Synthetic Biologist - Foundry Theorist - American Wetware - stay humble biodesigners
Cambridge, MA
Joined June 2014
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- Followers18.4K
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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.
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…
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
Warhound, the brain child of Ben Lamm and Palmer Luckey, emerges from stealth to genetically engineer dogs for military and law enforcement.
spr.ly/6011BHZNMF
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
Jake Wintermute 🧬/acc retweeted
This probably the first time horse embryos are being sold after being genetically selected. Imagine if this started happening more and in cattle and pets. The impact this would have on animal breeding.
Our first genetically selected horse embryos going up for public auction on Sunday! Expecting it to sell for $35k+
Wheely is a really fast stakes broodmare we purchased after we found she had a variant in her growth hormone that could possibly create speed and size advantages
Jake Wintermute 🧬/acc retweeted
Obvs happens but nice to see it so boastfully laid out
Watch Wall Streeters hop over Anthropic’s biosecurity guardrail with ease bc they’re bros, while blithely admitting they don’t have ANY of the biosecurity measures required for rank and file bio researchers doing real work
🦂 This was a very fun collaboration with the team @citrini! Thank you to @TwistBioscience and @adaptyvbio for the rapid turnaround on experimental validation and to Susana Vázquez Torres (@CNIOStopCancer), Tim Jenkins (@DTUtweet ), and Dan Bedinger (@carterra_bio) for their thoughtful review.
Read more in our blog post: anthropic.com/research/claud…
Jake Wintermute 🧬/acc retweeted
Weekend project complete: Run (Free)BindCraft on your mac!
Check out the latest version 1.0.6 which supports experimental support for apple silicon (github.com/cytokineking/Free…).
Jake Wintermute 🧬/acc retweeted
It will be morbidly interesting to see the diversity of schemes which AI cooks up to kill exactly 50 people
Anthropic's proposed AI safety bill sets "killing or seriously injuring more than 50 people" as the risk threshold for blocking the release of an AI model
In contrast, when a single patient (Jesse Gelsinger) died in a gene therapy clinical trial in 1999:
- The institute that ran the trial was dissolved
- The senior scientist running the trial was banned from clinical work for 5 years
- Gene therapy saw deep cuts in funding and research activity for a decade
Tech and biotech have just profoundly different cultures of risk. As AI companies increasingly engage with biomedical research, a culture clash is inevitable
politico.com/news/2026/10/16…
Jake Wintermute 🧬/acc retweeted
the elizabeth holmes movie inspired me to worship my evil autistic wife even harder
Jake Wintermute 🧬/acc retweeted
You’ve just ordered Pizza Hut and 2L of Mountain Dew. You’ve loaded WoW on your crappy PC. Somehow, your paladin has reached level 34, and you’re about to group up for a quest in Stranglethorn Vale. Your parents don’t mind you staying up all night. A perfect summer night. You are 35 years old. The year is 2026.
Jake Wintermute 🧬/acc retweeted
Come work with me! TT Professor opening at Purdue University; Quantitative Neuroscience!
I’d love to recruit someone working on high throughput image data. It's a great place to be, Purdue is a top-30 US university (12th among public universities):
careers.purdue.edu/job/Assis…
Jake Wintermute 🧬/acc retweeted
Got a defunct Metrocard machine with my friends... if you're on instagram, follow along at @ 5x5_collective for updates on what we'll do with it
After picking it up from a city warehouse today, we got it to turn on (not trivial) and inspected a bunch of the internal electronics. this thing is from august 2001. lots of fun old stuff in there, which seems to basically still work.
next up -- testing all of the serial connections and seeing if we can figure out how to drive the printer, read/write to magnetic strips on the cards, etc
And then we start building new hardware and software for this lil guy :)
Jake Wintermute 🧬/acc retweeted
Check out our new preprint led by @mileshuseyin unexpectedly discovering Polycomb 3D interactions independent of cPRC1.
Miles led this ambitious study. He's also on the faculty job market, and I can't recommend him highly enough for important and comprehensive science!
1/9) Excited to share my preprint on Polycomb 3D chromatin interactions from my postdoc with @Anders_S_Hansen!
We were surprised to find that canonical PRC1 doesn't seem to be the only contributor to these interactions:
biorxiv.org/content/10.64898…
Jake Wintermute 🧬/acc retweeted
I can do your genetic horoscope for you tiktok.com/@american.wetware…
I can't find a way to use my genome.
I’m the most intense longevity athlete in the world and haven’t used my genome for a single thing.
Fully sequenced in 2012. Again this year, paying $7,902 for matched 30x long read + 100x short read.
Still, nothing.
What am I missing?
Jake Wintermute 🧬/acc retweeted
#woodgang 🪵
Jake Wintermute 🧬/acc retweeted
Hiring for Members of Technical Staff to work on rigorous evaluation of AI in biology.
Our mission is to advance humanity's ability to engineer biology. We approach this by understanding and improving AI’s application to biology across basic research, drug discovery, and biosecurity. We are a team of engineers, scientists, and operations specialists who are driven by improving capabilities and interpretability. Some of our work is showcased on benchmarks.bio.
About this role
You’ll turn your understanding of a biological domain into a roadmap of benchmarks and design them with engineers. Then build and manage your own scientific team using your network and internal talent infrastructure.
You have
(1) deep scientific expertise and experience using AI tools
(2) or strong coursework in math/CS and experience working with scientists
This is a high-intensity, founder-type role. Our Members of Technical Staff have built companies, run drug programs and scaled complex technical projects.
Projects you might work on
- Design benchmarks with engineers and scientists, from selecting scientific questions and datasets to developing reliable graders.
- Work with engineers on large-scale computing and AI inference infrastructure to evaluate models and investigate their failures.
- Research new methods for evaluating scientific capabilities and measuring improvements from training.
- Work with our internal data generation and drug development teams to build tasks around real experiments and research decisions.
How we work
Our MTS team works in person in Mission Bay, San Francisco. We keep meetings to a minimum and are flexible about when you arrive or leave. Tight deadlines and customer commitments sometimes require late hours.
Our work in use
Frontier AI labs use our benchmarks to assess biological capabilities and safeguards. Our work appears in research announcements and model cards, including:
- anthropic.com/claude-fable-5…
- anthropic.com/claude-opus-5-…
- anthropic.com/news/healthcar…
- media.x.ai/v1/website/card4p…
- x.ai/news/biosafety-at-the-f…
Hiring Process
Our process is typically completed within two weeks.
- Round 1: Introduction
- Round 2: Technical project matching
- Round 3: Take-home evaluation project (~2 hours)
- Round 4: Technical interview / live engineering session (1 hour)
- Round 5: Paid onsite project and presentation (2–3 days) - Offer
Compensation & Benefits
- 350K-500K+ OTE
- Equity
- Unlimited PTO
- Health, dental and vision insurance fully covered
- Visa sponsorship and relocation assistance
- 401(k)
- Office in Mission Bay, San Francisco
- Lunch and dinner provided
Apply at jobs.ashbyhq.com/latchbio/9b…. Or send an email to kenny[at]latch[dot]bio
