I wasn’t certain whether to post this, because it felt to me that many other posts by people in their late 20s or early 30s say the same things. But I also, in a sense, treat my blog as a series of messages to my future self to remember how I used to think and this is something I wanted to send. So, I’m posting it. I’m 28. That’s a fabulous number - it’s the sum of the first consecutive integers,…
I'm naturally good at two things - not giving up on projects that take more than a decade, and feeling intense, transcendent joy in response to a scientific understanding of the world. I'm confused by whether the latter 'skill' is a good thing to cultivate, and wrote this draft post to understand it better. I was obsessed with scientific phenomena well before I could plausibly understand them.…
I've decided not to work with Aubrey de Grey or SENS in any capacity moving forward. I had one bad experience with him when I was 17 - he told me in writing that he had an ‘adventurous love life’ and that it had ‘always felt quite jarring’ not to let conversations with me stray in that direction given that ‘[he] could treat [me] as an equal on every other level’. He sent this from his work email,…
I’d like to ask better questions about biology, quickly. This is hard, particularly in fields I have no experience with. There’s no general solution to this problem, but there are things that seem to help. I’d submit that reading papers is actually, in isolation, a potentially dangerous activity. Sure, it’s better than doing nothing. But papers are generated in a rich social context that you don’t…
A week ago, I was curious - can we make an immortal yeast? I wasn't sure. In 5 minutes of thinking, it seemed potentially doable (on the order of a 5+ year scale project for a hardworking technical team, but testable along the way). It would also be the first time humanity made an organism immortal. Not counting human cells or pre-existing immortal species. But I wasn't really sure. So, I decided…
Image from the labs of S.-H. Roh and S. Wilkens The world of a cell is a subtle, elegant, and chaotic place. Molecules are crammed closer together than attendees at a rock concert, computers self-replicate with ease, and millions of tiny machines cooperate to build a living city. Imagine yourself, shrunk to the nanoscale, exploring the cell. What might you see? We believe that a combination of…
Most newcomers trying to learn ‘longevity biotech’ unintentionally take an ineffective approach. Here are some things I wish I'd focused more on when first entering the field, in addition to obsessively learning the fundamentals of aging biology. It's not a comprehensive list, just a few things I find some people skipping over when they start. Build mental models of how we manipulate human…
Quick notes from Schrodinger's 'What is Life': We combine two paradigms: Quantum world: Operates on the nanoscale. Energy is quantized, which means continuous noise will not constantly disrupt processes or destabilize structures. Therefore, you can do useful things. Continuous world: Operates on the macro scale. Due to the law of large numbers, noise is scaled down by sqrt (number of atoms…
Many of my adult friends feel sad because they can't do science more. For most, it was a source of joy in college, but their current profession is related and orthogonal to it. You job requires you to know enough science to be dangerous, and keep up with the literature but original foundation thinking or exploring vastly new areas is not going to be part of your manager-oriented schedule. I relate…
Can I ask for help/advice? I really want a @Roam x @Mathematica tool for making explicit, data-filled knowledge graphs of new fields. What’s a good way to hack a pipeline until someone builds this? Context: I often want to understand new fields. To do this, I need to both build an idea graph and compile evidence for nodes in the graph. How I learn new fields: Build an idea graph (Roam, Google…
I’ve tried to write (what feels like) 15,000 versions of this essay. All of them ultimately cratered by the fact that it’s hard to write jocularly about deep emotional topics or emotionally about practical things. But I still (perhaps quixotically) think the below text should be useful to at least some sad people, so I’m posting this incomplete and imperfect version until I get time (probably…
An interesting note: I asked many people I respect to also share their advice, and most of it ended up being completely different from what both I wrote and within the group of respondents. So, I guess there’s no right answer on what to do if you’re young and ambitious. But I tried to pull out some of the common, recurring themes in the below. Maybe the only universal truth is that there are many…
The rage of research I realized recently that not everyone experiences research emotions the same way that I do, so I decided to write up my typical ‘research emotion journey’. If you experience similarly strong emotions when doing research, I’d love to hear about them! Could even do a followup blog post summarizing the findings. There are two key emotions that drive my research habits: wonder,…
Preamble One of my biggest personal fears is working in the wrong field to achieve the goal I care about. If you were around pre-1900s, and wanted to contribute to biology, you should have been a physicist (Robert Hooke, a physicist discovers the first cell, making a better microscope is a major driver of progress). In which field should you work to maximize progress in biology today? Tools are…