Jonathan "Joe" Betts-LaCroix (born Jonathan Betts; February 26, 1962) is an American

scientist A scientist is a person who Scientific method, researches to advance knowledge in an Branches of science, area of the natural sciences. In classical antiquity, there was no real ancient analog of a modern scientist. Instead, philosophers engag ...

and

entrepreneur Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value in ways that generally entail beyond the minimal amount of risk (assumed by a traditional business), and potentially involving values besides simply economic ones. An entreprene ...

known for his discoveries in

biophysics Biophysics is an interdisciplinary science that applies approaches and methods traditionally used in physics to study biological phenomena. Biophysics covers all scales of biological organization, from molecular to organismic and populations ...

and for creating the world's smallest

personal computer A personal computer, commonly referred to as PC or computer, is a computer designed for individual use. It is typically used for tasks such as Word processor, word processing, web browser, internet browsing, email, multimedia playback, and PC ...

. He is working to optimize medical research priorities in the U.S.

Early life and education

Joe Betts-LaCroix was born and raised in

Oregon Oregon ( , ) is a U.S. state, state in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. It is a part of the Western U.S., with the Columbia River delineating much of Oregon's northern boundary with Washington (state), Washington, while t ...

. He graduated from school with a D average, then spent the next six years living in a shared house with others whom he described as, "musicians, artists and weirdos". At this time, he did electronics, hardware and software work for local businesses. When his girlfriend went to

Harvard Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher lear ...

, he decided to follow. After getting straight A's at a local college, he transferred to Harvard, where he studied environmental geoscience.

Academics

Beginning in earth sciences at Harvard, Betts-LaCroix contributed to the field of long-term regulation of oxygen on Earth over multi-100 Million-year timespans, quantifying the effect of the burial efficiency of organic carbon as a feedback mechanism. At MIT, he designed and built an autonomous, robotic system that enables research into ocean circulation patterns and climate change, by operating untended for up to one year at sea on battery power and collecting hyper-pure water samples at predetermined intervals. In work at Caltech, Betts-LaCroix moved into biophysics, publishing a paper in ''

Science Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the universe. Modern science is typically divided into twoor threemajor branches: the natural sciences, which stu ...

'' that has been cited by more than 700 subsequent scientific works. In this work, he, along with David Beratan and

José Onuchic José Nelson Onuchic (born Sao Paulo, Brazil) is a Brazilian and American physicist, the Harry C & Olga K Wiess Professor of Physics at Rice University. He does research in molecular biophysics, condensed matter chemistry, and genetic networks, ...

,proved for the first time that electron-transfer rates in proteins are determined by the electron orbital interactions in the protein structure.

Hardware

In 2000, Betts-LaCroix cofounded

OQO OQO was a U.S. computer hardware company that was notable for manufacture of handheld computers. Its systems possessed the functionality of a tablet PC in a size slightly larger than a personal digital assistant (PDA). According to ''Guinness Wo ...

, a computer hardware and software OEM credited by the Guinness World Records as having created the world's smallest Windows PC. This created a new category of mobile computing devices between PDAs and laptops, which were initially dubbed the "Ultra Personal Computer", and which subsequently became known as the "Netbook". The device won many awards for its innovation, aesthetics and functionality. After OQO, Betts-Lacroix was active in Silicon Valley as a lecturer and mentor for CEOs of start up companies.

Biotechnology & biomedicine

Betts-LaCroix has participated in the

Quantified Self Quantified self is both the cultural phenomenon of self-tracking with technology and a community of users and makers of self-tracking tools who share an interest in "self-knowledge through numbers". Quantified self practices overlap with the pract ...

movement since the beginning, and has given numerous presentations on aspects of self experimentation and tracking, including experiments in the 28-Hour day. In 2010, he joined startup Halcyon Molecular to lead its automation efforts. Halcyon, funded by, among others,

Elon Musk Elon Reeve Musk ( ; born June 28, 1971) is a businessman. He is known for his leadership of Tesla, SpaceX, X (formerly Twitter), and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Musk has been considered the wealthiest person in th ...

and

Peter Thiel Peter Andreas Thiel (; born 11 October 1967) is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and political activist. A co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, he was the first outside investor in Facebook. According ...

, attempted to sequence human

DNA Deoxyribonucleic acid (; DNA) is a polymer composed of two polynucleotide chains that coil around each other to form a double helix. The polymer carries genetic instructions for the development, functioning, growth and reproduction of al ...

using

electron microscopes An electron microscope is a microscope that uses a beam of electrons as a source of illumination. It uses electron optics that are analogous to the glass lenses of an optical light microscope to control the electron beam, for instance focusing i ...

. The underlying goal of Halcyon's work was to make meaningful progress in understanding human biology in order to improve medicine. Following the theme of improving medicine, Betts-LaCroix founded th
Health Extension Foundation
in 2012. The efforts of the people working in Health Extension are motivated by recognizing that #Most healthcare money treats age-related diseases; #Aging is the single biggest risk factor for these diseases; #But funding to address the biochemical processes of aging is less than 0.01% of healthcare spending—and correcting this missed opportunity to optimally assign medical research and translation priorities. In 2013, Betts-LaCroix cofounded Vium, which has raised $33M to accelerate the development of new medical therapies by automating in-vivo research. Vium launched publicly in 2016, and was later acquired by Recursion in 2020. Betts-LaCroix is also a biotech angel investor in such companies as StemCentrx, Recursion Pharma and Spring Discovery, as well as a part-time contributor at

Y Combinator Y Combinator, LLC (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator and venture capital firm launched in March 2005 which has been used to launch more than 5,000 companies. The accelerator program started in Boston and Mountain View, Californi ...

. In 2020, Betts-LaCroix cofounded Retro Biosciences, which emerged out of stealth with $180 million in funding from

OpenAI OpenAI, Inc. is an American artificial intelligence (AI) organization founded in December 2015 and headquartered in San Francisco, California. It aims to develop "safe and beneficial" artificial general intelligence (AGI), which it defines ...

CEO

Sam Altman Samuel Harris Altman (born April 22, 1985) is an American technology entrepreneur, investor, and the chief executive officer of OpenAI since 2019 (he was Removal of Sam Altman from OpenAI, briefly dismissed and reinstated in November 2023). He ...

to focus on extending healthy human lifespans. Retro works on

autophagy Autophagy (or autophagocytosis; from the Greek language, Greek , , meaning "self-devouring" and , , meaning "hollow") is the natural, conserved degradation of the cell that removes unnecessary or dysfunctional components through a lysosome-depe ...

, the rejuvenation of blood plasma and on partial cell reprogramming.

References

External links