I think biotechnology is the most exciting thing you can work on. But I have never written down my reasons for thinking this explicitly, so here are some bulleted arguments: - It is incredibly broad across both space and time. Biology spans every possible scale, from atoms to organisms to the planet. Biochemical reactions happen at nanosecond timescales, whereas organisms evolve over hours (in some cases) or millennia. This breadth means that there is always something new to discover. I believe it's possible for any undergraduate student, with a little bit of guidance, to make an original discovery in a matter of weeks. It may not be an important discovery, but you can quickly find things that nobody else has ever found before. - Insights gained into one organism apply to many others. It is a miracle that we can engineer living organisms at all. How peculiar that a bacterial defense system (CRISPR-Cas) can be adapted into a gene-editing tool which works not only in bacteria, but also in plants and algae and humans. All life shares a common ancestor, and is assembled from a common set of ingredients, so we can mix-and-match our tools to solve incredibly diverse problems. (If life formed multiple times, and each "tree" of life persisted to the present, then the tools made for one branch of that tree would be unlikely to work in another. Fortunately, this is not the case.) - A deep understanding of biology can be applied to a *huge* range of problems. Say you're a protein designer, using computers to design new types of molecules. Such a skill is not only useful for making medicines! It can also be used to make antivenoms, or to design peptides that protect plants against pests, or a million other things. This means that, as a biotechnologist, you can work on medicines or climate change or agriculture or making life multiplanetary ... all using a common set of skills. It is just unfortunate that biology is taught in such a boring way in schools, with textbooks and rote memorization. My advice would be to fight through your boredom and then join a research laboratory, as soon as you possibly can. Get hands-on skills and try to work on your own problems.

we are hiring for a small number of high impact roles across research, engineering, and strategic ops at @tacitlabsco! come do the best work of your life with the best people you'll ever work with. we work together, in person, out of a beautiful office in Dogpatch. the culture here is high ownership and high-urgency. we keep the team intentionally small, meaning that each new person we bring on is n-of-1, with enormous scope and lots of room to run. we like people to be highly opinionated, technical, and a little bit weird. you'll work closely with our partners at the frontier labs, giving you ample exposure to research at the bleeding edge. send us an email with a couple lines about you, what you've worked on, and why you want to join - queuing up our first wave of interviews for next week!

Announcing the Hyperspectral Biology Fund: It's possible to see engineered microbes from space; not with the naked eye, but by the distinctive way their molecules absorb light. The secret is hyperspectral cameras. Whereas a normal camera captures just three colors (red, green, and blue), a hyperspectral camera captures the full spectrum of light at every pixel. When merged with synthetic biology, one can create engineered organisms that sense something (a pathogen, explosive, pollutant, etc) and then monitor them using satellites with hyperspectral cameras orbiting Earth. The end goal is to build a planetary-scale biosensing network. I'm giving away $75,000 in microgrants to help grow this field. Applications are due by July 10. Thanks to @davidtlang and the Experiment Foundation for making this possible.

I've started a new company called @tacitlabsco, an applied research lab at the intersection of AI and biology. 1/n

We're excited to announce a $4M Seed round led by @GameChangersVC, with support from incredible investors including @scooterbraun, @GuyOseary, @stellation, @SignalFire, @MaCVentureCap, and others. A few years ago, while hosting community events and testing early products, my co-founders @WeilynChong, @NathanAhn, and I noticed a consistent pattern. After every event, people asked the same questions: Where are the photos? Who captured that moment? How do I reconnect with the people I met? fortune.com/2026/06/16/photo…

I'm writing an interactive book about the cell. My next chapter, "Why Are Cells Small?" is now live. TL;DR: Cells are limited by two physical constraints; diffusion rates and their ratio of volume and surface area. First, surface area: Assuming that a cell is roughly spherical in shape, its internal volume grows proportionally to the cube of its radius, whereas its surface area grows proportionally to the square of that radius. This means that the available amount of membrane (where nutrients come in, and waste goes out) grows much slower than the volume as a whole. So as a cell's radius goes up, it gets harder and harder to maintain cellular functions. Second, diffusion: Molecules need to collide with each other for biology to work. Enzymes must find substrates, signaling molecules must reach receptors, and ribosomes must collide with messenger RNAs. Inside a cell, nearly everything happens by chance encounters amongst these molecules! As a cell’s volume grows, though, the chance that these encounters will happen decreases (assuming the total numbers of molecules stay constant). With these constraints in mind, we can begin to speculate as to why various cells are shaped the way they are. Red blood cells are tiny and shaped like biconcave discs to aid with diffusion; by abandoning a spherical shape and evolving more toward a ‘donut,’ they increase their surface area without compromising volume. Human eggs are by far the largest cells in the body, growing to about 100 micrometers in diameter. They can do this because they are not so metabolically active, and thus don't require random collisions to occur frequently. Instead, they stockpile nutrients during oogenesis to wait out fertilization. Finally, there is a giant bacterium, called Thiomargarita magnifica, that can extend about one centimeter in length, so large that it is visible to the naked eye. It does this by breaking the surface area-to-volume rule, filling between 65–80 percent of its internal volume with an empty vacuole. In other words, it pushes most of its molecules to the cell periphery, thus shortening diffusion distances.

In SF briefly next week and wanna try something new. I'm reserving time to meet new folks working on AIxBio: new therapeutic and measurement modalities, harness design, boring-but-critical problems beyond discovery, etc. DM me.

We live in a golden age of biology. So why are people still dying from disease? Because discovery and development move slower than they should. Today, we’re partnering with Incyte to change that. Kosmos is now the first agent that can compress months of drug development into weeks, from the earliest stages of scientific discovery through to FDA approval. @Incyte will be the first company to deploy it across their pipeline. Work that used to take a team of scientists months now happens in weeks. Patients can't wait, and neither can we.

Keytruda transformed cancer care and made Merck more money than any drug in history. It was also discovered by accident, and nearly out-licensed in 2010 for pocket change. New Approved exclusive interviews with the inventors and the Merck CMO who ran development:

Come build Amplify Bio with us! Digital Biology is a generational opportunity. We couldn’t be more excited about the technical founders we’ve already partnered with. Recently, we shared the advisors we’ve added to help support them. And we’ve got some exciting news to share about our investment team soon, too. Now, we’re looking for an outlier person to help create even more asymmetry for our founders. Come build the connectivity layer between the best technical founders, scientific minds, and pharma leaders with us!

Achira is on track to achieve a real turning point in our scientific understanding of the universe: atomistic foundation models. One of the most important emerging technologies today. Join this team!

Hiring AI/ML talent at @achira_ai to build world models for molecules We're looking for scientists and research engineers who will join Achira's technical staff to join its mission to build microscopic world models. As large scale AI models have matured and revolutionized our ability to intervene on the digital world, we are increasingly racing towards physical AI as the next frontier. Achira builds foundation simulation models that will explictly model the microcosm on an atomistic level with a goal to deeply impact virtual chemistry in service of drug discovery and is marrying the best of deep learning/generative AI with physics, statistical mechanics, and quantum chemistry. If you're up for the challenge to build at the frontier, come join us. achira.ai/careers/

I've started writing my book: "Biology is a Burrito & Other Essays." It is an interactive and highly visual look into the beauty, speed, and complexity of a living cell. I'm planning to print hardcover books while serializing the essays online. The first essay is now available at burrito.bio. This was inspired by Stewart Brand's latest book, "Maintenance of Everything," which he developed in serialized form with @WorksInProgMag. One cool thing about that book was that he improved each chapter with reader comments before printing the physical copies! I'll be doing the same with this book. If you send me feedback that improves the text, I'll credit you online and in the final print version. You can also sign up to get email updates when a new essay launches. Hope you enjoy!

@arcinstitute is hiring a CTO. It may be the most important technical role in biology right now - and here's why I'm the one posting it. This summer I'm transitioning from CTO to Strategic Advisor. When I left Android 18 months ago, I said I wanted to use AI to accelerate drug discovery. Joining Arc was how I put that into action - and the team has delivered: frontier AI x Bio models like Evo, STATE, and STACK, AI research agents like scBaseCount, the Virtual Cell Challenge, a TED Audacious grant, and world-class compute. Given what my family has been through these past few years, a full-time operational role isn't the right fit right now. The mission still is, which is why I'm staying close as an advisor. Thanks to @skonermann, @pdhsu, and @patrickc for their partnership. We need a cracked ML and technical leader - mission-obsessed, ready to architect the future of science. DMs open. arcinstitute.org/jobs/cto

🚨New job alert! I’m looking for a strong scientist and operator that wants to expand their efforts to work closely with me on … well everything! This spans my work at @ArcadiaScience as well as @AsteraInstitute. If you’re excited by the mission of our orgs, thrive in a fast-paced environment, and have a passion for science/open science/metascience, apply now! jobs.lever.co/arcadiascience…

We're launching Sleuth today. The intelligence platform for biopharma's highest-stakes decisions, in use at top companies in the world. To celebrate, we broke down the Chinese landscape: 18K assets & a map of the strategic white space. RT comment "Sleuth" for access.

pipeline-in-a-person (h/t @Prof_Oak_ for the concept) is one skilled biotech operator a bunch of Claudes running a virtual biotech company. reach out if you want to help build this or pilot it.