Jun 26, 2023·edited Jun 26, 2023Liked by Asimov Press
>An anti-aging talk by Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, a biochemist at Altos Labs, was so crowded and overfilled with people that police showed up and ejected half of them. In 2016, Belmonte “reported that sick mice lived 30% longer than expected after receiving a cocktail of special reprogramming proteins,” according to the article in MIT Technology Review.
I was at this conference (but not the talk). The whole conference was poorly organized and chaotic, and I really hope the organizers learn from this.
I also saw Magdalena Żernicka-Goetz's talk, and read her preprint and Jacob Hanna's preprint. I think Hanna's is better but Żernicka-Goetz's is still pretty interesting. They certainly have a huge rivalry going on.
> “Is the LLM really the democratising force here?” wrote Patrick Kearns, a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh. “Anyone with a few years of molecular biology training could do this if so inclined."
The difference between the number of people with a few years of molecular biology training and the number of people who can use ChatGPT is at least two orders of magnitude, maybe more. So yeah, that seems like a big deal.
>An anti-aging talk by Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, a biochemist at Altos Labs, was so crowded and overfilled with people that police showed up and ejected half of them. In 2016, Belmonte “reported that sick mice lived 30% longer than expected after receiving a cocktail of special reprogramming proteins,” according to the article in MIT Technology Review.
I was at this conference (but not the talk). The whole conference was poorly organized and chaotic, and I really hope the organizers learn from this.
I also saw Magdalena Żernicka-Goetz's talk, and read her preprint and Jacob Hanna's preprint. I think Hanna's is better but Żernicka-Goetz's is still pretty interesting. They certainly have a huge rivalry going on.
Great read as always Niko, thanks!
Two comments: 1) why would they call it synXNA, given the clear use of XNA in a different scientific context as unnatural genetic polymers (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/anie.201905999)? And what's with the spurious website (http://synxna.com/#)?
2) As you applied to Jason Chin's group, you should know that it's at the MRC LMB, not Cambridge Uni (although Jason has an appointment there, too)
Cheers!
Hey Max, thanks for your comment. Yes, you're right about #2. Unfortunately, I'm not sure why they called their tool SynXNA.
> “Is the LLM really the democratising force here?” wrote Patrick Kearns, a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh. “Anyone with a few years of molecular biology training could do this if so inclined."
The difference between the number of people with a few years of molecular biology training and the number of people who can use ChatGPT is at least two orders of magnitude, maybe more. So yeah, that seems like a big deal.