Episode

These 30-something Harvard Professors are making biology programmable - AbuGoot Lab

Podcast
Free Radicals
Published
Apr 7, 2026
Duration seconds
4529
Processing state
not_requested
Canonical source
https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/danielshur/episodes/These-30-something-Harvard-Professors-are-making-biology-programmable---AbuGoot-Lab-e3hfk0q
Audio
https://anchor.fm/s/107b5162c/podcast/play/118001114/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2026-3-5%2F421470288-44100-2-5c77aeb352f95.mp3
JSON
/v1/public/podcasts/free-radicals-7588534/episodes/these-30-something-harvard-professors-are-making-biology-programmable-abugoot-lab
Markdown
/podcast/free-radicals-7588534/these-30-something-harvard-professors-are-making-biology-programmable-abugoot-lab.md

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Summary

Two young Harvard professors are coming for the supplements industry. Dr. Jonathan Gootenberg and Dr. Omar Abudayyeh run a joint lab at Harvard Medical School, 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. 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. As PhD students at Harvard in Feng Zhang and Aviv Regev’s labs, Jonathan and Omar pioneered research on programmable targeted genetic engineering with CRISPR. Now Jonathan and Omar lead a joint lab at Harvard, where they develop molecular and artificial intelligence based approaches to program biology, unravel cellular aging, rejuvenate hair, develop next-gen therapeutics, and decode biological complexity with virtual cells.