Who we are
End Suffering is a nonprofit dedicated to improving the global wellbeing of humans and animals by addressing suffering at its biological source.
Writ large, the story of humanity has been one of defiance against nature: of coming to understand it, and using that understanding to improve our condition above and beyond its procession of meaningless tragedies. With fire, spears, and medicine, we freed ourselves from the natural orders of parasitism, predation, and disease. The overwhelming majority of our lives today are built on social, technological, and cultural artifices designed for our welfare, not our reproductive fitness.
But the structure of our experience remains shackled to our biology in ways we are only now gaining the power to understand. We no longer celebrate the many scars of our brutal evolutionary history. We pathologize them, and, where we can, we correct them. Through biotechnology and genetic engineering, the deepest roots of unnecessary suffering can be disempowered, and, in time, destroyed.
By funding promising work toward these ends and connecting the individuals who share this vision, we intend to lay the groundwork for a community capable of building a kinder, happier, more benevolent world.
What we believe
All sentient beings have the same fundamental interests: to be free from suffering, to be treated with respect, to live lives unmarred by cruelty or abuse. These interests are not metaphysical postulates. They are consequences of the kind of nervous systems we and they have.
Biotechnology is going to reshape the nature of sentient life within our lifetimes. The work to align it with sentient life needs to start now.
Founder
James Evans
End Suffering was established by James Evans to raise global awareness of the seriousness of the problem of suffering and to advance efforts to find and eliminate its biological foundations, which he believes underlie many of humanity's most pressing problems, from psychological illness to societal conflict to systemic injustice.
A successful investor and technologist, James has long wanted to see humanity's scientific capabilities directed toward the betterment of all sentient life. Through an approach that combines universal compassion with scientific rigor, he believes that biotechnology can profoundly improve the world.
Frequently asked
- What is End Suffering?
- A nonprofit dedicated to eliminating suffering at its biological source. Suffering is not an inevitable feature of existence; it is a biological condition that can be understood, mitigated, and ultimately abolished through science and technology.
- Why focus on biology? Isn't suffering a social or psychological problem?
- The capacity to suffer is biological. Pain, fear, anxiety, and despair are physical states of nervous systems, regardless of what occasions them. Targeting those foundations gives us solutions that are more durable than any social or psychological intervention alone, and applicable to the overwhelming majority of sentient life, including animals beyond the reach of social reform.
- Is this about creating a world without pain or emotion?
- No. Not only because good emotions are good, but because our concern is foremost with gratuitous suffering. When someone says "end hunger", you don't lecture them about the many benefits of fasting, because you know their focus is on the horror of involuntary, unremediated hunger; we say "end suffering" in the same way.
- How do you decide what to fund?
- We look for work that is tractable, neglected, scalable, and well-defined. See our application page for details, and our past grants for examples of what has met those criteria.
- How can I help?
- If you are a researcher, engineer, ethicist, advocate, or funder whose work bears on any of our fields of interest, we want to hear from you. See Contribute.