Biotech CEO Liz Parrish explains why you’re legally allowed to choose euthanasia in many countries – but not allowed to choose experimental medicine that might extend your life – and why she decided to become “patient zero” for gene therapies targeting aging itself.

Liz Parrish is the founder and CEO of BioViva, a US biotech company developing gene therapies for aging and age-related diseases. In 2015 she famously travelled outside the US to receive two experimental gene therapies (telomerase and follistatin), becoming one of the first people in the world to use gene therapy explicitly to treat biological aging. Since then she’s been at the centre of the debates around longevity, regulation and patient rights.

In this episode you get an unfiltered look at what it’s like to take massive personal risk to push medicine forward – from watching her son get diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, to starting BioViva, to challenging regulators with her idea of “Best Choice Medicine”: the right to choose high-risk, high-reward treatments when the alternative is slow, guaranteed decline.

She explains, among other things:

◼️ The personal story behind BioViva: her son’s diagnosis, what she saw in children’s hospitals, and why she concluded that keeping the status quo is not “safety” – it’s guaranteed death
◼️ Why she chose telomerase (TERT) and follistatin as her first gene therapies, what telomeres actually do, and how they’re linked to immune failure, progeria and the diseases of aging
◼️ What it felt like in the weeks after becoming “patient zero”: the fear, the scientific pushback, and why one advisor told her she had “13 days to live”
◼️ The idea of Best Choice Medicine: why you can legally choose euthanasia in places like the Netherlands, but not choose experimental gene therapy even if you fully accept the risk
◼️ How current regulation really works (phase I–III are still experiments), why she thinks we’re overprotecting people from potential harm while guaranteeing they die of aging anyway
◼️ How BioViva operates today: US-based protocol design, international clinics, licensing in places like the Bahamas, Latin America and China, and why she refuses to treat others before treating herself
◼️ Why she believes gene therapy can eventually become affordable at scale – and why the early “super-rich” patients are actually funding the data that will make it cheaper for everyone
◼️ How her team is building a hand-curated database of thousands of gene therapy studies and using AI + genomics to design combinatorial therapies for complex, multi-gene conditions like aging
◼️ What society gets fundamentally wrong about “anti-aging” and why your organs, stem cells and kidneys are aging far worse than your face
◼️ Her philosophical take on life extension: why she believes longer lives could make us more moral and future-oriented, and why she worries more about a world of short, desperate lives than about dictators living longer

Explore Liz Parrish’s work
◼️ BioViva and her gene therapy work (search: “Liz Parrish BioViva”)
◼️ Talks, interviews & articles on aging, gene therapy and Best Choice Medicine (search: “Liz Parrish treating aging as a disease”)

https://bioviva-science.com/our-team

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