Laura Deming, former child prodigy and longevity venture capitalist

Who we're talking about: Venture capitalist Laura Deming. Deming is only 29, but she has already has a 17-year career in the longevity field.

Deming first became fascinated by the biology of aging at age 8 (yep, 8). At age 12, she joined the lab of molecular biologist Cynthia Kenyon at UCSF, and successfully increased the lifespan of C. elegans worms by a factor of 10 through genetic engineering.

At age 14, Deming went to study physics at MIT. At 17, she dropped out, took $100,000 of Peter Thiel's money as an inaugural member of the Peter Thiel Fellowship, and started a longevity venture capital firm. She's been funding longevity companies ever since.

And the news is: Deming recently published an open letter in which she claims the longevity field is at an inflection point. The past decade demonstrated that longevity companies could make money, and could get new drugs to patients for age-related diseases.

But 2023, Deming says, is the start of a new era. Specifically, Deming predicts that in the next decade we will see drugs directly for longevity move into clinical practice.

Why this is a big deal: The longevity field is quickly maturing, and interest in it is growing. It's becoming more and more acceptable to say that aging itself could be a target of medical interventions — as opposed to age-related diseases like Alzheimer's or cancer.

And if Deming is right, then interest in longevity is about to explode, because new longevity interventions are just around the corner (ok, it’s a decade-long corner).

What's next? Last month, Deming launched age1, a VC firm to help make this future happen. She has raised $50 million so far.

Compared to some of the billion-dollar-plus investments that have been made and will be made in the longevity field, that might not sound like a lot of money. But clearly, Deming is unusually smart and unusually driven. Perhaps she can make magic happen, even with a relatively small number of millions.