Laura 🌲 ⛰️
@LauraDeming
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I like molecules and thought experiments! personal: (notes on research + longevity) work: and
Joined May 2011
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I feel like each year I realize how much I don’t know and how ignorant I am and it’s *awesome*. Like, how exciting is it that you *don’t* already know all there is to learn?
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Urgent: we need more lab technicians to scale up coronavirus testing capacity in LA - if you have lab experience and are in LA or willing to relocate please email ldeming.www
@gmail
.com
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The world: So, aging is impossible to change, basically there's nothing we can do to...
Longevity scientists: We engineered a mouse to live 2x longer than normal!
The world: ...as I was saying, aging is impossible to change, there's nothing we can do
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Kind of crazy that we don’t know how general anesthesia works
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Humans are colonies of nanoscale robots composed of stardust and powered by sunlight.
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Who is, to engineers, what Feynman is to scientists? Popular but thoughtful, represents the spirit behind the discipline.
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We discovered the electron ~120 years ago. Isn't that kind of crazy?
It's cool how much we've done with that knowledge, since.
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Is there a good reason why many basic laws of physics are linear or quadratic (for example, F=ma), not much more complex?
This might be a silly question - I'm just curious why this isn't true, or what kinds of laws we'd be unlikely to see.
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I want a list of books that are good to re-read every year.
Most valued: technical books that can apply across disciplines ('How to Solve It' by Polya).
Any suggestions?
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What are the most interesting concepts that apply both to economics and biology?
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This was a hard post to feel comfortable publishing, but I hope this might help someone. I've been sad as a teenager in the past and wanted to share some ways I've learned to deal with those emotions.
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I've decided not to work with Aubrey de Grey or SENS in any capacity moving forward.
@celinehalioua
has written about her similar experiences here
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Looking for Head of Ops for Longevity Fund - $150K+ salary, higher if you’re significantly experienced. Looking for someone smart and capable with 3+ years of operating at a fast-paced startup or VC firm.
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I’m curious - what are the most beautiful (ethereal, thought-provoking) websites you’ve seen? Points for artistic value, not words without visual beauty.
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Successful people often sound silly b/c they have mental models for everything, often wrong. But interesting thing is they have models for *everything* and update them continuously. The alternate is no model. Is that better?
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I'm considering abstaining from Wikipedia / Google for a bit to see if it improves speed of learning about something. Hypothesis is first links/descriptions in both are so low quality that actually impedes learning. No idea what to replace them with. Will report back!
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It's cute that cell walls can be made of sugar. Like single-celled organisms are living in their own private gingerbread houses.
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Have you ever had a moment of scientific understand that took your breath away and left you wandering dazed for days afterward?
For me, it was the phrase 'everything is made of atoms' - one day it went from banal/obvious to a tesseract of beautiful pictures.
What are yours?
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Wanted: a book recommendation service that shows a distribution of where people spent the most time in a book.
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I broke down crying in our office when I got the call. Hard to describe how much this means coming from inside the field. Congratulations to
@celinehalioua
, team and regulators for breaking open a pathway for regulatory consideration of drugs in this field.
1 - Loyal has earned what we believe is the FDA’s first-ever formal acceptance that a drug can be developed + approved for lifespan extension
2 - We have 'technical section complete' AKA the 'does it work' data for LOY-001 - our large dog lifespan extension drug - is done
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'waking up at dawn, doing math and eating chocolate'
WORLD'S OLDEST PERSON: Kane Tanaka of Japan has officially been named the oldest person in the world at 116 years and 66 days, saying she likes waking up at dawn, doing math and eating chocolate.
@TomLlamasABC
reports.
#TheIndex
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I'm curious if it's possible to make a yeast cell live forever. If you're interested in investigating the problem, ping me at info
@longevity
.vc
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Excited to launch a new fund today:
I wrote here about my takeaways from the past decade + predictions for the next:
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Looking for a founding team member (head of operations) on a new high impact project - email laura
@longevity
.vc if interested, or know someone who might be
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This just dropped - the most important milestone in the history of longevity biotech.
Thread on what this means below
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Looking for people to help a company massively scale up COVID-19 testing capacity - email ldeming.www
@gmail
.com if you can help. Will need to hire lab techs (recruit + manage) and coordinate supply chain, skills relevant to any above welcome.
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After a bunch of failed photo attempts, my friend yelled 'LAURA! THINK ABOUT STATISTICAL MECHANICS!' and I guess this is what pure love looks like.
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Advice for ambitious teenagers -
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I hate paper PDFs!
Scientists
1. Collect data, put in spreadsheet
2. Make JPEG with spreadsheet
3. Put JPEG in PDF
You
4. Extract JPEG from PDF
5. Extract data points from JPEG
6. Put data points in spreadsheet
The PDF is noisy, compressed filter on info you want!
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I and
@celinehalioua
are thinking of running a quick longevity startup school next Sunday - anyone interested?
If yes, reply below w/ what you'd want to hear about! If we do it, will DM you with a zoom link.
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If glass and plastic didn't exist, how fast could progress in biology have gone in the past 100 years?
Is there an equivalently useful new material we don't have yet?
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Here's a quick summary of interesting things to understand about aging biology, if you're new to the field:
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If you are a hospital/physician in LA or SF with patients in need of COVID-19 testing please email ldeming.www
@gmail
.com, we’ll work to help you.
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One of the scariest things I've learned about the biotech industry is that there's really no one in charge. Like, I used to think there was some kind of optimized process for commercializing scientific ideas.
Sooooooo not true. It's not even an efficient market.
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Would anyone be interested in a game theory journal club in the new year? Prob 10 sessions, going through classic papers + thought expts.
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We need builders to break the longevity barrier this decade. Come build with us.
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I’m re-learning probability and statistics, looking for a tutor (ideally stats or math PhD student) able to grade problem sets (for example, Wasserman’s ‘All of Statistics’) and suggest new problems.
Please reach out to ldeming.www
@gmail
.com if interested!
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Yesterday, I was sitting in a park feeling kind of sad about the fate of humanity.
Then an elderly gentlemen walked by, said something about how we should all be more connected, and threw a KitKat bar my way.
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What is the most important US law that seemed really insignificant when originally passed?
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How much has Hans Zimmer's music indirectly increased US GDP?
Curious if more/less than the 'Social Network' + Reznor soundtrack. Including of course memetic associations from Inception/Interstellar/etc.
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What is useful to believe when you are young, but harmful to believe when you are older?
In aging, we call this antagonistic pleiotropy (genes that are selected for because they help the young, but actively cause damage later)
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What are the most striking and beautiful representations of technology in film, outside of the human computer interaction in the original Iron Man?
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I'm obsessed w the idea that in 100 years there will be a valid discipline of theoretical biology which you can practice in akin to theoretical vs experimental physics - where it isn't a second-class citizen to experimental work.
So interested in what catalyzes it.
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Sorry for the late posting! I made a research primer () - would love any feedback/thoughts/comments.
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It's funny how academic language sometimes differs from other areas.
When my smart academic friends say 'I don't know', it usually means they've written a few papers on the subject.
'I have no idea' could mean they've spent a decade pondering something.
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Who thinks they understand what entropy is? Drop a definition in the replies below :)
Ditto heat, voltage, energy
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The Italians in 1545 were *really* excited about solving cubic equations
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What non-obvious ideas learned over decades are hard to describe but important for a 'good life'?
Emphasis on non-obvious (or, something that's said a lot, but hard to actually understand).
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Most of my (smart, technical) friends are losing their minds over GPT-3. Are they wrong?
I guess, what's a productive response? Apathy presumably isn't.
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Learning high school biology is weird, because you're presented with a bunch of abstractions, and later realize you can't make logical inferences from most of them.
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Would anyone be interested in a public science library (aka feel free to come study at our office)? We have a bunch of science history/textbooks - curious if would be useful for anyone (or if Google has made obsolete). Would have loved something like this as a kid.
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Free way to get a pretty good education in any given discipline: read all Nobel laureate lectures (technical and biographical).
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There is no royal road to aging biology. Trying to solve longevity without understanding how biology works is like trying to build a rocket without understanding physics.
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Is there a YC for researchers?
Curious to hear from folks in academia if such a thing exists.
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Nobel Laureate Albert Fert, fun description of realizing how inaccessible Ingmar Bergman's work was lead him to physics.
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Every weekend I get really, really annoyed about how little I understand about something. This weekend it's progress in biology research. Argh!
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Have an exclusive on *significant* longevity story that will break next few weeks - very exciting addition to the field. Would love to give to a writer/journalist interested in the space + able to cover it in the right context.
DM for more info, thanks!
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Problem I have in group conversations:
1) don't understand a key concept
2) feel like it would 'hijack' the conversation to chase it down
3) pause all information intake until resolved.
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Every Christmas I decide to actually learn topology, read the first chapter of Munkres, and then don't do any more topology until the same thing happens next December.
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Also, anytime anyone tries to tell you they know what energy is, you can just tell them Richard Feynman said we don't actually know, it's just a thing that's conserved. When we calculate it a bunch of different ways.
I used to get so frustrated by not understanding this.
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One thing most people don't realize about longevity research is it's not *just* figuring out what to do - there's an insane amount of engineering to implement in humans. And many of the tools we use to do that are biological in nature.
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Ernest Shackleton's hiring post - best ever & generated enormous response
http://t.co/1Q9ZnPTNrR
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Genentech was a California company started by a non-biologist and a tech venture firm
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Mostly, my life = bashing my head against Overton windows until they move. Disconcerting to think back to 2011 - what's happening in longevity today seemed both very logical and socially impossible.
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Testing this out - we believe many great founders self-select out of starting longevity companies, and would love to help educate / just give you more info about what it entails. Literally, our
#1
job this year is just helping people think through this.
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I think one of my major frustrations with most scientific papers is they don’t take the semantic concept graph seriously. They treat the summary and conclusion as a place to write marketing material, not to seriously describe the knowledge work which motivated the experiment.
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Mental models I used in 2020:
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For those who have never experienced it, Paprika by Satoshi Kon is (imho) one of the most beautiful and intricate animated films ever. Spirited Away for adults. A smarter Inception. Note very weird so prob don't watch w/ kids. So sad Kon died before making Dreaming Machine.
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Sometimes I try to define what aging actually is. Then I remember that we can’t define life and death is the absence of that and aging is somewhere in between and then I just go home.
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I've noticed a few things (particularly young) people tend not to do when they learn about longevity biotech. I think it would be helpful to be aware of some of these things earlier, so collected a few suggestions here.
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Want to discuss longevity science with friends online (and publicly, so newcomers to the field can learn about it). Any recs for the best platform to do it on?
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A scientist walks into a bar and orders 10 shots of vodka. “Wow,” says the bartender, “that’s an order of magnitude.”
what’s the most common joke about your field of study?
For astrophysics I’d say:
- order of magnitude jokes
- assume a spherical cow
- all elements heavier than hydrogen and helium are metals
yep that’s 3 but same order of mag soooo idc 😌
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I'm going to do a mini lecture series on biology. Just playing around, come if you want to have fun! First one next Monday @ 6 PT.
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I'm looking for a thought partner -
Topics du jour: evolutionary dynamics, physics, and entropy wrt the question 'what is life'?
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I feel like ppl underrate burnout from not being able to express genuine curiosity. Not everyone needs to, but some people really really need to have some of that at/outside work or they deeply struggle.
Kind of a platitude until you run into it in practice.
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If you were disappointed by the Oppenheimer movie, you can watch the documentary 'The Day After Trinity' which delivers 10x on both the technical inspiration and direct moral impact on the scientists involved post bombing.
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I wish all graphs - in every medium - were replace by raw data + tunable assumption parameters to play with
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I wish there were recreational science discussion clubs in the same way that there are recreational sports leagues.
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Next Monday @ 6pm, will give a Twitch lecture on 'Longevity by the Numbers'
If there's a topic you like, mention below! As usual, just experimenting - but this viewpoint is one I care a lot about :)
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Hi all! We launched . Catalyzing the next generation of longevity companies. Excited to welcome
@SpringDiscovery
to the first batch.
Applications open on a rolling basis, program starts June 4.
Thanks
@pmarca
@felicis
@eladgil
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Just another Saturday in which I optimistically download ‘Quantum Field Theory for the Gifted Amateur’
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Want: a 'nature retreat' except nature = giant man-made steel foundries or rocket launches.
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I did ~1 week of research on making yeast live forever, and wrote a short post about it. It's not obviously implausible.
I'm curious if it's possible to make a yeast cell live forever. If you're interested in investigating the problem, ping me at info
@longevity
.vc
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I'm extremely confused about what the 'scientific method' actually is - I no longer feel like I understand how to classify things as 'scientific' vs 'not scientific'.
Has anyone else (who has experienced similar confusion) found enlightening materials / things to ponder?
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I + all my friends have started saying 'question mark' instead of inflecting a sentence
Today a random biopharma industry person did it in conversation
Does anyone know where this trend started?
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I’ve transferred my allegiance from Molecular Biology of the Cell to - this is the new bible for aspiring mol bio learners, you should def check it out!
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My inbox is a Schelling point for 12-15 year old longevity prodigies - there's no lack of IQ, but only a few know themselves well enough to predict future action + persistently followup in intellectual good faith efforts to find the truth. The latter consistently amaze.
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The craziest thing about this story is it all started when Aubrey emailed telling us there were multiple allegations, bc he wanted our help suppressing them.
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Congratulations to ALX Oncology! Currently, 3/6 companies from Longevity Fund 1 have IPO'd, and the remaining 2/6 have drugs in the clinic.
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Are good entrepreneurs stoic?
Genuinely curious. Recently very much flipped mind on stoicism, used to think it was important, now curious how often it's actively bad. 'This too shall pass' vs 'let's fix this yesterday!'
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*so* excited to use LLMs as a research assistant, feels like a huge upgrade
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In case anyone was curious, header photo is from when I was (10? 11?) and decided that the only think worth scrawling in chalk outside our house was science propaganda. Then an actual scientist walked by, stopped and talked to us for 30 min. Best day ever.
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What long and difficult project/work/journey has permanently and positively improved your ability to think?
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Growing up, thought hero stories were analogies for life. Joseph Campbell Thousand Faces, the Odyssey, etc.
Weird to grow up and realize stories have *nothing* to do with what a life should look like. They're just compelling.
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"When Santiago Ramon y Cajal was 11-years-old, he destroyed a neighbor's gate with a homemade cannon and spent three days in jail"
^ one of the most famous neuroscientists of all time
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Sometimes I wonder if I should post my curmudgeon rants about my industry. But it would be hard to frame them properly - I'm not mad at the state of things as much as insanely excited about where we can go, and sad I'll get to see a fraction of it in my lifetime.
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Half my friends use the word 'meme' in the Dawkins sense, half interpret it the mainstream way, resulting conversations can be very funny.
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