The New Biology

Markov Biosciences, a startup in San Francisco, is betting that biology is about to have its GPT moment. In this episode, founder Adam Green explains the "bitter lesson" for biology, the idea borrowed from Richard Sutton that large unbiased datasets and the right training objective tend to outcompete models with hard-coded rules and human priors. Adam thinks, in particular, that the virtual cell f...

Nonfiction Laboratories is building a technology called “magnetogenetics” that promises to control proteins inside the body — such as antibodies or enzymes — using small magnets. In this episode, co-founder Maria Ingaramo and scientific advisor Andrew York explain how they engineered a protein, MagLOV, that responds strongly to magnetic fields, why most prior attempts have failed to replicate, and...

Plasmidsaurus took plasmid sequencing from $600 to $15 and turned a "boring" service company idea into a hugely successful company serving 70,000+ scientists. In this episode, CEO Mark Budde and Niko McCarty get into the bigger question: what does it take for companies to automate and scale wet-lab biology methods in the same way that Plasmidsaurus did for sequencing? They cover the early Oxford N...