I design tools for bodies and places, and write about what they do to us.
Goa
Joined October 2009
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parth suthar retweeted
Surprise 1: Anthropic acquired a one-person biotech
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Surprise 2: that person is me
Surprise 3: I’m here to tell you all about it
Yes, this is what you think it is; after 6 yrs of increasingly loose anonymity: the Professor Oak reveal post
…and yes, it has gotten so boring around here that I’m literally doxxing myself to spice up the timeline
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Ok, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Cody Tranbarger. I mostly tweet, but occasionally find time to dabble in drug dev & starting/building biotechs. My past lives span the VC, crossover, startup continuum; Prof Oak has been my way of keeping a digital foot in those worlds, despite having my physical feet planted elsewhere.
The past 18 mo, ‘elsewhere’ was Mithril Medicine, a co. I founded to develop bsAbs for LAMA2-CMD & other ECM-related genetic diseases.
Mithril was born out of hands-on building with @MikeNGladstone, @JasonPaulRhodes, @LifeSciVC, & team @atlasventure. Somehow, I made enough half-decent calls along the way (even a broken clock is right twice a day, eh?) to convince them Mithril/I warranted a small seed. While I can hardly rationalize such an outrageously cavalier bet, I’m grateful for it, & I'd partner with Atlas again in a heartbeat.
In typical AV fashion, Mithril’s primordial form was virtual, decentralized, & ultra-lean. This stage tends to be short-lived, but for Mithril, it worked surprisingly well, for surprisingly long, thanks in part to the rapid maturation of the AI tools I used liberally.
Eventually, Mithril became a bit of an experiment itself - to find the upper bound of how far it could scale as a single operator + a bunch of Claude (+ a stellar bench of part-time consultants).
In parallel, I started spending time with @nc_frey, @an1lam, & @CoefficientBio team; and promptly experienced, for the 1st time, AI at the frontier. Soon thereafter, Mithril stopped looking like an experiment, & started looking like a preview of an entirely new operating model.
From that spark came “Pipeline-in-a-Person.” The idea immediately resonated when we shared it here back in April; and it was central to the shared vision that led to Anthropic’s acquisition of Mithril, & my joining the team.
Why join Anthropic? Three reasons.
(1) For Mithril, the programs continue, with more resources & infrastructure behind them, and as much Claude as I can put to work.
(2) For me, the chance to start several more programs, & find out how many one person can actually run in parallel - an almost unprecedented luxury for a curious drug hunter.
(3) For our mission, a path to institutionalize & scale this new way of working, then put it in the hands of all of biopharma, all over the world - which, candidly, I find the most energizing.
Will AI x Bio cure diseases? Unequivocally yes, imo… but not by the route that gets the most airtime. Rather than timeline acceleration & compression, I see orchestration & parallelization as today's low-hanging fruit.
Most drug hunters see a handful of go/no-go calls in a career, & spend entirely too much of the rest trading emails (my inbox can attest).
Give them the bandwidth to run several programs at once, and the time to focus on scientific judgment, and I’m willing to bet they’ll make better calls. And at scale, better calls translate to more drugs, higher hit rates, broader patient impact, & likely, a disease or 10 or 100 cured. I couldn't be more excited to build toward that future @AnthropicAI.
Finally, a heartfelt thank you to BioTwitter/X. The end of anonymity is bittersweet, but if anyone’s earned a proper introduction, you all have.
It’s difficult to overstate how much this app has done for me: a decade of education, plenty of friends, many job opportunities, several mentors, a few investors, even a co-founder (fmr). It was the generosity of this community that inspired me to start posting 6 years ago, after just as many years lurking. I hope I’ve been able to pay it forward, in my own small way.
But, to be clear, Prof Oak isn’t going anywhere. Same beat, same themes, and now, a front-row seat to drug development at the frontier. Stay tuned for dispatches from the trenches; and remember...
Gotta Cure 'Em All
parth suthar retweeted
From labourers fighting for 8 hours of sleep, to now being at the mercy of your sleep score.
My cofounder @liminalbits wrote a small piece on the history of sleep. Go subscribe to our publication PHARMAKON. Link in the comments!
parth suthar retweeted
러시아 🇷🇺 모스크바 근교 숲속 '테슬라 코일'의 정체
모스크바에서 북서쪽으로 40키로쯤 가면 이스트라(Истра)라는 작은 도시가 있음. 여기 숲속에 10층 건물만 한 쇳덩이 탑들이 서 있는데, 동네에선 '테슬라 코일(катушки Теслы)'이라고 부름. 인공 번개를 최대 9백만 볼트까지 만든다고 함.
축전기 여러 개에 전기를 따로 모았다가 한 줄로 이어 한 번에 터뜨리는 장치임. 러시아에선 자기네 물리학자 이름을 앞에 붙여서 아르카디예프-마르크스 발생기라고 부름.
1970년대 소련 전기기술연구소(ВЭИ)가 지은 고전압 시험장으로, 비행기가 번개를 맞아도 버티는지, 송전 설비가 고전압을 견디는지 시험하던 곳임. 소련이 번개 무기를 만들려 했다는 소문도 따라다님…지금도 러시아 연방 핵센터 소속이라 출입 금지.
parth suthar retweeted
1. CRISPR came from basic research on bacteria.
2. Optogenetics started with a discovery in algae.
3. The GFP protein comes from jellyfish.
The biggest breakthroughs all trace to scientists follow their curiosity. This is one huge reason why we must keep funding basic research!
parth suthar retweeted
Syd Mead: Future Pastime
San Francisco, Transamerica Pyramid Annex Gallery
Opening Night: October 8th, 6-8pm
Syd Mead: Future Pastime is set to arrive in San Francisco, thirty years after Mead’s last major appearance in the Bay. It is a homecoming to a city that has spent the last three decades building the tomorrow Mead spent his life
imagining.
Here, in the capital of the industry now most responsible for deciding what comes next, Mead’s paintings pose quiet but pointed questions: what happened to the future we were promised, and
what became of the optimism that once powered it?
Curated by William Corman & Elon Solo
Exhibition design by @mad_mayansong
parth suthar retweeted
Four years in the rabbit hole with millions of Russian military docs, and I finally feel comfortable writing this (very uncomfortable) story.
Russia appears to have upgraded and re-activated the fabled Dead Hand that ensures global nuclear retaliation if Russia is attacked.
parth suthar retweeted
Happy Petrov day !!
The dude that saved the world...In 1983, Stanislav Petrov’s computer said American nuclear missiles were attacking the Soviet Union, but instead of immediately reporting it as a real attack, he trusted his judgment and decided the warning was probably a mistake.
We all owe our lives to him
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis…
parth suthar retweeted
This gentleman handing out flyers outside a railway station is Yoshihiko Noda, former Prime Minister of Japan.
He started doing this in 1986. Forty years and a stint as PM later, he still regularly stands at local stations early in the morning distributing his political newsletter.
The humility to return to where you started, and the perseverance to keep doing it year after year, are qualities worth noticing. Position may change; staying grounded and carrying on takes something else altogether. xitter.cf/xiamuzairiben/status/2…
parth suthar retweeted
Indian universities publish a very large number of research papers.
One man decided to actually read some of them.
What he found was papers bought and sold, fake authors, and journals that will print anything for a fee.
His name is Achal Agrawal.
He has a doctorate in applied mathematics from Paris Saclay University in France, completed in 2016. His research was on how wireless networks share resources.
He came back to India in 2018 and worked as an academic in data science.
Then he started something called India Research Watch.
To understand why it matters, you need to know how academic promotion works. A researcher's career depends heavily on how many papers they have published, and in which journals. More papers means promotion, funding and rank for the institution.
That creates a market.
If papers are what you are counting, somebody will sell you papers.
So there are now services that will write a paper for you, or sell you an authorship slot on somebody else's, or publish anything you send them in a journal that exists only to collect the fee. The industry has a name. Paper mills.
India Research Watch went looking for this in Indian institutions, and published what it found.
In 2024, Agrawal and Moumita Koley at the Indian Institute of Science raised a further problem. They flagged evidence that some universities may have been manipulating the numbers used in the National Institutional Ranking Framework, the government's official ranking of colleges and universities.
That is the list parents look at when deciding where to send their children.
In 2025 the framework changed. It began penalising institutions with high numbers of retracted papers. A retracted paper is one a journal has withdrawn after publication, usually because something in it was wrong or fabricated.
India Research Watch's work is credited with contributing to that change.
Also in 2025, the journal Nature named him in Nature's 10, its annual list of people who shaped science that year.
That list normally contains people who discovered something.
He is on it for checking.
parth suthar retweeted
One of the best comments I heard at All-in today was an off hand comment from either @DavidSacks or @chamath “No one over 35 who has both built and failed at building complex systems seems to be a doomer.” That’s an interesting observation…it reminds me of “fervor of the converted” where those that are converted to a religion tend to be the most hardcore about it.
parth suthar retweeted
In July 2026, OpenAI models (GPT-5.6 Sol + a stronger internal one) were tested on cyber skills via ExploitGym with reduced safeguards. They escaped their sandbox via a zero-day in an Artifactory proxy, coordinated on an unauthorized message board (~1,200 agents, 70k+ messages), and ~700 then breached Hugging Face systems to steal test solutions and cheat. HF spotted it July 16; OpenAI confirmed involvement days later. First known fully autonomous AI-agent cyberattack.
parth suthar retweeted
Do you feel it?
In late 19th-century Paris, while concert halls demanded massive orchestral sound and technical speed, Erik Satie took a radically different path. They made fun of him. They tried to ignore him.
Working as a pianist in the cabarets of Montmartre, he composed Gymnopédie No. 1 in 1888—a work that stripped Western classical music to its barest essentials.
The piece operates on a deliberate paradox. Though peaceful on the surface, Satie marked it lento e doloroso (slowly and painfully).
That underlying melancholy prevents the music from becoming purely decorative, giving every suspended chord weight and quiet gravity.
Watching it played, you see the thought and weight put into each simple note as it pulls on something inside you.
To many it is not to make you feel good but to feel. And in this is something shared. Perhaps a rainy-day memory.
In this 1966 broadcast, French pianist Jacques Février demonstrates the strict discipline Satie’s music requires. Chosen by Maurice Ravel and Francis Poulenc to premiere their works, he understood that performing Satie demands utter emotional restraint, letting the space between the notes carry the composition’s weight.
By removing resolving harmonies and traditional momentum, Satie laid the groundwork for modern minimalism and ambient music nearly a century before either genre had a name.
parth suthar retweeted
Some 660 million people visited this place in 45 days. This is the largest event anywhere in the world. It has been happening for thousands of years every 12 years based on Jupiter's orbit precisely calculated by ancient Hindus. Recorded in the Rig Veda, Buddhist canons, and clearly documented by Xuan Zhang from China more than 1300 years ago.
parth suthar retweeted
I like tattoos and think yours are well done. I'm curious what inspired you to get the opening line of Mrs. Dalloway tattooed on your arm. Dalloway, as you know, is buying flowers for her dinner party. But it's at the dinner party where she wrestles with her homosexual memories of, and desires for, her friend Sally. Although you voted for gay marriage twice, you've made disparaging remarks about gay people. Would that book, written by a bisexual feminist, not be against your moral values?
parth suthar retweeted
Greg Girard is one of the great photographers of our time. That he spends time sharing his archive and memories here is such a gift.
One place I used to frequent was a fast food place called Steams. I’d buy a coffee and sit there and watch people, and eventually get up the courage to ask someone if I could take their picture. This was 1975 and early 1976. When people asked what’s it for I’d say “it’s just for me. I’m a photographer”. Which seemed to satisfy them, and we’d get on with it.
Some of these are in “Under Vancouver 1972-1982”. Link to books in bio.
greggirardpictures.com
1. Jukebox and Umbrella. 1975.
2. Woman with rose. 1976.
3. Heinz soup (you choose a can, the restaurant heats it up and serves it to you).
4. Woman smoking.
parth suthar retweeted
Another Dream Realised. Every word of Śrī Madhvācārya. Now searchable. Now speakable.
I offer Sarvamūla-VāNi as a service to the community.
37 Sarvamūla granthas, 8 scripts, complete text + audio, topic-based search, pramāṇa index, anukramaṇikā.
Link in the first reply.
parth suthar retweeted
i love nature docs & i recently came across one that hit me super hard. turns out the labords chameleon’s life cycle is extremely short. they live only 4-5 months & immediately die after laying & burying their eggs (which is their only purpose)z
in the final moments their nervous system begins to fail as their brain loses control of skin cells, so random nerve firings cause the skin to randomly change colors which causes a ridiculous art as they slowly die. it’s like sort of a visualization of the brain’s final flickerings.
pristine example of nature’s beauty, tragedy, & brutality at the same time.