Daniel Shur

Today I am launching the Free Radicals podcast with @EricDai_BioE . Every Tuesday, we’ll be releasing long form conversations with the visionaries giving humanity control over biology and working to dramatically extend human lifespan. We’re thrilled to host @celinehalioua, Founder + CEO @loyalfordogs, for our inaugural episode. Celine is building the world’s first lifespan extension drugs for dogs. Follow me, @EricDai_BioE and @FreeRadicalsBio for new episodes every Tuesday. 00:00:00 - Intro 00:01:51 - Celine’s background 00:05:00 - Dropping out of academia 00:07:50 - Finding ways to increase free will 00:09:36 - How to align financial incentives with longevity 00:14:52 - Longevity drugs should be boring 00:21:24 - Celine’s leadership style 00:24:08 - Advice on fundraising and constructing feedback loops 00:26:52 - Loyal’s fundraising history 00:27:57 - Building for Zero Billion Dollar Markets 00:29:11 - How to succeed in biotech 00:30:21 - How to find blockbuster opportunities 00:33:25 - How to create a gold rush in longevity 00:35:25 - The problem with the aging field 00:39:32 - How to identify signal from noise 00:41:54 - AI applications to biology 00:45:15 - Importance of naiveté 00:47:24 - FREE RADICALS

"Longevity is the most important problem of humanity we have to solve soon with the help of AI; billions of lives are at stake." That's how @DeryaTR_ framed his upcoming talk at @VitalistBay. The AI x Bio track lineup ↓

New episodes of @FreeRadicalsBio will be on pause until May 26th because we’re taking our show on the road! This week we’re at @SynBioBeta. Next week @VitalistBay. We’ll be recording conversations with some amazing leaders in AI and Bio at these conferences! We’ll be back to our regular weekly episodes soon. And on a personal note this is the first time I’ve ever been at an event as a member of the press

So excited for the future

"All great snake oil... all great lies are built on a seed of truth. The reason there's so much excitement around longevity is that we are able to modify aging biology in animals... and there are drugs in clinical trials... but consumers are not patient." In today's episode of the @FreeRadicalsBio podcast, we dive into the history of the geroscience field with Dr. @JamesPeyer, founder & CEO @CambrianBio. We discuss what makes geroscience's approach drug development so unique, how to unlock the flywheel of innovation that will get us longevity escape velocity, and Amplifier Therapeutics' "zone 2 in a pill"... which might prove to be the first ever true longevity drug. Follow me and @EricDai_BioE to stay up to date on the latest news in longevity biotech!

@MartinShkreli @zerophases @kanzure Everyone has a disease - it’s called aging. Every single person feels worse at 35 than they did at 25 - huge market to reverse that. The challenging thing is figuring out how to actually do that though…

@zerophases @kanzure medicine is for sick people with disease

1/ How long do you want to live? For most of human history, aging was inevitable. It's now solvable. Apply for LBF8 cohort program: longbiofellowship dot org /THREAD🧵

Health and wellness will be the biggest market in the world. It’s inevitable.

“You’re born, you grow up, you have a career, and then you get older and then you die. And that's just like the acceptable plan. Even if the plan is horrible… as long as we're going to plan, everybody goes along with it.” @realNathanCheng is one of the most prolific activists in the longevity field. He argues that aging, decline and death are not really a great plan, even if it's the way things work today. He has dedicated his life and career to finding us a new plan. Follow me and @EricDai_BioE to stay up to date on the latest news in longevity biotech! 0:00 Intro 2:35 Why did Nathan dedicate his life to defeating aging & death? (And the absurdity of asking that question) 8:59 Why has Daniel been on the fence, despite being longevity-pilled 14:09 The agency and bravery of founders to tackle the hardest problems (like aging) 18:46 Many ways to contribute to longevity besides entrepreneurship 19:41 Is longevity underinvested into? 24:48 What does it mean to treat aging itself as the issue (vs other diseases) 32:23 Do we need more scientific arguments, or philosophical arguments? 39:50 Nathan’s experience longevity-pilling influential people 47:03 Billionaire paradox 53:18 The challenge in going from viewing aging as inevitable to malleable 57:29 What needs to change about our culture to save us from aging & death 1:16:55 Should we be intolerant of pro-death & pro-aging views? 1:22:59 Join us at Vitalist Bay!

Even if you were to eat a perfectly healthy diet, you will still age eventually (though slower) and die. We also know that virtually all organisms age (albeit at different rates, and a few don't). Tons of evidence that aging is a real process at the root of diseases, and it can be interfered with.

@brian_armstrong @newlimit it's a strong point, but could any of these be re-framed as slow poisonings by environmental factors? e.g. processed/unhealthy diet. If you consume excess alcohol daily for decades, it will gradually cause liver disease, regardless of the underlying aging process.

Aging is arguably the root cause of most major diseases. Our cells lose function as we age, allowing various conditions to manifest, which is why most major diseases correlate with age. Yes, it is more complex than this, but this is a major component. @newlimit is working on treating a root cause of disease (aging) using epigenetic reprogramming.

@FreeRadicalsBio @KexinHuang5 @a16z @MenloVentures Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the…

@FreeRadicalsBio @KexinHuang5 @a16z @MenloVentures Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/1rbVhP…

Thanks to AI, this century will be marked by an abundance of discoveries in biology. Today’s guest on the @FreeRadicalsBio podcast is @KexinHuang5, one of the brightest minds in AI for life sciences. Kexin recently raised $13.5M from @a16z and @MenloVentures Anthology Fund in partnership with @AnthropicAI, to build @phylo_bio - a research lab studying agentic biology. Listen to learn how AI will make the dream of a one-man biotech reality within 10 years, how AI can unveil discoveries hidden in existing data, and much more. Be sure to follow me and @EricDai_BioE to stay up to date on the latest news in longevity biotech! 0:00 Intro 2:47 Phylo’s vision to transform how biologist work 6:35 Phylo’s research areas 12:48 Why it’s harder for AI to do biology rather than software, and how to get around that 18:05 Building a virtual cell is a data problem 22:31 What it means for a biotech to go fully AI-native 27:26 The role of a human scientist & the importance of taste 32:22 Experiments in teaching AI scientific taste 36:57 How agents are transforming biology 42:53 The dream of the one-man biotech 47:21 How AI agents can find low hanging fruit through indication expansion 51:51 Can AI agents inflect biotech progress to give us radical life extension? 1:00:47 POPPER model for hypothesis validation 1:04:17 AI research institutes

What will future AI enable in bio? That depends on the training datasets we choose to generate now. @MartinBJensen: “How do you treat this disease? [...] is it one disease or five different things with different drivers? [This] is way underspecified. Solving those kinds of problems [needs] different kinds of data input. In vivo perturbation at scale [...], I think is one thing you can do." - Free Radicals podcast with @EricDai_BioE and @teleodaniel

@karpathy @jenzhuscott I'd much prefer an AGI future that gives us biotech so that we live on in our actual bodies, rather than as lossy simulations on computers. Let's be more optimistic! Our kids would prefer that too i think

Yes it's the tractable form of brain upload. There's a ton of scifi on brain uploads that requires way too exotic tech (scanning and simulating brains etc), when we're about to get a lossy and approximate version of that *a lot* sooner via LLM simulators. You can easily imagine a "brain upload" startup - you show up for a few days to carry out detailed video interviews, then they use all that data with an LLM finetuning process to "upload" you and give you an API endpoint of your simulation that you can talk to. Look at what's already possible with HeyGen as an example, but combine it with an LLM model that has deep knowledge and personality. Trippy and admittedly kind of dystopian but in principle quite possible around now.

As I build my own 2nd brain 🧠 on Obsidian using @karpathy ‘s wiki idea, it suddenly dawned on me - one day when we r gone, our kids could inherit an interactive map to your mind, passion, obsessions, work, fascinations… It’s kind of beautiful way to think abt your 2nd 🧠.

@hell_others @omarabudayyeh @jgooten @harvardmed thank you @hell_others!! appreciate the support

@teleodaniel @omarabudayyeh @jgooten @harvardmed your all conversations are amazing. thank you

Two young Harvard professors are coming for the supplements industry. @omarabudayyeh and @jgooten run a joint lab at @harvardmed, have co-founded 4 biotechs, and raised over $300M to develop genetic medicines and diagnostics. But what surprised me most: they think like consumer tech founders, not academics. They start with what people actually want and work backwards from there. And best of all? They’re totally longevity-pilled. Consumers want to feel younger and healthier, and big pharma is waking up to it. In this week’s episode of the Free Radicals podcast, we discuss the biology of aging, the future of longevity therapeutics, and how Harvard can bring legitimacy to the supplements industry. One of my favorite episodes yet. Be sure to follow me, @EricDai_BioE and @FreeRadicalsBio to stay up to date on the latest news in longevity biotech!

@omarabudayyeh @jgooten @harvardmed Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the…

@omarabudayyeh @jgooten @harvardmed Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/2xSRHp…