Origin

Many people have asked me how I came to do what I do. For brevity, this is the story.

At 16, I discovered genetic engineering and longevity biology and realized that extending human lifespan was the most important problem I could work on. I also realized it would be extremely hard - requiring skills I didn't have and wouldn't acquire for over a decade.

So I mapped out what I'd need to learn to the best of my ability: synthetic biology, systems biology, mammalian cell engineering, aging biology, gene therapy, and translational research. Then I spent the next 15 years executing that plan across 11 labs in 4 countries.

This is how I got there.

I started far from biology.

I grew up in post-Soviet Estonia. My family was poor, religious, and focused on music—my mother, a violinist, trained my brothers and me to become professional musicians. I started playing & singing at 3 y.o., performed in national TV at 5 and by age 11 was performing professionally at the Estonian National Opera.

But I couldn't shake the feeling that music was just entertainment. And the inconsistencies in religious teachings meant I found no answers there either. By 13, I was depressed, skipping school, playing video games, searching for something that mattered.

Then I discovered the theory of evolution.

Reading about natural selection had a profound impact. First, it made me more depressed: I realized life had no inherent meaning, that I'd have to create my own. Second, it opened the door to physics, which became an obsession. Understanding the fundamental fabric of reality felt like the only thing worth doing.

So, at 15, I decided to leave music and become a physicist.

I had one year to catch up and fight my way into into Estonia's best physics / science high school. I got in - but started at the bottom of the class. I remember a classmate loudly asking what the hell I was doing at my first physics olympiad.

As I studied modern physics, though, a pattern emerged: meaningful progress required either decades on a single theorem or being part of thousand-person collaborations. Making a major, Newton/Einstein/Hawking/Curie level contribution within a single lifetime felt like a roll of the dice.

Physics felt like a gamble.

What Tesla had achieved - physics combined with engineering - felt much more accessible. But of course, electrical engineering was no longer the frontier.

Then, in 10th grade biology class, I saw a photograph: a mouse with a human ear on its back (the Vacanti mouse). Most classmates found it repulsive. I was stunned.

We could engineer life itself.

That year, I found my teacher and my mission.

Our bio class was got lucky and got Kersti Veskimets, one of Estonia's best biology teachers, who had an MSc in gene technologies, assigned to us. She connected me with a colleague at Tallinn University of Technology and mentored me through my first genetic engineering project that year: engineering a GST fusion peptide to optimize protein production in E.coli.

I still remember the pride of stepping into that lab for the first time. The project won national awards and represented Estonia at Intel ISEF 2012 - and funnily, was read out by the principal as one of the school's best research projects at our graduation.

The same summer, I read Aubrey de Grey's "Ending Aging."

It was the second shock. Aging - this mysterious, unbeatable process - was just an engineering problem. And we were the first generation who had access to genetic engineering.

So, it was obvious - this was how I could make the biggest contribution.

What it takes to solve aging

I also roughly understood the scale of what solving aging required. You can't fix it with one drug. Aging isn't caused by a single issue. Our bodies have never contained the machinery necessary to live much longer than we currently do - evolution has just never had the possibility or need to build it. We need to build it.

Solving one problem only buys you time until the next one rears its head - just like you need fundamentally new mechanisms to keep a car going for 1 year vs 10 vs 100.

So, addressing aging needs something more like an operating system - a modular, upgradeable, constantly improving way to layer genetic updates to stably address one issue after another.

That meant solving three problems:

1. Understanding why our genetic circuits fail after ~50 years

2. Being able to rewrite DNA in a living adult organism

3. Designing new genetic circuits that would actually extend lifespan

Aubrey himself said gene therapy was too hard for longevity. He was right - at the time. But I was much younger than he - I had more time. I decided to prove him wrong.

So I mapped it out and executed.

The journey ended up taking me through Imperial College (bacterial synthetic biology, living biomaterials, ancient DNA repair), ETH Zürich (bioelectronic implants with engineered cells) and Harvard (whole-body gene delivery, progeria therapy, aging interventions). By the end of my PhD, I had hit most of the skills, had successfully delivered DNA across most of the body of an adult animal, and extended lifespan with several longevity gene therapies.

But - along the way I learned something else: the main bottleneck wasn't brainpower, good ideas, analyzing concepts or understanding the literature or science. It was the raw manual work required to perform genetic engineering, execute experiments and gather data. Whenever a solution to a key technical bottleneck was developed (PCR, GFP, restriction enzymes, NGS, CRISPR, single-cell seq, reprogramming) it marked a fundamental, seismic shift in whole of biology.

In short, the science wasn't the bottleneck. The tools were.

That realization led me to found Olden Labs in 2023.

Most people say they turned to longevity because they lost someone, or because they fear death.

For me, it was evolution, physics, and depression and a systematic search for a meaningful life.

So - here's to solving longevity. Or dying trying.