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Note: this essay required conversations with a lot of people. I’d like to thank Patrick Boyle (ex-CSO of Ginkgo Bioworks), Harmon Bhasin (founder of a stealth biosecurity startup), Bryan Lehrer (ex-Blueprint Biosecurity), Theia Vogel (ex-SecureDNA), Jacob Swett (founder of Blueprint Biosecurity), Matt Watson (ex-MITRE), Janika Schmitt (Program Officer at Sentinel...
Note: this article required conversations with a lot of people. A (hopefully) exhaustive, randomized list of everyone whose thoughts contributed to the article: Lachlan Munroe (Head of Automation at DTU Biosustain), Max Hodak (CEO of Science, former founder of Transcriptic), D.J. Kleinbaum (CEO of Emerald Cloud Labs), Keoni Gandall (former...
Note: Extraordinarily grateful to Milan Cvitkovic, Sumner Norman, Ben Woodington, and Adam Marblestone for all the helpful conversations, comments, and critiques on drafts of this essay. Introduction The whole field of neurotech is nauseatingly complicated. This seems to be because you need to understand at least five fields at once...
In 1654, a Jesuit polymath named Athanasius Kircher published Mundus Subterraneus, a comprehensive geography of the Earth’s interior. It had maps and illustrations and rivers of fire and vast subterranean oceans and air channels connecting every volcano on the planet. He wrote that “the whole Earth is not solid but...
Note: I spent my holidays writing a bunch of biology-adjacent, nontechnical pieces. I’ll intermittently mix them between whatever technical thing I send out, much like how a farmer may mix sawdust into feed, or a compounding pharmacist, butter into bathtub-created semaglutide. This one is about history! The book ‘Death with...
Introduction What I will describe below is a rough first approximation of what it is like to work in the field of machine-learning-assisted small-molecule design. Imagine that you are tasked with solving the following machine-learning problem: > There are 116 billion balls of varying colors, textures, shapes, and sizes in...
Youtube: https://youtu.be/3DWTF5mNcUU Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3aZr5yTgwB4QzUV5ADN0y9?si=9aTLjRZDRHuSBvmckenO1Q Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-if-we-could-grow-human-tissue-by-recapitulating/id1758545538?i=1000741694661 Substack/Transcript: https://www.owlposting.com/p/what-if-we-could-grow-human-tissue This is an interview with Matthew Osman and Fabio Boniolo, the co-founders of Polyphron. The thesis behind Polyphron is equal parts nauseating and exciting in how ambitious it is: growing ex-vivo tissue to use in organ repair. And, truthfully, it felt...