The Exchanges

Q And, and, and how come you studied bioinformatics?

A So I did research at UCSF in a gene therapy lab for Parkinson's disease, and that's really where I fell in love with research. And a lot of my work there was sort of analyzing images, uh, in MRI as to see the distribution of, of how injected gene therapies distribute as, as it pertains to gene expression. Uh, and just absolutely loved the idea of, of at the time in 2010 was not a very loved field. Imaging informatics is kind of a backwater. Uh, and, but that we could use what was AI at the time to kind of automate these human tasks. That was so exciting. Uh, and then I was kind of saved because around 20 12 when deep learning came out, all of a sudden my field became one of the most exciting research fields ever.

AI assessment note: “I did research at UCSF in a gene therapy lab... fell in love with research”

Q field. So, you know, a lot of people, I think we talked about earlier, like with our friend Rick, that they were in a revolution in bio right now, which I know you, you agree with. Like what, what are, give, give our audience some of the reasons we're in revolution in bio. What are the key things that have just started this revolution? Why is this happening right now?

A Yeah. Yeah. So I think, uh, you know, it's kind of like, it's always hard. I think we have to choose arbitrary dates for this because it's like, at what point in an exponential growth graph did everything get exponential, right? And the definition is that it's always, always looks exponential along different scales. But, like, one sort of window I love to think about is between 20 11 and 20 12, right? Like, so I talked about how, uh, AlexNet wins ImageNet, and that was really the sort of Fosbury flop for deep learning, uh, and, and, but at the same time, within, like, the same sort of span of period is, is when, uh, Jennifer Doudna's work and Fang Zhang's work came out on CRISPR, so my friends who were into genetic engineering working on, like, talons or zinc fingers all of a sudden saw Their entire field upended at the same time.

AI assessment note: “Jennifer Doudna's work and Fang Zhang's work came out on CRISPR”

Q What are a couple of the new fields of biology we've opened up?

A Yeah, so like, I would say cell therapy being one of the sort of canonical textbook answers here, right? Using cells as medicine, training our cells to be medicine. So, uh, you know, if you think about the evolution of how medicine happened, it was like small molecules, right? Uh, was kind of like our canonical early days, uh, uh, German textile companies pivoting into chemistry. Then we had biologics starting in the eighties, the sort of initial biotech revolution. And now we're really looking at cells themselves, which are like the fundamental building blocks in our body. How do we engineer them to fight disease or even better yet? How do we think about our immune system, which is really the best disease fighting mechanism in the world? How are we giving it stronger and better tools to do what it's already doing?

AI assessment note: “I would say cell therapy being one of the sort of canonical textbook answers”

Q And, and, and, and are there other than cell therapy, are there other areas of biology that have just opened up a lot recently? What are some of the other things going on?

A Yeah. So I'd say outside of cell therapy, a thing we think about a lot is like bio manufacturing, bio discovery, uh, advanced materials and biotech and whatnot. So, uh, there's the human healthcare components. Then there's this sort of manufacturing components, you know, engineering say yeast or E. coli to produce things that we'd normally produce in other ways, and this has been, waves of this have been tried in the past and failed, but we're actually starting to see a lot of this. We're obviously seeing this in like food and food tech, where we have all these vegan foods, like impossible foods, whatever, and now we're seeing this with cheeses and really kind of a replacement space for, for vegan and more sustainable foods there, but then biomanufacturing of advanced materials, right? So How do we create novel materials outside of petrochemicals, uh, with sort of interesting new biological, uh, uh, inspiration that gives us new.

AI assessment note: “outside of cell therapy, a thing we think about a lot is like bio manufacturing”

Q Even within human healthcare, the ways of breaking it down better to like, think about like, what are we going after? And, and what, and what are the ways in which, in which business and science and policy, like, like, what are you inspired just to solve and fix? Yeah.

A So I think I'll, I'll scope this within human healthcare, and I think what I'm very inspired by is that as we get more exquisite control over biology, much more tunable control, uh, we get to stop thinking about diseases in these sort of broad population sense of the word, and can start narrowing them down into individual, uh, diseases. So, like, type two diabetes, for example, Um, you would need insulin to treat it, and this is how we treat everybody with type two diabetes, is you need insulin to kind of manage your glucose. But, you know, what's the causal reason for type two diabetes, right? It's overeating and whatnot, but where does that stem from? Could it be like depression and using food as kind of a crutch to help sort of self-medicate? Does it come from having some kind of physical injury that prevents you from being able to exercise? Does it come from some kind of genetic predisposition here? Like type two diabetes is so many different diseases if we think about on a causal spectrum, as opposed to on a symptomatic endpoint spectrum. And so what I got excited about is how do we start breaking apart diseases on the individual basis? And we can do that because it makes sense. We can treat patients as individuals. We can sequence them. We can assay them. We can look at them across all of these different dimensions to say, here are the various reasons why you might have t…

AI assessment note: “what I'm very inspired by is that as we get more exquisite control over biology”

Q Do you think academics have gotten more tribal or less tribal though over the last decade? Is that, is it tribalism like affecting that part of society potentially as well in some ways?

A Um, I, I don't know if I would call it tribalism. I would say that, um, what we are saying is, is people who are more comfortable having say black and white views, um, Uh, maybe divorced of the nuance within there, uh, because they are divorced enough from situations where nuance is important. So, uh, to maybe make that abstract statement a little more concrete, like, If you are in a tenured position in academia, uh, and, and you consider moving to industry, the dark side, which is always considered like the, the, the phrase that they tell you, um, you have like the privilege of principle that many other people don't, right? You don't have to make trade-offs to function in society. You get to spout and like have the opinions that you want. And that's wonderful.

AI assessment note: “I don't know if I would call it tribalism. I would say that”