Laura Deming started working in longevity science at age 12, when she emailed biologist Cynthia Kenyon at UCSF and landed a mentorship in her lab studying the genetics of aging in C. elegans. Her family moved from New Zealand to San Francisco to make it possible. At 17, Deming became one of the inaugural Thiel Fellows, dropping out of MIT to launch The Longevity Fund, a venture capital firm dedicated to backing companies that target the biology of aging. The fund was among the first institutional investors focused exclusively on longevity, helping legitimize the field when most VCs considered aging research too speculative to fund. Deming has since co-founded age1, a next-generation longevity venture fund, and Until (also known as Cradle), a company developing reversible cryopreservation: the ability to cool living tissue to ultra-low temperatures and bring it back fully functional. If successful, reversible cryopreservation would transform organ transplantation and bridge patients to future medical technologies. Deming represents a new generation of longevity advocates who combine scientific credibility with the capital allocation skills to turn research into real companies.
Key contributions
- Founded The Longevity Fund, pioneering longevity venture capital
- One of the youngest Thiel Fellows at age 17
- Co-founded age1 longevity venture fund and Until (reversible cryopreservation)
- Helped legitimize longevity as an investable field
Quotes (1)
“I wanted to work on the world's most important problem. The mission of the Longevity Fund is that everyone in the world can live as long as they want.”
paraphrased · 2019