Laura Deming

She dropped out of MIT at 17, raised a fund that produced 5 IPOs, and now she’s building cryotech to keep patients alive until cures arrive.

In 3rd grade, Laura Deming learned we were all going to die of a condition called aging, and decided she was going to fix it.

By 12, she was volunteering in Cynthia Kenyon’s lab, studying C. elegans, a tiny worm used in aging research.

Kenyon’s work had shown that a single genetic mutation could double a worm’s lifespan.

Laura was ablating gonads and peering into microscopes, absorbing biogerontology fundamentals.

At 14, she enrolled at MIT to study physics.

At 17, she dropped out, with $100K from Peter Thiel’s 20under20 fellowship, and started a VC fund focused on longevity.

She called it The Longevity Fund.

$4M in Fund I.

She funded Unity Biotechnology, Fauna Bio, Rubedo, Navitor, Spring Discovery, and others.

To date, her portfolio has produced 5 IPOs.

Her firms raised over $1B in follow-on capital.

Today, she’s the cofounder and CEO of Cradle, a startup focused on medical hibernation... cryopreserving patients with terminal illness so they can be revived in the future.

She’s spent years studying not just the biology of aging, but the philosophy of it.

“What do you want to preserve over time?”

Not everyone will answer the same.

She’s read Derek Parfit, Buddhist no-self meditations, and Rilke’s Duino Elegies to understand the self, not just as a body, but as a continuous identity that evolves.

She’s debated whether it matters if you survive, or just someone similar to you.

Whether the goal is physical continuity, or value preservation.

Whether being “you” in 100 years means anything at all.

She’s studied game theory, and how lifespan extension might change incentives across society.

Longer time horizons might incentivize more prosocial behavior. But they might also entrench power and capital even further.

To her, biology is best understood not through words but through mental play.

She calls it embodied thinking...

In her imagination, she’s a molecule floating through a cytoplasm.

She sees how randomness governs motion.

She realizes cells run on passive diffusion.

And from that, she derived insights into how cryopreservation might work.

Her fixation on cryo started with a simple idea: sometimes, the medicine you need is just 12 months away. If we could pause your biology for 12 months, you could survive.

Cradle wants to build that bridge.

Cryopreservation isn’t immortality. It’s one way to make death a choice... not a deadline.

She believes in creating conscious entities that evolve over centuries, not decades.

“I think the interesting thing about transhumanism is that you’re trying to become something that you don't understand. It’s like Flatland. You’re like a 2D thing. And then you’re trying to become a 3D object. But you can’t even conceive of what that 3D object is in your current 2D form.”