Saving Lives & Buying Time
An evening with Laura Deming, co-founder of Until, on saving lives, curing disease, and giving people more time.
About the conversation
Until is working on reversible cryopreservation: cooling living tissue until it stops, then bringing it back. The first goal is donor organs. Today a donated heart or lung lasts only hours on ice, and many organs never reach a patient in time. Organs that could be paused could be banked, matched, and moved without the race.
Laura talked about how the work scales from cells to organs to whole systems, why the team spans biology, chemistry, physics, and surgery, and the long-term goal of medical hibernation: pausing a patient until a treatment exists.
She also told the story of a cold email she sent at 12 that landed her in an aging research lab, and the one that found her co-founder.
Recorded at a World’s Fair Co. Pioneers evening in San Francisco on October 6, 2026.
Photos
Laura Deming on stage in front of a full room. 
Laura and Cam with a diagram of the textbook cell.
Most event photos by Martin Srna.
Go deeper
- Until is hiring · The team spans chemistry, biology, engineering, neuroscience, and surgery.
- Until’s roadmap
- Until’s 2024 neural tissue progress report
- Bringing organ-scale cryopreservation into existence · Co-founder Hunter Davis on Owl Posting.
- The baby born from a 30-year-old embryo · MIT Technology Review.
- The Machinery of Life · David Goodsell’s paintings of the inside of a cell.
- US organ donation statistics · HRSA.
Thanks to our partners 1517 Fund and Impulse Labs for supporting this program.