Synthetic Biologist - Foundry Theorist - American Wetware - stay humble biodesigners

Cambridge, MA
Joined June 2014
Stop glamorizing the hustle and start glamorizing the mussel
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Sci-fi shows cool futures and shitty futures. Cool spaceships or killer robots. Beautiful thriving worlds or dystopian hellscapes. But sci-fi food is almost always weird and bad. Nutrient paste. Corpse-starch. Insect patties. I want more optimistic sci-fi foods!
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Jake Wintermute 🧬/acc retweeted
On #2: Andy Grove once said “abandoning today's 'commodity' manufacturing can lock you out of tomorrow's emerging industry” and nowhere is this more true than in pharma and life sciences. Over the last 20 years we have shifted much of the drug discovery process to large Chinese contract research organizations (CROs) like Wuxi—a company which was added to the DoW’s list of “Chinese military companies” in June. We’ve seen this multiple times now. When the work moves overseas, the expertise and infrastructure follow. We're at risk of losing the ability to turn our ideas into medicines. That’s an unacceptable dependency for something so central to our health and our future.
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Jake Wintermute 🧬/acc retweeted
China has gotten ahead of the US in biotechnology, largely by making their clinical trial system more effective. I covered this in a @nytimes article. Now, American patients are travelling there to have access to drugs they can't access at home. It's high time the US woke up and implemented much needed reforms.
"She had been through chemotherapy and surgery, but the cancer had now spread to her brain. And she didn’t qualify for the relevant clinical trials. “Too bad she’s not Chinese,” a doctor told her son... “She could go to a pharmacy in China and buy it.” kffhealthnews.org/health-ind…
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The deadliest rivalry since alien vs. predator
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Jake Wintermute 🧬/acc retweeted
I had considered doing this for cats but 1) cats are already optimized for war and 2) historically cats have not aligned with NATO
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Screen addiction is the new obesity. When a dopamine hit becomes too easy to obtain, it overwhelms our natural capacity to self-regulate Like obesity, the puritanical American instinct is to fight this with discipline and shame. And like obesity, this approach will fail and keep failing We need a pharmaceutical intervention. Only Ozempic for social media can save us
Americans have a "revealed preference" for doing less of basically everything except going online and I have serious doubts that this is making us happier. slowboring.com/p/americans-n…
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People are watching mathematics and software engineering for signs of the fast takeoff when really they should be watching porn
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Biosecurity people I'm counting on you to keep this from happening again
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Jake Wintermute 🧬/acc retweeted
Yes real lab work takes time but if you continue to decouple design from execution it becomes a lot easier to optimize the execution steps. Lots of slow wet lab time comes from scientists explaining protocols to each other instead of well optimized handoffs. Rate limiting step is often humans chatting instead of cells growing
god these two charts really hurt my soul 64 hours to dry lab design an multi-binding antivenom and 39 days for results and 4-7 years to release
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