July 2024 update
SuperGrass, UK biotech, happiness
Designed SuperGrass that grows to a maximum height. Gotta publish that whitepaper. So far, check out the pics of some experiments 👇
Spent a lot of time thinking, in silence, as a tourist in London. That helped me recharge my spiritual battery to apply to yet more biotech.
Thoughts
I talked with an investor who’s been pitched zombie chicken (chicken that aren’t conscious so we can grow their meet without guilt). For real. It only reminded me that the power of design thinking applied to biology (not biodesign as we currently know it) is to think outside the engineer’s box.
I had the enormous pleasure of attending SciFoo, a party for nerds organized by O’Reilly Media, Google, and Nature. My favorite convo was on moonshots and media. I think we need SciFi that embeds biotech into culture and inspires the next generation of leaders that moonshots need.
Another cool discussion was on why “synbio won’t save the world”. I think we need more perspective on how much money is burnt on say a handful of AI startups versus the whole synbio industry, how much time it actually took for tech to take off from governmental programs into mainstream, and never forget that commodities are not a place to start.
Two years after graduating high school, I finally saw my dearest friend Lalo IRL again. Over the phone, he’s always the one telling his adventures and I don’t have much to say apart from projects. This time I remembered that life’s made of tradeoffs, none of which absolutely right or wrong. Just be coherent with your desires and actions.
Being overly influenced by scientific founders throughout my teenage years meant that I forgot that a company’s main function is to make money, not to do science. It’s very important not to forget that.
I think I chatted with a biotech scammer. He was so weird but the company he was telling me about was actually followed by some legit people I know IRL, and it was a complex neurotech one. Anyway, we haven’t talked since which makes me wonder: what did he want from me?
JC, software dev at Ginkgo, is building a great biotech community in LatAm as he’s living in Mexico City. He’s so cool and reminded me of the importance of building more biotech communities.
I joined 5 of the coolest young biotech community builders in Latam to discuss what the region is missing. I think the problem is we’re those weird people of people living in between the top 1% and the bottom billion, so we want to see cutting edge in our home too but tend to ignore that the whole industry, even in regions with abundant economic resources, is going through its own challenges. I also confirmed my intuition of tropicalizing biotech to the needs and strengths of each region — Let’s go build Latam’s ag and food biotech!
In stem cells and human decisions, you can connect the dots by asking for perspective. Naomi Nakayama, the PI who kindly offered me a place in her lab for the summer, is great at knowing this from people’s CVs and looking at their eyes when they talk about the things they’re passionate about. I was worried about the how content creation, entrepreneurship and plant research I’ve done might fuse into a single job. She thinks they will as long as my curiosity remains genuine and unforced…
Thank you so much to Adaobi, Timon, Nelli, Cai, Said, Logan, Meir, Diego, Oli, Sibi, Dhanya, Naomi, Jane, Shelby, Jenny, and many many more people, for making time to meet with me and allow me to learn from your incredible work. My intention is to pay it forward as I continue to grow as a person and as a biotechnologist.