a month ago i stumbled upon the novo nordisk + general control partnership on x and after realizing the founder of the latter company, lada nuzhna, graduated from thiel fellowship (same with charles wu of an agri-robotics startup), i began looking at her posted works on https://www.ladanuzhna.xyz/.
in short, her theses are:
- the overall biotech innovation speed is structurally declining (the opposite of the tech industry, which is seeing more powerful models being released every day)
- the approved drugs have very high fixed cost (from the heavy r&d, high failure, costly manufacturing of extremely novel therapeutics) that are econmically unviable. they (the lbc market is vast but ineffective) also dont optimize for age reversel or halting, but rather general healthspan with minimal slow-down/buffer efficacy.
- all the aging bottlenecks aren't low technicality nor bad science, but rather is due to the flawed beauracracy within the us. she wants to reform, not to escape.
- her domain is epigenetics reprogramming to achieve age reversal.
- the north star is to solve biology, then aim for the stars, to figure out where do we come from + how do we stay (her nw majors were cs + physics, before the bio pivot). the point is to live long enough to figure out the bigger comological questions.
after reading some of her writings, she is no doubt one of the smartest entrepreneurial thinker within the lbc industry within my age bracket, save from some phd candidates and postdocs.
and to the 5th thesis i align the most with a humanist creativity spin. while she is solely "chasing the stars" to find universal physical truths, that need should be coupled by our expansion of creativity in arts in literature, visual, and film.
however, from the scifi tetralogy she cited on her personal site, one can infer she aligns more toward transhumanism than essentialism because the main characters within that book say so. from THIS one can then infer that she is ruthlessly, by any means possible, trying to find truth. that is more frightening in terms of the sheer volume of conviction (to abandon the core humanist principles of preserving one's biological mind for the radical truth seeking approach) and the potential disregard of anti-accelerationist regulatory mindset.
it would be very interesting if one day in my life i bump into her and dive into some scientific and philosophical babbling. i sure agree we need to win the biological battlefront to find out our collective beginnings and how far we can go, on a cosmological level.
and here is the the scifi tetralogy quote that she cited:
The Utopian Oath
from Terra Ignota, by Ada Palmer
I hereby renounce the right to complacency,
and vow lifelong to take
only what minimum of leisure
is necessary to my productivity,
viewing health, happiness, rest, and play
as means, not ends, and that,
while Utopia provides my needs,
I will commit the full produce of my labors
to our collective effort
to redirect the path of human life
away from death
and toward the stars.