Laura Deming

When she was 8, Laura Deming realized that we were all going to die of a disease called aging. Ever since, her driving passion has been to slow aging and eliminate age-related disease. She started working in a biogerontology lab when she was 12, and matriculated at MIT when she was 14. At 17, she was one of the youngest 20under20 fellows awarded $100,000 by Peter Thiel to pursue her venture full time. Laura is currently a full-time partner at The Longevity Fund, an early stage venture capital fund backing companies which target the aging process to treat disease, with investments in gene editing, small molecule therapeutics, and novel methods to treat disease.

Guest Appearances

November 29, 2015

In Ron Howard’s 1985 movie ‘Cocoon,’ a group of elderly people living in a Florida retirement community become magically rejuvenated by aliens. It plays out as a fantasy, a hilarious what-if scenario about old people acting young. The movie seems more fiction than science, but in the 30 years since the film’s release, the branch of medicine devoted to curing aging has grown into possibly the next big thing.

Aging has only been a problem since the beginning of time, a disease born into us by the very nature of being alive, but scientists believe we’re not far off from therapies that could extend our lifespan by decades and keep us feeling like we’re in our 30s the whole time.

Jack O’Brien is joined by Laura Deming, a 21-year-old venture capitalist, who is funding the therapies of the future that will slow the process of aging. They discuss some of the breakthroughs in the field and Laura debunks some myths about current life extension treatments.

Jack is then joined by Fiona Ginty, a principal scientist at GE working on the microimaging of cells. Fiona shares how this technology will aid in the fight against aging as that process might be built into our DNA.