FULL INTERVIEW: Ruxandra Teslo says John von Neumann would have been a worse drug developer than a mediocre biologist at Pfizer with the right data. In biology, intelligence was never the bottleneck. @RuxandraTeslo is a writer at @WorksInProgMag & @stripe. She joined @theojaffee and @schisofrenia the day after Anthropic's binder results and Moderna's phase 3, to break down what both actually showed: 00:47 what Claude did and didn't do on 14 of 15 targets 03:04 the harder problem isn't designing the molecule, it's picking the target 06:23 whether protein binder design has real dual use risk 08:08 why "AGI will be hyper-persuasive" is benchmark-brained 11:40 von Neumann would be a worse drug developer than a Pfizer biologist with the right data 12:46 why Moderna jumped 148% on results she says we already knew 15:34 melanoma is the most favorable cancer you could possibly test this on 18:06 why prevention trials are so hard, and screening is the real play 21:25 the GitLab founder running experimental therapies on his own cancer 22:19 why she's most excited about AI for rare disease

It's finally here! I gave a TED talk in April in Vancouver, and it was released online today. You can watch it here: ted.com/talks/saloni_dattani… I've also adapted it into an article, which was published last week: worksinprogress.co/issue/fut…

The vast majority of people care about animal welfare, but factory farming continues growing. Will animals always suffer? In a brilliant new piece @KojiFlynnDo & @MartinVGould argue there’s a Kuznets curve for animal welfare: we can turn things around. worksinprogress.co/issue/wil… • Demand for meat rises with wealth – South Korea went from eating about 4kg of meat per person per year in the 1960s to 120kg now. But rich countries often plateau at around 150kg per person per year, and in some, it’s begun to decline. • Factory farming follows wealth. More than 80 billion land animals are slaughtered every year, and including fish more than doubles that number. • Animals are one of the clearest examples where welfare has gotten worse over the long term. It doesn’t have to stay this way. Like the classic Kuznets curve, where industrialization once meant worsening pollution, rich countries have managed to turn things around, cleaning the air we breathe; we can do the same for animal welfare. Some improvements to farm animal welfare would be very cheap: it costs just 1-2 cents extra per egg for hens to be cage-free, and now 45% of hens in the US, 62% in the EU and 82% in the UK are. Alternative meats are currently more expensive, but cheaper methods might reduce their costs like previous technological cost curves have done. But there are other reforms too: in-ovo sexing, for example, involves identifying the sex of chicks while still in the egg, could spare the billions of male chicks each year who are gassed or ground up on their first day of life. I learnt a lot from this article and loved it. Let’s bend the curve! You can read it in full here: worksinprogress.co/issue/wil…

BIG NEW piece by me. A few years ago, if you asked me to summarize my entire worldview in one article, I would’ve said it was too broad and too difficult. But this year, I decided to do it. worksinprogress.co/issue/fut… The central drama of the modern world is innovation against suffering, and we have made incredible progress so far. But we are doing far worse than we could. Millions still suffer from untreatable diseases, because of bottlenecks that we could fix. You can help fix them.

I haven’t read a magazine for at least a decade. But I have now read every single print issue of Works in Progress back to back. Not just me. My whole family. Everyone waits for me to finish it so they can read it too. Do yourself a favor and subscribe. Won’t regret it!

Ugly architecture creates powerful coalitions against development. Sceptics about this have misunderstood how these coalitions work. My latest in Works in Progress: worksinprogress.co/issue/bea… Western countries used to let landowners build almost anything anywhere. Now, strict rules freeze the character of most neighborhoods, banning change and densification. Why? One theory is that modern buildings tend to be ugly, leading residents to support rules that exclude them from their neighborhoods. If this is true, then designing beautiful buildings could lead to more development. Housing reformists have vigorously debated this theory. I do believe that ugliness plays a role in hindering development, but not in quite the way usually proposed. Ugliness is probably not a major driver of opposition to development by local people. Local opponents have many other concerns that are at least as important, like disruption from construction, loss of green space, pressure on local services, and diminished social exclusivity. But there is strong circumstantial evidence that ugliness is sometimes a major driver of opposition among people who live nowhere near the development in question. The first group are often called ‘NIMBYs’, for ‘Not in my backyard’. Let us call the second group ‘NITBYs’, for ‘Not in that backyard’. While a few NITBYs are fervent campaigners, most are only casually interested. Their motives are faint but basically altruistic: their question is whether or not, based on a cursory assessment, a development is an objective improvement to its neighborhood. In certain contexts, the ugliness of a development can summon into being a huge cloud of NITBYs, whose interest in the scheme may indeed be superficial, but who can nonetheless be collectively potent. This model is especially compelling in the case of heritage conservation. Until the 1960s, the redevelopment of historic buildings was almost always permitted; today, it is almost always banned by conservation rules. Supporters of conservationism usually portray it as a response to the destructiveness of postwar planners, while opponents see it as a pretext for suburban NIMBYism. In fact, neither explanation is plausible. On the one hand, postwar planners were no more destructive than the Victorians or Georgians had been: the rate of demolition was historically normal, and cannot explain the wildly unprecedented policy response. And on the other hand, there was no need for NIMBYs to invent pretexts to ban new buildings, as they had already successfully prohibited the kinds of development they disliked in the first half of the century. What had changed, and what generated the host of NITBYs that bore conservationism to victory, was the ascendancy of modernist architecture, a style that is demonstrably far more contentious with the public. Conservationism was a reaction to postwar redevelopment, as its proponents claimed. But it was less a reaction to what the modernists destroyed, than to what they created. This argument can be summarised by the two Paris buildings pictured below. Both were built on the site of older stock, but only one provoked a conservationist backlash. Is this so very mysterious?

Would you rather be exposed to the radiation of 1,000 CT scans all in one go, or be hit with the same cumulative amount of radiation, but over the course of a lifetime? worksinprogress.co/issue/how… Hopefully you will not have to take that decision, but if you do, make sure it's spread out over your lifetime. There is now overwhelming evidence that low-dose-rate ionizing radiation is not that harmful. Even Chernobyl, by far the world's worst nuclear disaster, exposed millions yet has likely killed 60 or so people. A total of 200 may die early. The other bad civil nuclear disasters – Windscale, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island – likely killed nobody at all. The evidence is rolling in: ---> Many residents of Kerala are exposed to seven full-body CT scans' worth of ionizing radiation every year. But multiple studies find no effect on their health. ---> Taiwanese apartment dwellers were unwittingly exposed to up 100 CT scans per year because their apartments were made with radioactive cobalt rebar. But dwellers suffered much lower cancer rates than other age-comparable Taiwanese. ---> Between 1915 and 1950, women in factories painted radium onto watch dials to make them glow in the dark. Those licking the brushes sometimes suffered severe cancers. But non-lickers had lifetime doses equivalent to nearly 1,000 CT scans with no effect. ---> At 58 in 1945, Albert Stevens was injected with an enormous amount of plutonium, exposing him to a radiation dose equivalent to 300 CT scans every year. He lived to be 79. These and many other studies show that ionizing radiation's harms are primarily about concentrated acute doses, not low doses over a long time. Yet nuclear regulatory systems are based around the principle that any radiation exposure is totally intolerable. This leads to rules like 'ALARA' – as low as reasonably achievable – which continually ratchet up regulatory requirements, making nuclear power slow and expensive. Read my new piece with @chalmermagne for @WorksinProgMag.

Half the land area of Boston, a quarter of NYC, and 15% of San Francisco were raised from the sea before 1970. Since then, land values have grown by 30x but land reclamation has ground to a halt. This failure follows the spread environmental law around the world rather than any geographic, technological, or economic constraint. Thus, our lack of land reclamation and the severe land constraints in our most important cities are self-imposed and avoidable. We should make more land! worksinprogress.co/issue/why… Land reclamation was common practice in American cities in the 19th and 20th centuries. Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Charleston, San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia, Norfolk, DC, Oakland, and LA all had major land reclamation projects that extended residential living space or infrastructure or both. The Bay Area alone reclaimed an area of land equivalent to ten Manhattans between 1850 and 1957, at an inflation-adjusted cost of $330,000 per acre. Today, an acre of single-family-zoned land in San Francisco County averages $24 million. Even if the cost of land reclamation grew faster than inflation, despite technological leaps in dredging and construction technology, there should be plenty of room for profitable arbitrage. And yet, land reclamation is extinct in the Bay Area as well as in every other American city. This isn’t because we ran out of good spots to reclaim: Two thirds of the San Francisco Bay is shallower than Boston’s Back Bay was when it was reclaimed in the 1860s. Nor is it because of better transportation: We’ve used up all of the easy suburban expansions enabled by the train and the automobile so prices are rising even in outlying suburbs. Instead, land reclamation’s death is due to environmental law. Evidence for this claim shows up in the coincident timing of land reclamation’s demise across dozens of cities in the US and in the environmental compliance process of the few reclamation projects still inching along today, but the best evidence is found internationally. No country has more experience or more reason to reclaim land than the Netherlands. The Dutch built 5% of their country out of the sea over the first half of the 20th century and by 1975 they had another artificial lake in the Zuiderzee ready to drain at the flip of a switch, which would have made tens of thousands of acres of land just east of Amsterdam. But a 1969 environmental review law, similar to NEPA in the US, stopped the project before it was finished and the site is now a protected bird sanctuary. Their one major reclamation since, the Maasvlakte 2 extension of the port of Rotterdam, took 11 years and 6,000 pages of environmental review before construction began. Inversely, countries without these laws, like China, Singapore, and Japan have continued major land reclamation projects into the 21st century. China has reclaimed over 5,000 square kilometers since 2000, including a city of half a million outside Shanghai and Singapore has grown by a quarter since 1975. Every major American city has a land shortage. But we have more than enough shallow water, dredging capacity, and market incentive to make more land, just like we did 150 years ago. The only obstacle is our own choice to make making land illegal. The benefits of more land in our most productive cities are large enough to justify the effort of reforming the laws that currently prevent it. Let’s make more land!

Today we're launching Intercept: a $500M philanthropic initiative to make respiratory infections, like the common cold and flu, a thing of the past. We treat respiratory infections as a minor nuisance, but that’s really not the case. Most of us will spend 5% of our lives (!) sick from these viruses, they kill 1M people a year, cost $600B annually in productivity, and periodically threaten civilization through pandemics. So, if they’re such a big problem, why haven’t we dealt with them yet? Last year we convened ~40 leading scientists, pharma R&D leaders, biotech investors, and regulatory experts to better understand that. We heard two main reasons: (1) First, it’s just technically very challenging: respiratory viruses represent hundreds of distinct, mutating strains across several families. Fortunately, recent breakthroughs make this newly possible. (2) Second is a lack of funding: broad-spectrum solutions have historically been underfunded, in part because they’re not a great fit for most philanthropic or commercial funding (and while COVID generated a burst of activity around preventing and understanding respiratory infections through an influx of new funding, that hasn't been sustained). We think that with enough focus and funding, this might be solvable. Intercept is a $500 million philanthropic initiative that will take advantage of new tools to catalyze the development and deployment of two types of products: broad-spectrum preventatives and air cleaning technologies. This problem is undoubtedly difficult. But it’s more tractable now than it’s ever been. We think we should give it our best shot. We’re enormously grateful to our anchor funders: @stripe, @AnthropicAI, @TheFluLab, @FoundationOAI and individuals from Jane Street. And, I’m very excited to be building this with @incredutility and the rest of the team.

We are looking for journalists and other writers to write reported features for Works in Progress. There are a lot of important stories in the world that we’d like to cover that don't work as our typical essays, because they require on-the-ground information and insights that only a reporter can uncover. Things like: • Why has crime dropped so much in Washington, DC? • What is really happening in Milei’s Argentina? What about Bukele's El Salvador? • Why don't ASML and TSMC raise their prices? The type of person we are looking for will have already published features like these at a major publication. The work will be on a freelance basis (although we may offer salaried staff writer positions in the future) and pay will be competitive with major publications. If you’re the right person to do this, please send a hundred words on yourself and a story you'd like to cover, as well as examples of previous work, to wip-reporting@stripe.com