Deming: Medical hibernation carries severe psychological costs of losing social context
Laura Deming · How Until is Engineering Away Time in Organ Transplants | Laura Deming · Jan 29, 2026 · at 11:51
Laura Deming, CEO of biotech startup Until, discusses why social and relational factors will inherently limit elective or recreational uses of cryopreservation.
0:00 / 0:18exact quote · 18.7s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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, that kind of you incur. And so it's, in my mind, it only makes sense for, like, really serious use cases initially where, like, you literally would die if, 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, this other thing that you might want.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Laura Deming
Until aims for reversible whole-body cryopreservation after mastering single organ transplants
“Our long-term goal is reversible whole body cryopreservation for, you know, medical sort of hibernation. But in the near term, what we work on is reversibly cryopreserving human, single human organs to help transplant patients get organs more efficiently.”
Deming: Society's failure to recognize aging as a disease hinders research
“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.”
Deming: Brain injury tolerance remains the bottleneck for whole-body cryopreservation
“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 …”
Deming: Rewarmed cryopreserved kidneys successfully restore normal organ function in rats
“Greg Faheed has done excellent work sort of looking at reversible cryopreservation in kidneys, and showing, like, you can reversibly cryopreserve a kidney, rewarm it, put it into a rat that does not have another kidney, and that rat returns to normal function …”
Deming: Cryobiology uniquely allows swapping biological complexity for engineering difficulty
“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, not a hundr…”
Deming: Immunotherapy raised metastatic melanoma ten-year survival to over 50 percent
“Like sort of in a single year, like metastatic 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…”