Would you rather keep your 20-year-old brain for the rest of your life, or your 20-year-old body? Eric Kelsic put that question to a room in Manchester, and most hands went up for the body. Then he delivered the bad news: today, you don't get to keep either one.

Kelsic, co-founder and CEO of Dyno Therapeutics, doesn't think that has to stay true. He told the Freedom Summit 2026 audience that much of the technology to change it already exists. In his view, the biggest thing standing in the way is no longer in the lab. It's in the law.

He calls the goal genetic agency: your ability to take action at the genetic level to live a healthier life. He tied it to New Hampshire's motto, Live Free or Die, which he said captures the American spirit.

Kelsic came to New England about 18 years ago and moved from physics into biology because he believed that research could change all of our lives. He holds a PhD in Systems Biology from Harvard and a BS in Physics from Caltech. Dyno has raised more than $100 million and has partnerships with Novartis, Sarepta, Roche, Spark, and Astellas. His talk, "The Future of Genetic Agency," was followed by a discussion with BioAge Labs CEO Kristen Fortney, moderated by Aydin Gokce. The discussion isn't in the video, so you'll find the highlights below.

Watch the full talk above, or read on for the core of his argument.

Kelsic opened with a frame from his physics days. Our bodies are biological machines, the most sophisticated ones we know of, built from many thousands of parts encoded in our genes.

That view of the cell as a system is what pulled him into the field. If you can understand how the pieces fit together, you can start to ask what to do with that knowledge.

He built the talk around three futures. Each one, he argued, leads to the same place: genetic agency.

Kelsic thinks today's debate about AI risk is too short-term. Machines keep getting smarter, and anything digital can, in principle, last forever. Once machines can improve themselves, he said, you get a kind of evolution, and humans are not good at reasoning about evolution over long stretches of time.

Some people in Silicon Valley believe the future belongs to machines. Others say humanity's only hope is to merge with them. Kelsic thinks there is a better way: learn to improve ourselves, which means understanding our bodies and being able to act on our genes.

He was clear that he does not mean germline editing, which changes genes before a person is born. He prefers individuals making that choice for themselves, for two reasons:

That choice matters because treatment decisions involve trade-offs. An experimental therapy carries risks, and so does choosing not to pursue treatment. Kelsic argued that the patient, or a trusted family member when needed, is often best placed to weigh them.

His second future came back to that opening question about your 20-year-old body.

By studying genetic differences between people, researchers now know ways to intervene. Many therapies start out to treat serious disease and turn out to have wider benefits. His example was GLP-1 drugs, which plenty of people without obesity or diabetes want.

Now picture that benefit built into you for good, instead of a monthly shot or a daily pill. Kelsic named two upsides. No one could take it away. And it might work even better, because it would interact with your cells the way your natural systems do. He framed this as a possibility for future genetic medicine. A genetic version of a GLP-1 drug does not exist today, and it would not be right for everyone.

Some genetic diseases affect only a handful of patients. Others, taken together, affect hundreds of millions of people. When Kelsic started in this field about 11 years ago, there were no FDA-approved gene therapies. Today there are a handful, with many more in development.

He pointed to patients who build their own therapy when none exists. The lessons these people learn as they blaze the trail, he said, help everyone who comes after them.

Kelsic broke a genetic medicine into two main parts: how it gets to the right cells, and what it does once it arrives.

This is where Kelsic started, and where the field has struggled most. Many of the gene therapy setbacks that make headlines trace back to poor delivery.

The first FDA-approved gene therapies used a protein shell called an AAV capsid to carry the medicine into places like the brain, muscle, and eye. That older technology was not efficient enough for many conditions.

Dyno's approach is to run many experiments at once, in a single test tube or even a single animal. The team changes the capsid protein in many different ways, sees which changes help and which break it, keeps the good ones, and repeats. One experiment can map the effect of changes at nearly every position on the protein.

About eight years in, he shared where that work stands in non-human primates, the animal model closest to humans:

These are company-reported animal results, not human trials. They measure transduction, which means the capsid reached the cells and delivered its genetic material. That is not the same as a proven benefit for patients. Still, better delivery makes a therapy work better, and it lets you lower the dose, which makes it safer.

The payload can be as simple as a natural human gene. It can also be a tool like CRISPR-Cas9 that cuts the genome or edits a single letter of DNA.

Teams now design payloads with AI. Working with NVIDIA, Dyno built a model that designed a brand-new protein to bind to a therapeutic target.

Kelsic summed up three technologies coming together:

He said Dyno has been working with OpenAI to test AI agent systems and explore how they might support patients and drug developers. He was also clear that experienced researchers are still needed to connect the evidence and guide decisions. The idea that a patient might someday use an AI model to help develop a therapy was a forecast, not something people do today.

This was the heart of the talk. After decades of work, Kelsic said, the technology for genetic agency already exists. The limit is no longer in the lab. It is in the law.

His proposals:

After the talk, Kristen Fortney, CEO of BioAge Labs, joined Eric Kelsic on stage, for a conversation moderated by Aydin Gokce. This conversation took place after the talk and isn't included in the video.

Can competition bring costs down? The panel asked whether that works if the tools behind genetic medicine stay concentrated in a few organizations. Kelsic said he has seen small teams use AI and expert support to go from an idea to early data with less money than traditional drug development. He cited $5 million as a rough figure he sees in some early efforts. That is his estimate from experience, not a field-wide average.

Families looking abroad. He noted that some families pursue research outside the United States when they can't find a path at home. His point was that patients should have realistic options, with oversight and transparency.

Safety over time. Gene therapies can have lasting effects, so follow-up matters. The FDA recommends long-term monitoring in some gene therapy trials to catch delayed risks and see how long a treatment's effects last.

Living longer vs. living well. An audience member asked whether a treatment's risks and benefits look different for someone lean, strong, and active than for someone with obesity, and raised a concern about muscle loss. The exchange came back to why muscle matters for staying independent with age, and to being clear about which patients a treatment is meant to help.

A speaker also described research that uses protein and metabolite measurements in large groups of people to find markers linked to lifespan and to physical and mental function. These markers are a research tool. They are not proof that a treatment will extend life or improve health in people who don't have the condition it treats. Since health depends on exercise, diet, and environment as well as genes, Kelsic pointed toward measuring more than genes alone.

Kelsic closed by calling for more leadership on regulation. He said he loves what is happening in New Hampshire and hopes other states follow its example.

He hopes more scientists and builders come to New Hampshire to be part of its innovation ecosystem, and that, in time, the best of it reaches the federal level. His final line was a simple call: it's time to build a future with genetic agency.

Kelsic spoke in the Freedom Summit's Bio Innovation program. The two-day Summit also included a Built Futures track and covered energy, housing, technology, and entrepreneurship.

His talk left a practical question: if patients gain more ways to act on their health, will they have a safe, workable path to do so? The answer will depend on what researchers can build, how treatments are studied and regulated, what they cost, and whether patients have a real say in decisions about access.

Watch Eric Kelsic's full Freedom Summit talk on YouTube

Learn more about Dyno Therapeutics and connect with Eric Kelsic.

Read more from Freedom Summit 2026 → https://freedomsummit.tech

Freedom Summit 2026 took place in Manchester, NH, and is brought to you by Freedom Village. Freedom Village is building a techno-optimist hub: real estate and community for people who ship, with nature, ownership, and events worth showing up for, in the "Live Free or Die" state of New Hampshire. Big cities are ambitious but expensive and crowded. The woods are beautiful but isolating. Freedom Village is a third space, nature-rich and intentionally designed, where tech and community builders live, create, and prototype the future in real life, with self-reliance, ownership, and ambition at the core.

Videos from Freedom Summit are brought to you by Dyno. Special thanks to Eric Kelsic.