Health, biotech, and longevity: How to extend human flourishing

Talks and writing from Progress Conference 2025

Several talks at Progress Conference 2025 and other discussions focused on progress towards healthier, longer lives. Biotech approaches to longevity, discussions about specific bottlenecks in longevity, visions for the FDA in the age of AI, AI’s potential for accelerating innovation, fertility and its impact on population growth or decline, healthcare reform focused on prevention rather than treatment, and more broadly, a positive vision for a world where we regularly live to be 100. Here are select talks from the conference and related writing.

Track dispatch

Aging as a disease: The rise of longevity science by Laura Mazer

In this essay for Big Think’s special issue The Engine of Progress, board-certified surgeon, educator, and RPI Fellow Dr. Laura Mazer writes about how the frontier of medicine is shifting.

Most of my writing focuses on the history of medicine and innovators who found cures and solutions to problems that we barely remember today. To sit for four days with people who are so focused on the future, so committed to the next frontier, was an exciting departure. To pursue longevity, not survival — to target aging itself, not a specific disease — is to shift the paradigm of medicine. A transition from less disease to more life. The science is still in its early days, and it’s happening largely along non-traditional paths and with non-traditional funding and support models. In that, it keeps company with many of the true medical breakthroughs in history.

Talk videos

Automating Scientific Research

Ludovico Mitchener, Member of Technical Staff at Edison Scientific (and previously at FutureHouse), talks about components of scientific research that can be automated and what it might look like to have end-to-end automation of scientific research.

A techno-humanist perspective on female fertility extension

Ruxandra Teslo covers fertility extension: “As global fertility declines, pro-natalism has become a politically polarized, male-dominated issue in the culture wars… I argue that a techno-humanist approach can reconcile these goals. Progress studies already champions many structural changes that would make it easier for young people to have children. An example is housing and the YIMBY movement. However, explicitly supporting fertility technology: tools that expand reproductive autonomy, improve IVF outcomes, and extend reproductive longevity can align pro-natal goals with women’s empowerment. Next, I will outline what can be done at a policy and scientific level in the short, medium, and long term to advance this vision.”

Rethinking life expectancy in the 21st century

John Burn-Murdoch, Data Reporter at the Financial Times, talks about trends in life expectancy you might not know about: “Throughout most of the last century, lifespans in the developed world steadily lengthened for rich and poor alike as infectious diseases were beaten back and modern medicine and healthcare made steady progress against other conditions. But that pattern has not held in recent years, with lifespans for those at the top and bottom diverging in several countries and the key mechanisms behind these shifts also evolving. How should we recalibrate our thinking about life expectancy for this new era, and what lessons can be learned for the challenges that lie ahead?”

Four numbers define progress in Longevity

Martin Borch Jensen, founder of Norn Group, provides “A look at longevity through the lens of Grove’s ‘breakfast factory’. Healthy years of life is what we’re serving, but how do those get made and what would help us get more of them (per time and dollar)? We’ll go from basic research through clinical trials and identify the four most important numbers to optimize for this factory of life.”

Would that all diseases had but one neck!

Francisco LePort, CEO of Gordian Biotechnology, talks about new models for drug discovery: “Today, every age-related disease requires specialized expertise, experimentation, and equipment to solve. Learning the mechanisms of even one disease can take a lifetime (or more!). Yet all life springs from the same fundamental chemical processes. The vast complexity we see, including all of these diseases we wish to cure, stem from relatively small changes in the DNA based coding system shared across all biological systems. Can we design a drug discovery system with today’s tools that takes advantage of this? Can we scale drug discovery across all age-related diseases, rather than attacking each individually? What are the building blocks of such a discovery system, and how would this impact not just the science of drug discovery, but how it is funded and implemented?”

---

We are publishing videos of conference talks over several weeks; this is the second to last group. We’ll post videos on the RPI YouTube channel. 2025 talks will all be added to this specific playlist here.

Thanks to Big Think our conference media partner, for producing all these videos and The Engine of Progress, a special issue of Big Think exploring the people and ideas driving humanity forward.