a germline-expressed gene that rejuvenates cells without inducing pluripotency, and SB101, a pro-aging gene whose inhibition both reverses cellular age and prevents fibrosis, opening a clear path to clinical development. Daniel also shares his philosophy on why reversing aging might be easier than we think, the coming cultural shift when anti-aging drugs become mundane reality, and why he won't rest until we can double human lifespan.
53 min
Polyphron is led by co-founder and CEO Matthew Osman, a twice-exited tech entrepreneur turned biotech founder. Matthew is building a computation-first tissue foundry that applies AI and lab automation to semi-autonomously replicate human tissues in a dish. Polyphron aims to create the world’s most efficient tissue foundry for regenerative medicine. Listen to this episode to learn more about the core bet and technological platform at Polyphron, the remarkable progress they’ve made on two programs in heart and brain tissue in just a year, and what’s next for the company.
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