Free Radicals

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...

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 traditiona...

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 opportunit...

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 L...

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 pric...

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...

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 Partne...

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...

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...

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 a...

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...

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...

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 b...

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 Chri...

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 pri...

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...

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 informati...

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 SB1...

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 co...

Dr. Omri Amirav-Drory is a General Partner at NFX whose mission in life is to end involuntary death. Omri has backed companies like Mammoth Biosciences, Immunai, and Centivax, and has earned a reputation as one of the most respected seed investors in tech-enabled life sciences and longevity. He previously founded Genome Compiler and sold it to Twist Bioscience, which is now worth $2.5 billion. We’...

Dr. Jacob Kimmel is the President of NewLimit, a biotechnology company developing reprogramming medicines to treat age-related disease and extend human healthspan. Dr. Kimmel co-founded the company with Blake Byers and Bryan Armstrong, and has since raised over $300M from top venture capital funds like Kleiner Perkins, Dimension, Founders Fund, and Khosla Ventures. They expect to initiate their fi...

Adam Gries is a serial entrepreneur with four successful exits, and products that have reached over eighty million users. He has now set his sights on creating a longevity revolution through his organization Vitalism. Vitalism is a moral philosophy and community of action, forming a revolutionary movement to get humanity to fight as hard as possible to achieve unlimited lifespans in peak health. O...

Dr. Janine Sengstack and Rob Cahill, founders of the startup Junevity, are on a mission to extend lifespan and healthspan by combining AI and large scale omics data with genetic medicines known as “siRNAs”. Their cellular reset platform promises to create medicines that can reset each of your organs back to a healthy and youthful state. This year, Junevity successfully restored "18-year-old m...

Lada Nuzhna is a researcher and founder driven by two questions: how did we get here, and how do we stay. Lada dropped out of college to pursue her biology research as a Thiel fellow, and to co-found Impetus Grants which funds breakthrough longevity science. Through Impetus, she has allocated over $34M to fund some of the most ambitious projects and clinical trials in aging. She is now developing...

Alex Colville, PhD, is a Co-founder and General Partner at Age1, one of the premier aging venture capital firms where he has invested in companies like Science, Gordian, Loyal, and General Control. Prior to that, he was an investor and founding chief of staff at Amaranth Foundation, where he invested in moonshot biology and aging initiatives. He got his biotech business career started as a managem...