No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups - Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming

Episode Date: January 29, 2026

What if we could pause biological time to wait for a cure for a disease? Thanks to innovations and research in reversible cryopreservation, this possibility is no longer just science fiction. Sarah Guo sits down with Laura Deming, CEO and co-founder of biotech startup Until, to dive deep into the growing field of reversible cryopreservation. Laura talks about how her time as a Thiel Fellow as well as her founding of the Longevity Fund fueled her obsession with solving the “social blindspot” of aging. Laura details how her new startup, Until, seeks to build tools that allow for “pressing pause” on biological time, starting with human organs with the hopes of scaling up to full body medical hibernation. Together, they also discuss why ice is the enemy of tissue, using engineering tools to help solve biological problems, and how this technology may revolutionize organ transplantation by removing time as a variable.  Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [e-mail] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @LauraDeming | @untillabs  Chapters: 00:00 – Cold Open 01:08 – Laura Deming Introduction 01:53 – Why Laura Focused on Cryo Preservation and Longevity 06:20 – Bringing on Co-Founder Hunter Davis 07:55 – Until’s Goal 10:10 – Other Use Cases for Cryo Technology 12:22 – Scientific Challenges in Cryo Tech 15:36 – Using Engineering Principles to Solve Biological Problems 20:18 – Scaling Up Cryo Preservation 21:48 – Leading and Recruiting at Until 25:02 – Why Hasn’t Cryo Tech Been Worked On More? 27:14 – Making Time Not a Variable in Organ Transplants  29:06 – Changing How the Molecular World is Depicted 30:47 – Conclusion

What if you could take someone who is on their deathbed and find some way to hibernate them until the sort of critical cure for the disease comes online? The ability to freeze time for humans. I didn't actually think that was something you could go work on, so apparently it is. Our long-term goal is reversible whole body crypreservation for medical hibernation. But in the near term, what we work on is reversibly crypreserving single human organs to help transplant patients get organs more efficiently. Making time not a variable changes the whole paradigm.

One thing I love about the field of cry preservation is I think, like the The problem speaks for itself. Water expands when it forms ice. That's just hard for your tissue to take without substantial damage. And the cool thing is that there's sort of a temperature below which ice formation stops happening. So basically if you can traverse and you can get below that

without ice formation, then you're good. We already reversively crypreserved tissue, including human tissue, all the time. And we do it for very long time periods. There are kids who were literally cryo preserved for 30 years as tiny embryos. And so the main question is not, is this possible to do at all?

It's is it possible scale up. Given that's true, why don't you think it's been worked on? Hi, listeners. Welcome back to No Priors. Today, I'm really excited to be here with Laura Deming. Previously, the founder of the Longevity Fund, and now the co-founder and CEO of Until. We're going to talk about how Until is progressing the frontier

of reversible cryopreservation, or freezing, living things, and waking them back up, beginning with human organs, progressing to small animals, and hopefully making progress on the whole body. It sounds like science fiction, but we'll talk about some of the scientific challenges where we are today and the implications if this is possible. Thanks so much. Welcome, Laura. Laura, thanks so much for doing this. Yeah, thanks for helping me. I've been so looking forward to this since our Pantheon watch sessions. We're talking about upload and the nature of consciousness. But one thing that you don't know is that my like very long ago wished for technology,

that I wanted to exist were telepathy and, like, upload the ability to freeze time for humans. I didn't actually think that was something you could go work on. So apparently it is. How do you end up working on that or being interested in longevity at all? There's two different questions. So, yeah, I come from longevity background, but in my mind, like, reversible prior preservation is applicable about outside of that as well. I don't know. I mean, I think I'm really obsessed with areas that feel like they should be worked on, but are And, you know, when as a kid, I think naively just growing up, that seemed really obvious for longevity. And it's really surprising to realize that, you know, it's not the case that most people, like, are working on that explicitly as a goal.

And in fact that, like, it's kind of, like, I think longevity and aging kind of occupy this weird realm where because they're not, like, explicitly diseases in a way that's fully socially recognized yet, they're not seen as valid to work on. But, like, that's not really for, I think, technical reasons on some level. it's more for like classification reasons. Because like, you know, you can extend the lifespan of like, sort of many different organisms using technology. And how much can do that in humans, we have no idea. And, you know, it could be very small of technology. But sort of like, I think longevity is interesting because it feels like an area

where there's a social blind spot around something. And I find those very interesting. Perhaps I was just, I'm sure this is true, not very observant as a, you know, school-aged child. But I don't think I even understood aging was like a concept that I should. consider at all. And so how did you end up thinking about it in any depth? I grew up in a pretty odd setup. So, you know, I was in New Zealand. I was homeschooled. I didn't really have a, like, I didn't go to a normal biology class. I was kind of, you know, by myself in the house.

I imagine you like staring at a field of sheep and then being like, someday we're going to get old. I should do something about this. Yeah, no, that would have been the farm that we had for a little bit. But I remember one thing that was really stood out to me was at some point when I was a kid, I was thinking about how long people in my life were going to live and how old they were. And for some reason, it made a lot of sense to me that everyone should live until they were 10 years old and then die immediately at 10 years old. Like, I just, that like that seemed like some hypothesis. I didn't really know how old people were. And so working backwards, I was like, oh, my dad must be like, you know, maybe eight and my mom's different than him, so like maybe seven. But I think one thing that was

really striking was realizing that we don't all live until a certain age and then we die. In fact, we don't, you know, like what determines how long we live. Like, that was very interesting, right? this idea that like, because I also live until 10 years old and then we died immediately at town, like, I would feel much more confident with the idea that, like, longevity is some kind of immaliable, like, hard limit. But they do that, like, there was uncertainty about that. It's just really interesting. And it's sort of like, what are the factors behind that uncertainty? So I'm going to fast forward through a bunch of, like, lab work you did and going to MIT and being a TL fellow, like, why a longevity fund?

Me just being very literal, like, at the time that I was interested in longevity, I think if you ask the average person in the field, like, what's the big problem? Most people would say, well, we just can't get enough funding for our projects. And so that's the big problem. And I just like that literally, like when I was a teenager. So I won't out. Yeah. I was just like, I should just get a lot of money to like help push longevity drugs forward. And the name for that happened to venture capital fund. But it definitely wasn't working downstream of the idea of venture capital. Like that came after. Yeah. This idea of like just getting money for projects that should have money and and didn't. You did this for a number of years. What triggered the, like, sort of change in how you were

going to spend your attention to cry preservation? I think just, like, cry preservation is one of the cool, like, I think it's not, like, to pardon the pun, but I think it's one of the coolest, most interesting, like, best problems ever. Like, I think, like, from so many different angles, like, I think you've ever since counterfactual impact. Like, if you're obsessed with, like, just technical delight, like, just rosh your, like, technical interest and diversity and, like, the lot of technical parts of the problem. And then also, I think from, perspective of social impact. Like, I'm just, it was just, it's such interesting problem from, like, how it's perceived and then, like, what are the different factors of that? It was like zero to one.

It was like the, I remember just seeing the problem clearly for the first time. I mean, a lot of the people in my life, I think, had been aware of it, but I just, it took me so long to really, I think, see it clearly for myself. But then it was just like zero to one of like, this is the only thing that I could imagine hoaring the next decade of, like, my work into it. That was after I kind of done kind of the first set of work with the fun. I was kind of like thinking, what is the next, like, big thing. With your co-founder, Hunter, was it like an immediately obvious, yes, we should work on this together? He's one of the few people where if I ask him a question, like, he'll come back the next day and give me an answer where he's literally thought through

from first principles, like, what the correct answer is. Like, I remember at some point, I realized that he'd written a doc on like the principles of like, you know, correct preservation. Like most people, you know, like, like, would write that from the literature or kind of like citing different sort of sources at various levels of granularity. Hunter, went back and like redevived fundamental laws of stat and mech as part of like this is what you should know in crab preservation doc like i really admire how much he builds up from like like like uh like really simple models to try to create coherent like technical pictures that are more complex he's like the most fun interesting best person to work with um ever for sure and it wasn't a hard sell like we should go

work on this problem in particular it was not a hard cell but it was not an interesting way so I think one thing that I like love about the field of cry preservation is I think it's very compelling. Like if you like heart, like it's one of those things where if you like the problem speaks for itself. And so I remember telling Hunter about it in our first call and he basically was like, oh, I don't buy it. He told me later that he didn't tell me in the call. But then he went off and thought about it for a couple days and like really thought about like what we knew about ice formation. Like did, you know, some like basic back of the envelope math and came. back and he was like, oh, wait, this seems like actually, or like, this seems like it's in the

real impossibility in a way that is very different from my initial intuition. And that, that sort of like conjugation is just so interesting to me. Maybe it's useful to zoom out and just say, like, what is the goal of until? I would think about our goal as trying to create a new form of critical care. The example that I would give that is sort of the core of the company is there's some years where certain diseases such as like metastatic melanoma go from being, like sort of in a single a year, like, Medistak and Melanoma went from being something that you had like a six to nine month prognosis, like, less than a year of expected survival to with like, you know, new combination immunotherapies, you might have a decade plus of expected survival or like 50% of people sort of surviving

over a decade, you know, without getting sort of death from melanoma. In fact, we're storing to have other things at that point. The tagline is like single years can make the difference between a patient dying of internal illness and like living long enough to make the critical cure. But right now, there's no way to press pause on their biological time. Like, what if you had an ambulance to the future, right? Like, what if you could take someone who is on their deathbed and, you know, find some way to, you know, just sort of hibernate them, basically, until the sort of critical cure for the disease comes online.

And like, you know, any of this context, we're not talking about necessarily decades or kind of, like, you know, much longer than that. Initially, it's just kind of in the context of, like, when there's a window where you could, imagine, like, a critical trials being done for a drug that were they eligible for, could make a huge difference for their disease. To give an example of the need, too, it's like my sort of co-founder's father-in-law had this happen to him in the sense

that he got sort of advanced cancer that would have been treatable or addressable by a therapy that came out basically a couple months after he was no longer eligible for the therapy. And he like missed, you know, the critical clinical trial by like, you know, a couple months. And so sort of like that level of urgency

that like someone in that position shouldn't have to, you know, miss, a critical therapy because there's a couple month difference in when they got their sort of disease and when the therapy became available. And from a just like product perspective, that means you need to do whole body cryopreservation. Yeah. So like to give conducts on technically how we think about this problem, so our long-term goal is reversible whole body cryopreservation for medical sort of hibernation.

But in the near term, what we work on is reversibly cryopreserving single human organs to help transplant patients get organs more efficiently. I want to come back to all of the technical challenges here and where we are and what you think the next milestones are. But because you describe it in the context of medical use, like I'm going to be honest. As a kid, I was like, well, I want to be able to freeze time because I want to be able to go to Mars too. Or you said because you've worked on longevity with this perspective, like aging is, you know, it could be considered disease. A health stay we should work on that is credible medical science. So how do you think about those other use cases?

So an interesting thing when you start to think about, like, actually applying the technology is sort of what's the experience of the person, not just kind of technically for the disease, but socially. So like one of the number one reasons most people wouldn't do medical hibernation, especially that it wouldn't be like for the most part of recreational thing is that, you know, I think a lot of people view themselves in part defined by their social context. So like when you say recreational thing, you mean because like you just you think of that as going to Mars as a recreational use case. Oh, no, no, sorry. I think this case, what I'm thinking of is, you know, some people might imagine that they would love to skip into the future just to see what happens, you know, and maybe, you know, like, have their same amount of number of years of life, but, like, have to be future shifted by some amount of time.

Yes. But the number one reason that most people wouldn't do that and are also just, you know, very weary of the idea of hibernation for themselves is, you know. I can't take everybody with me. Yeah, exactly. It's a idea that, like, you kind of define yourself by the people around you. And so I think, I think, like, you know, those kinds of use cases, like going to Mars, And those are all kind of things that could happen and could happen with or like sort of could happen.

We'll work part happening technology for certain like definitions of mind. But I think the thing that a lot of people will face is just like this question of like, is it worth, you know, traveling so far to give up my current social context? And that will put a limit on like how much people want to use this for like I think there's like a real cost that kind of you incurred. So it's in my mind only makes sense for like really serious use cases initially where like you literally would die. Or like, you know, because yeah, because you're kind of putting on the line like your current, like all of your current social reality. And, like, how that will evolve without you versus, like, you know, the other thing that you might want. But, I mean, a lot of people might want to go to Mars, even in that context, but I think I'm a little, yeah, the cost is pretty significant.

It's very hard to know what we want, though. Like, a lot of people might make that decision whether or not, you know, their ultimate happiness is higher. That's fair. Maybe you can just break down how you think about the challenges scientifically, right, versus, I think, to maybe even Hunter's original reaction, like, sounds like science fiction. I don't know if you can go work on that thing. Yeah. Right? And so if it's, you know, crystal formation or whatever the set of challenges and what sequence you think you should solve them. I see. Yeah. Maybe I can just give a series of effects that I think together sort of make the problem super interesting.

So one fact is that ice formation is a staccastic process. So if ice just formed unilaterally in any given material past a certain point of temperature, like, you know, just like go from zero to one. it's like 100% ice. That might be kind of hard to think carefully about technically, but ice sort of forms through a process of random nucleation and then extension. And this is cool because you can modulate the like sort of nucleation, the rate of nucleation and extension to then modulate the probability of ice formation. And because it's probabilistic, if you can do that well enough, and you can sort of spend minimal time in the temperature range where ice can nucleate,

then that gives you a shot at sort of preventing a lot of ice formation. So like the number one tagline would be like avoid ice at all. Or like sort of avoid as much as possible. There may be something like something. I think some people might be working on technologies to cry preserve with some sort of like ice formation. But we're focused on regimes where you're basically trying to avoid as much ice formation as possible. Just for the non-biologists, you know, ice formation is bad because it breaks all the cell membranes. Yeah.

So ice rush is bad because ice expands. Water expands when it forms ice. And that's just hard for your tissue. to take without substantial damage. So you want to avoid ice formation. And the cool thing is that there's sort of a temperature below which ice formation stops happening. So basically if you can traverse, let's say, you know, going below zero degrees or less

through to around minus 130. And you can get below that without ice formation, then you're good. And the interesting is at that point, you're good for quite a long time. So there have been human embryos that were reversibly cry preserved for, the latest record was over 30 years, and then we warmed and sort of viably used to create pregnancy, and then, you know, sort of like there are kids who were literally cryopreserved for 30 years as tiny embryos. And so that's the last thing, which was very surprising to me, which is that, like, we already reversibly cryopreserved tissue, including human tissue,

including cold body human tissue at that very, very small, like, you know, in a couple of hundreds of stage all the time. And we do it for very long time periods, which I honestly, like, would a first principle's been stuck on? Is this possible to do at all? It's a possible scale up to a large complex biological system that has a lot of vasculature, where you're dealing with different material properties, where you have to think a lot about profusion

and how to sort of diffuse chemicals in and out and how to like getting heated out quickly enough. So the idea that you could pause all molecular emotion and then randomly we started and even a cell would survive that, you know, like from French principles to me used to seem crazy. But we know that works. Yeah, it's like, we just, we already like,

scientists just tried it and it worked. And so now the problem is, like scaling that up and doing it in a way that's compatible with like, you know, tissue health. Yes. I think one of the things that was most wildly surprising to me, like being in your lab a little while ago is how much it looks like people were working on what I'd consider to be like engineering problems around. It's like, oh, how do we get something to warm quickly and safely enough versus let me go work on this therapeutic? Yeah. So actually, I feel like there's just part of the problem that I've been trying to explain externally for a long time. Every time I try to explain it, I think it comes off as like not specific or something, but it is actually one of the core reasons why I think the problem is interesting to work on,

which is that like you can trade off like engineering difficulty and biological difficulty to a non-zero degree. Like not 100%. Like you can't just use engineering to solve the problem. You absolutely have biological questions and like those questions could come out in the negative for some of these cases. So like that's not saying you can just make an engineering problem. But like you can make your life easier on the biology front by building better engineering tooling. And the fact that that's possible is a huge deal. Like that is not true for most problems in biology.

And it gives you a lot of leverage on the problem. This is probably interesting to maybe only like 5% people watching this. But like I think that I'm obsessed with this is just the idea like temperature is such a beautiful conceptual tool. Right. It's like temperature as an idea is something that in physics took like took physicists hundreds of years to come up with. It links like molecular motion to a high like a single high level measurable parameter. And just tuning temperature like sort of tells you about almost like the relative passage of time. of like molecules at the nanoscale.

Like that's that's a highly non-trivial sort of conceptual lever to have on a problem. And in biology, one of the biggest problems is like it's really hard to find powerful conceptual levers on sort of like for like nanoscale, for manipulating like the nanoscale that have anything approaching that degree of sort of leverage. Basically what that gives you is like you can apply a lot of theoretical sort of a lot of theoretical tool could use in physics to model parts of this question in ways that are actually useful. And it is just not true that you can use, like, equations from physics to think usefully about almost any other problem in biology.

There are plug sections like in the context of like medical devices, but like, in a, in a context where you're talking about, like, changing the course of a terminal illness, which, this one is interesting because this doesn't even allow to change it, but like it gives you the possibility of some more time. I think it's one of the most important things to talk about the problem. understand how to explain it in a way that is clear. But I think it's one of the most important things to understand about the problem. Yeah, maybe if I think about actually applying it, like, just very concretely to what you are doing,

like, if it is challenging from a, you know, organ preservation biology perspective to have a organ reheated or, sorry, rewarmed, like, evenly throughout, then maybe the thing to do is to, like, change the surface area to volume ratio of, like, your heating device, or, sorry, distribute the heat in different ways without like changing your understanding of the biology, but just with new devices and technologies that you invent from the engineering perspective. Like that actually seems like a very simple example. I realize you're implying a like more fundamental view of like why temperature is just such a interesting framework to be working on from both an engineering perspective and a biology perspective. And there's like tradeoffs where you

put your effort here. But I think that's actually that's something that like didn't did not occur to me at all coming into your lab and learning more about until I was like, oh, it's actually like a, to some degree, much simpler problem than I understood to the point of like, well, if you can just reduce and preserve, reduce and increase temperature in these ways that are perfect through this organ is going to work, right? Yeah. So I, let me restate that and then give one caveat just to make sure that, like I can you correctly. So A, way that you can talk about the trade-off between engineering and biology is that, like, with engineering, you can modulate cooling and re-warming rate, just to some extent, to certain, to certain extent.

And then that can then change, like, how much, what we call a craptative agent or kind of chemical that modulates ice formation, you add to the system. And you want to minimize the concentration of that craptych agent. Basically, yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And so as you increase cooling and rewarming rate, aka spending therefore minimal minimal time and kind of the dangerous zone of ice formation, you can correspondingly decrease the concentration of carbon that you're putting in. But if you could instantaneously cool and rewarm, then you wouldn't have to put any CP in. But that's not something that we're default assuming is feasible for a large

system. So there's still always going to be a component of biology, aka how tissue responds, especially for a dog's a deep perspective to like a new chemical agent. Where are you now in this progression? Like should I think of it as like there's a kidney and then it seems like quite a large jump to a small animal, but maybe it's not? Yeah, so we work on the two in parallel. So we both work on scaling up preservation and re-warming technologies to kind of human organ scale. And also in parallel, we work on sort of whole rat, reversible hibernation and intrinsic technologies over from sort of what we learn on the kidney side into the right context, as well as doing things specifically for rat. When you started the company, did you have a timeline in your own mind? So I think initially

I was like, we could maybe make some progress and hopefully make some good products, but like the idea of full body cry preservation felt like that would be really far out if that was possible. I mean, I think it, I definitely still wouldn't put like a near-term timeline on it, but I feel like we have a much clearer roadmap, at least to get, to begin to get there. And the first steps seem faster than, than I would have imagined, if that makes sense. Like, but the big unknown to get to whole body reversible is the brain. It's unclear. Like the brain can withstand a lot of change and does withstand a lot of different types of damage or change with age, for example. But it's unclear whether, like, what kind of injury the brain could sustain in the context of like a whole body of risk preparation protocol.

And then like what level of fidelity it's possible to do. So like that, that to be clear is a big unknown on the neuroscience side. How do you recruit and like lead in a company that has like, let's say, an unclear like timeline around a really big. scientific goal like that, like in terms of both finding people that are the right fit, motivating them, and how do you think about urgency in that context? I mean, I think we have a pretty clear timeline for a first product, which is like get a reversibly crypreserved. So basically, transplant patients today, surprisingly frequently miss organs that are on route to them because there's a timing problem. So like, you know,

organs expire very quickly after they become available from a donor. That's very unfortunate. Yeah. And it's crazy because it's like they're the, they're like, one of the most precious resources we know of, and yet, like, people regularly charter private jets. You know, like, you're putting a surgeon on a private jet to go pick up an organ, get it back to a patient in time. Yeah. Like, and you're doing all that at the last minute and scheduling the patient for surgery at the last minute. So the patient has to wait within, like, a two-hour radius of a transplant center with a pager on them or like a notification device at all times. And so the first product that we're aiming towards is just, you know, being able to pause time for the organs.

The patient doesn't, so, you know, you can take as long as you need to get the organ to the patient. And that's very near time. Like, that's not long-term ethical. that's like we're aiming to get that into like pre-concilable studies and into the clinic as quickly as possible. So I think it helps to have a very concrete goal that clearly is relevant to a long-term goal, right? I think another thing that was inspired just about that product was like, if we're at all talking about whole body reversible cry preservation and we can't make a dent on that problem. There's no version of not going through it. Yeah. It's sort of the thing that's like if you're

serious, that should be doable. And if like you can't do that, then like you're not the company to like do the long-term thing. So that it was nice stuff for us to like have a very clear benchmark for ourselves of like, you know, are we correct that this is attractable technology on that scale? I guess, like, is it a challenge or to lead beyond that? Because everybody understands the company has a broader mission or is it just focus on step one? I think there's the possibility that's difficult, but I think right now I feel good about sort of our ability to compete around that, which is like, I think if we were like, it's 100% possible to do whole body risk per preservation. There's no question we're certain. Like, then we would just be

shitters and then we, like, we wouldn't be able to recruit because it's, you know, there's a lot of technical risk and there's a lot of uncertainty between here and there. I think we can't accurately expose the models that we use to think about the problem. You know, like, why we think that this is at all, like, possibly in scope and, like, you know, what we're testing to, you know, sort of trying it closer to there. And I think the problem is interesting enough that, you know, some of the hunter, it's sort of like really good people tend to be skeptical at first because there's an intuition that it shouldn't work. But then, like, they'll see a lot of data very quickly where it's like, wait, I wouldn't have thought that was possible intuitively, but that seems to be possible.

And so, like, let me think about this from first principles. What's another data point that you think matters besides, like, embryos can be frozen? Embryos can be versibly cry preserved. And there's work from the existing carpalgae community, so from John Dishaw's group and then predated by that. Also, you know, Greg Faheed has done excellent work, sort of looking at irreversible car preservation and kidneys and showing, like, you can reverseably crypreserve a kidney, rewarm it, put it into a rat that does not have another kidney and that rat returns normal function after about a month.

So it's sort of like, you know, even just on the whole mammalian organ scale, like, this is not a problem that's entirely out in the wilderness. It's something that, like, is even academically tractable right now. Given that's true, why don't you think it's been worked on? I realize I'm asking an answer for other people, but I'm like, well, that's very odd. Yeah. I mean, I think even the field of like Oregon reversible crop preservation really had trouble for a while attracting the resources that would be required to scale it. And I really give a lot of credit to the field pioneers. Like, you know, Greg, you know, is just an incredible example of somebody who fought

tirelessly to make this field a reality and sort of make a justification of thing that people were taking seriously. And, you know, like, through a long period where I think it just wasn't kind of something to focus on. But I don't how to put it, but like in venture, like, I think my whole job sort of, in that part of my life is like picking trends that, like, sort of feel like, oh, this thing just feels weird or it seems kind of hard to think about. but technically, like, there's nothing kind of that corresponds to that. And I think, like, for example, like, whole body, restable carb preservation, like, now seen as just much more kind of reasonable, but whole body of reciprocal car preservation, definitely an area where I think there's just, like, so much possibility for conflation with, like,

really extreme, like, it's, it's hard to talk about it rationally. People either, like, love it and they love it so much that they won't question it, or it's, like, they're worried that thinking about, that associating with it is a little bit too science fiction for kind of where it might be optimal for them be focused. And so I think like, I'm kind of dancing around some things that like are still but antimimetic around it. But yeah. The study of longevity has become much more mainstream over the last five years or so, both

academically and in terms of consumer interest, right? And I think those two things are linked. Do you hope that happens with cryopreservation? Aging becoming something that like one of the best like, someone who seems one of the best, like, next generation professors, chooses to work on without shame or fear of, like, not getting a grant is great. That part of aging being against me is great.

And, like, I definitely hope that that happens for carp preservation, specifically also for car preservation of, like, variety of tissues, including, like, neural tissue, and including, like, things related to whole body work, not exclusively, but, like, basically that those topics are, like, seen as something that you're, like, it's fine to work on. maybe just like if you go to paint a picture of organ transplantation is transformed by, you know, until, like, in what ways? Like, how do you think that will change either what type of care patients can receive or even do you think that has any impact on how people think about the speed of medical research?

I think the thing that feels the most compelling for me is just like the experience of the transplant patient. it's really, I think, constricting, it's like you're waiting for a life-changing surgery and you have no idea when it will even be scheduled, you know, and you can't go on vacation or really leave, like, and you have to, like, move, you have to be, like, close to the place where you will get surgery,

and you can't leave a certain radius of, like, travel distance to that place for fear of losing out on your life-changing surgery. Like, that is such a... And surgery center house arrest. Yeah. That's such a crazy proposition. And then I also think, you know, right now for matching,

it's like everything's done at literally the last minute. It's like someone dies, an organ comes available. And like you're just kind of calling around trying to find like what patient is available to get this organ. And you don't have that much time to make the optimal match, right? It's sort of like, like who can get to the hospital? Yeah. Yikes. And so I think just like one sort of transplant surgeon that we've been working with,

the way he described it was just like just making time not a variable changes the whole paradigm. I don't think that will happen overnight, obviously. But like, I think the dream would be that like everyone in the ecosystem has the time they need to like, you know, make the best possible decision, sort of like do things in a way that feels the best for them. I mean, like, a surgeon doesn't have to stay up overnight the same day that they flew out to get the organ to do this, the surgery. You know, they can like wait sort of until it's like the best time for them instead of doing it like literally, you know, like as soon as they land. Like they go into operation like that. It just it's sort of something that when you really think about it, it's like it's amazing that.

I mean, it's incredible that like everyone is operating this way right now. Maybe to close up, if we broaden the scope a little bit, are there other, are there other, problems that are in, let's say, biology, medicine, science, technology that you think are like worth working on and interesting and perhaps feasible, but people are not looking at as much as they should be, you know, maybe not even making a value judgment, but that you're curious about. Aesthetically, I'm just really curious about, like, how to represent the molecular world in a way that people can understand and engage with.

Like, I think it's just such a cool and beautiful thing. It's like, you know, we're talking about kindergarten, like, world earlier. It's like this beautiful kindergarten, like, feels in my mind right colorful, even though it's like, not. literally sort of place to play around. And I think most people experience it as like flat triangles and squares in a biology textbook where it's like, you know, there's an arrow between like this triangle and this triangle is just like doesn't make any conceptual sense and it's like confusing and annoying. And so I'm just like, I personally am really curious about like how to

erupts in the world in a way that is really compelling and feel super exciting. From an education perspective. I think it is artistically cool if it's educational, but I think it's more just because I think it's so beautiful. It's like if you can never seen a tree, it's like being able to see a tree. It's like that would be so great. Right. You know, it's like this complex fractal thing and it's like light falling through the sort of tree branches. And I think like the molecular world is like that. It's just, it's a kind of view that's not made accessible to most people. It's hard to conceptualize and you have to like do some amount of studying to sort of like build the world in your mind correctly.

I look forward to finding that art. Thanks, Laura. Thanks for having me. Find us on Twitter at No Pryor's Pod. Subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you want to see our faces, follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen. That way you get a new episode. every week. And sign up for emails or find transcripts for every episode at no dash priors.com.