Valley of the Gods by Alexandra Wolfe

Author:Alexandra Wolfe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

6

Alpha Girls and Beta Boys

Nearly a year into her Thiel Fellowship, in spring 2012 Laura Deming was having little luck raising money for her fledgling Longevity Fund. She hadn’t gone back to school, but she had returned to a college campus to work out of a Stanford lab testing mice to figure out ways to make them live longer. The lab turned her onto new talent. There she looked for promising young scientists and companies that her longevity venture firm could invest in. It gave her solace to be near Stanford, even if she wasn’t technically a student.

Deming enjoyed living among the other fellows in Palo Alto, but she hadn’t quite figured out how to come up with new concepts in the lab and meet potential donors who would invest in her fund—and at the same time source new biotechnologies to extend human life. Then there was her social life to worry about. It was all rather overwhelming. She decided to become a fruitarian.

In her longevity research circles, she was used to meeting scientists who were always tweaking their diets to see how they would feel. Laura came across people practicing calorie restriction as well as more typical diets of limiting carbs or fat. Some of her tech friends saw their bodies as machines, constantly adding and taking away food groups to test productivity differences. One had tried eating only fruit. So to raise her energy, she swore off all meat, bread, and dairy for the sixth months of her fund-raising efforts. Her dainty body became an even fainter wisp, and she slept less and less each night. But her focus and clarity increased, and she found she could get much more done during the day. Deming also found that her new diet fit in with a strange social landscape that was proving different from the one she was vaguely aware of at MIT, where she had started working in a lab at age fourteen. At MIT, she was comfortable among the scientists in their spectacles and white lab coats. The research assistants found her somewhat of a curiosity. Here was a tiny little prodigy passionate about testing the life-spans of mice.

But in Silicon Valley, everyone was some version of a tiny little prodigy. And they all acted like their bodies were nuanced machines in need of a special treatment, which included an enlightened diet, fitness regimen, or mating system to make it run better and code faster. Being a fruitarian helped her fit into a place where baseline nerdiness wasn’t nearly enough. You had to be weird in some specifically difficult way that made you more productive at the same time.

Deming fit that bill. So did Noor Siddiqui, at least for John Burnham. Noor applied to be a 2012 Thiel fellow, the year after Burnham, in secret. She didn’t want to tell her parents, or anyone else for that matter. Her mother and father, both born in Pakistan, had moved to the United States to get a better education. They hoped their children would have the same opportunity.

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