The Most Secretive Longevity Lab Finally Opens Its Doors
Retro Biosciences, a startup with $180 million from Sam Altman, has a simple and audacious goal: Add 10 good years to your life. And until now, we haven’t had a glimpse of its best ideas.
Joe Betts-LaCroix didn’t have time to wait for architects, construction workers or really any of the normal things that go into building a new office, let alone a new laboratory. It was May 2021, and he wanted to do experiments … lots of them … right away. And so he and a small team of people took over an abandoned retail building in Redwood City, California, and filled it with shipping containers, which they’d soon fill with mice. They built the heating and air conditioning system for their lab pods by hand and did the same with the air-filtration system and their precisely tuned mouse vivarium. At the end of two months, Betts-LaCroix’s team had its first experiments up and running.
“I was told by a nearby developer that’s been building a similar-sized lab for more than a year that they’re going to spend $15 million on it,” Betts-LaCroix says. “I probably spent, I don’t know, $200,000. I’d just rather figure out how to do it and do it in a way that works.”