As below, so above. I write denovo.substack.com/
- Tweets 118
- Following 78
- Followers 170
- Likes 164
Metacelsus retweeted
I'm hosting a dinner next month in Boston for scientists and engineers interested in safely increasing human intelligence.
I'm interested in both treating cognitive impairment and helping healthy people improve their cognitive abilities. Could we develop treatments that help people learn faster, reason better, and solve harder problems? I'm especially interested in approaches that could work in adults.
There's a lot we don't know, including what's possible and what would be safe. I'd like to bring together people across neuroscience, genetics, drug development, and computational biology/ML to discuss promising research and what it would take to turn it into useful treatments.
I'm also interested in backing the right founding team if one comes together.
If you're working in this area or have relevant expertise, please apply at the link below.
Happy to cover travel if needed. Or if you can't make it to Boston, let us know - I may host one virtually for those who can't attend in person.
221
202
2,253
201,531
denovo.substack.com/p/biolog…
Astra is *almost* there but not quite. This is its attempt at a Carnegie stage 23 human embryo.
1
5
635
Biosecurity is good, but it's ironic that AI lab leaders are calling out biology for being potentially dangerous while rushing full speed ahead towards something 100X worse for existential risk. Where's the mandatory GPU screening and recordkeeping?
Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Demis Hassabis and many others have signed a letter urging Congress to increase security on orders of synthetic nucleic acids - and the equipment needed to make them - as models continue to become increasingly bio-capable.
1
163
Back in 1997, Teruhiko Wakayama made the first cloned mouse. Since 2005, his research group has done 20 years of continuous cloning. 58 generations, 30,947 microinjections. Here's what they found: denovo.substack.com/p/what-h…
1
163
Great writeup today by @eryney_ok in @corememory about our work at @OvelleBio. Anyone who's interested in solving infertility should check it out! corememory.com/p/this-startu…
1
3
662
dang, Gemini keeps laying on the sycophancy:
"This is a phenomenal pivot. You have just unlocked the absolute highest tier of human genomics."
1
4
147
Metacelsus retweeted
Former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein on hiring students from non Ivy league and prestigious schools
"The average will be higher at these great schools, and certainly the bottom quartile will be higher. But if you look at the tippy-top of Harvard and the top of the University of Minnesota, they will be at least as good. Maybe better"
143
330
7,740
2,399,729
Apparently the answer was to make a standardized Hawaiian alphabet to print the Bible . . . and also to ban hula dancing
Hiram Bingham I led the first Christian mission to Hawaii, and one of my ancestors. I'm reading his account and it's fascinating because he's a proto-EA!
“How shall we most effectually and most extensively promote the Redeemer’s cause with the means that are put into our hands”?
111
Hiram Bingham I led the first Christian mission to Hawaii, and one of my ancestors. I'm reading his account and it's fascinating because he's a proto-EA!
“How shall we most effectually and most extensively promote the Redeemer’s cause with the means that are put into our hands”?
180
nature.com/articles/d41586-0…
Nice overview of current progress and challenges in the IVG field, I'd recommend anyone who's interested to read this.
1
126
Paper from the Mitalipov lab on putting skin cell nuclei into eggs. nature.com/articles/s41467-0… This causes chromosomes to segregate, sort of like meiosis II.
It's an interesting approach but one which is unlikely to lead to healthy human births. I'll explain why below:
1
4
183
Also the epigenetic imprinting will be scrambled too. Finally this method still requires a donor egg so it won't solve the egg shortage.
1
96
The biology is very interesting, especially as it relates to meiosis II, and it's a great paper. But for clinical use, I think the only way to get healthy eggs is to go through both meiosis I and II.
I wrote about their earlier (mouse) paper here: denovo.substack.com/p/eggs-a…
91
science.org/doi/10.1126/scie…
IN PLANTS. The title was super good bait for me, but this isn't even an #inmice moment.
1
2
107
A new Nature paper on DNA-based neural networks: nature.com/articles/s41586-0…
The authors got stuck in a local maximum for three years, but had the courage to let go of their work and move to a better design. My thoughts here: denovo.substack.com/p/a-prof…
2
94
Second big milestone: Today marks a full year since @OvelleBio was incorporated. Happy birthday!
We've started up the lab, assembled a great team, and have already made considerable progress in meiosis, epigenetics, and other key technology for IVG. I'm excited for the future!
6
130