Liz Parrish: the conversation

Mornings in the Lab · Interview transcript

If you're over 40, you felt it. Your body doesn't bounce back and the clock starts talking louder. Most guys don't fear aging. They fear losing capability, strength, clarity, and the role they're supposed to hold. Today's guest lives in that exact pressure. She isn't a wellness influencer. She's someone pushing the edge of medicine. Liz is the CEO and founder of a revolutionary biotech company based near Seattle on Bainbridge Island. She's known as patient zero, the first person to undergo gene therapy with the goal of reversing biological aging. In September 2015, at age 44, she flew to Bogota. She received experimental therapies targeting telomeres and muscle preservation. Liz says blood tests showed her telomeres looked about 20 years younger. She since pursued klotho, follistatin, and PGC1 alpha. She also says over 300 people worldwide have accessed gene therapies through her company's network. When people call it playing God, she calls it medicine catching up to suffering. That argument matters, especially when your health is on the line. Keith: Johnny, what if I told you there's a woman out there, a mom from Seattle? She secretly flew to Colombia, didn't tell her husband or her kids, and had over a hundred needles shoved into her body in a clinic? Not for cosmetic reasons, not because she was sick, but because she decided that aging itself is a disease and she was going to be the guinea pig to prove it. Elizabeth Parrish, into the lab with Keith and John. Liz: How's it going? Good morning from Seattle. Keith: So, hold on. You get on the airplane. You don't tell the husband and kids you're going to Colombia to get some needles stabbed in your body. I don't care about anything else other than how did that conversation go when you got home? Liz: Well, it went really well for me for about eight months because I decided not to bring it up because I needed to recover and to let the gene therapies work. And I kept meaning to tell the family, but I really needed things to go normally because it was a first experiment in the world with these gene therapies in this combination. And eight months later, my husband read it in Wired magazine and that's when we decided to have the conversation. Keith: Are you still married? Liz: Yeah, I am. He's a pretty patient guy.