Founder Letter

Hunter's letter

In 2016, my father-in-law, Mark, was diagnosed with a terminal case of mesothelioma and died months later after frontline therapies failed, as we knew they would. Near the end of his life, a Keytruda trial opened for his disease, but he was too sick to qualify. Keytruda is now recognized as an effective therapy for some mesothelioma. When we heard from his doctor that there was nothing left to do, I felt a profound powerlessness.

Years later, when Laura and I met, I saw a path to pausing biological time that could help those who would otherwise be left optionless by contemporary medicine. It’s an audacious solution with significant scientific uncertainty along the way, but I stand convinced that the scale of the problem justifies the journey.

Laura's letter

I feel incredibly angry when I find problems which could help patients, but which aren’t worked on because they seem uncool or haven’t been well evaluated. I think we, as humans, should try as hard as we can to find the best path to cures for patients, and to look past cognitive biases that get in the way of perceiving them correctly.

I started my career afraid of death, and wanting to create technologies to eliminate it. Now, close to two decades later, I’ve changed — I’m not sure what it means to preserve the continuous self, and I think society will need to make a call about what ‘it’ wants. That said, I think we haven’t thought clearly or well enough about how technologies that give us much more agency over our health could create different worlds. This is one of the most important things to figure out in the next century, in light of approaching science and technological progress, and I’m excited to work on technologies that pose these questions to society writ large.