Joe Betts-LaCroix

Joe Betts-LaCroix is a research scientist, inventor and entrepreneur rolled into one. His range of interests is astonishingly wide – from biophysics at Harvard, electronic tunneling in redox proteins at Caltech, to ocean chemistry at MIT. He holds numerous patents and the OQO company he set up has made it into the Guinness Book of Records as the developer and producer of the world’s smallest PC.
As executive director at Health Extension he is now engaged in researching the biochemical processes that lead to age-related diseases with the aim of engineering targeted prevention and intervention to effect a significant reduction of these illnesses in the future. The events he organizes in his Health Extension ‘Salon Series‘, and his TED (Technology, Entertainment Design) lecture have brought his work to the attention of an international audience.

I first met Joe Betts-LaCroix in August 2012 when we came together to discuss the lecture he was going to give at the “Through Art to Science” Symposium held in the Goethe Institute in San Francisco in October of the same year. When I showed him the OUBEY MINDKISS Book, he was wowed by the book’s design but even more fascinated by OUBEY’s pictures. We were soon involved in a long and deep conversation in the course of which the idea for an Encounter was born. And on 19 October 2012, one day before the Symposium was due to start, the Encounter with OUBEYs Pferdekopfnebel (Horsehead Nebula) took place at Joe’s house.