Stephen Skolnick

Author of Eat Shit & Prosper.

Founder of Constellation Bio.

Giving people back the parts of themselves they've lost.

[Stephen Skolnick @StephenSkolnick]

ɪ ᴄᴏᴍᴘʀɪsᴇ.

I've always said that I'll get a tattoo when I hear, or see, or think of something that I am compelled to have etched into my skin forever. I don't know if this quite does it, but I think it's the closest thing so far.

[Stephen Skolnick @StephenSkolnick]

@jan_choutka @miangoar Wild. Consider me schooled!

[Stephen Skolnick @StephenSkolnick]

@p3t4gora5 Do you think he also started feeding the dog better food when he started trying to save its life

because given the way most dry dog food smells, I would not be shocked if removing that from an animal's diet were enough to cure its cancer lol

[Stephen Skolnick @StephenSkolnick]

If you are using anything more complex than an excel spreadsheet for your bio work, you are wasting your time.

[Liang Chang @liangc_science]

My hot take against "AI will solve Bio + Drug Development", after burning $14,000 worth of AI tokens myself in 2mo:
AI could make drug development more crowded before makes it better. Because of the "Anti-Scaling Law" in biology.
Full write-up below⏬
https://t.co/aUnbWICmVu

[Stephen Skolnick @StephenSkolnick]

@NikoMcCarty Careful Niko, this is how you become a VC.

I caution you only because "get more money into the hands of aspiring scientists" is a distinct goal from "spur scientific advances", and there's no playbook for the latter.

[Stephen Skolnick @StephenSkolnick]

Okay but also: the world has genuinely gotten a lot shittier and harder to navigate in the last few years.
2-factor everything, like fine sand in the gears of our society.

We replaced the dials and spring-buttons on washing machines with capacitive touch-panels. Sleek, futuristic-looking, and utterly useless if your fingers have the tiniest smear of detergent on them.

Google remote-pushes new icons for all their mobile apps, and for the next week it takes you a full minute to find your fucking calendar button.

I could go on

[Stephen Skolnick @StephenSkolnick]

@kasthomas @ATinyGreenCell Read: it's expensive!

[Stephen Skolnick @StephenSkolnick]

@DaniBeckman @ATinyGreenCell "look, we can reuse it later for melatonin"

[Stephen Skolnick @StephenSkolnick]

@jan_choutka @miangoar Yeah aren't halogens basically just "big hydrogen"?
Can see why that'd be more useful in a small molecule than in proteins, in your framework

[Stephen Skolnick @StephenSkolnick]

ooooooh, got me. 🤷🏽‍♂️
If you want to know why that's where my mind went: a good friend "recovered a sense memory" of being raped by her dad...during what was very clearly a psychotic break. Talked all about the realization that he must have abused her the same way she talked about the realization that he must have been in the mafia this whole time. It made everything make such perfect sense—the coldness, the distance, her long-simmering sexual hangups and anxieties—that as soon as she had the thought, she just knew, in her bones, that it was true.
There were enough other obviously false beliefs—classic paranoia type shit about being under surveillance IIRC—that all our friends were deeply concerned. She accused him. He denied it, and her mom believes him—so she's cut her parents out of her life entirely.

She stopped talking about the mob stuff, being watched etc. once she got on seroquel and started sleeping better, but there's no going back with her parents.

Maybe that was the one true recovered memory amid a slew of paranoid delusions. Or maybe it's just easier to live in a world where there was a monster behind the mask all along, instead of the one where you don't know why you feel bad and your dad just didn't really care that much about you. We all live in her truth now anyway, because we love her. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Stephen Skolnick @StephenSkolnick]

@dgant @Romy_Holland ...a pathogenic mold commonly found on peanuts. Back in college my radiation biophysics prof explained that a jar of peanut butter increases your risk of cancer by a low but nonzero %, because some small portion of jars were made with a moldy peanut or two.

[Stephen Skolnick @StephenSkolnick]

@dgant @Romy_Holland Yeah there's def more to it than "you have to eat the thing early enough".
I suspect that, with peanuts in particular, it has to do with a mycotoxin called Aflatoxin. Highly carcinogenic, unbelievably inflammatory, trips every alarm in the body.
Produced by Aspergillus flavus...

[Stephen Skolnick @StephenSkolnick]

@QiaochuYuan @_StevenFan Imagine you're in his shoes and you did not, in fact, molest your daughter.
Like, what do you do? I guess starting a foundation says "doth protest too much", but like...if it were me I would genuinely want to draw attention to the problem and try to get to the bottom of it?

[Stephen Skolnick @StephenSkolnick]

Pack it up folks

[Ryan Lackey @octal]

@AlexanderTw33ts The goose is…cooked.

[Stephen Skolnick @StephenSkolnick]

@PrinceVogel I've said it before: cavities is a really tough endpoint. Years to readout, massive dependence on diet, brushing habits, vitamin K status; low inter-rater reliability in that dentists have a profit motive and some are skeezier than others.

This is why we're doing cholesterol.

[Stephen Skolnick @StephenSkolnick]

@AaronPublicTwit @PrinceVogel Yeah the formate scare was completely implausible from a scientific perspective, there's a whole formate economy in your gut.
But cavities is a really tough endpoint

[Stephen Skolnick @StephenSkolnick]

"Cardiovascular disease is a solved problem", he says.
So why is heart disease still the #1 killer of humans?

One of the things you're supposed to learn in college is that having drugs is not the same thing as having a solution to your problems.

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

Also, if you want to learn about heart disease, go check out this article: https://t.co/GzLUnBAjn5

[Stephen Skolnick @StephenSkolnick]

@cremieuxrecueil Bro did you write this just to piss me off lol

[Stephen Skolnick @StephenSkolnick]

@BagOfNeurons @HeywoodFloyd10 No he's right

[Stephen Skolnick @StephenSkolnick]

For the version of the story they won't tell you at church:

[Stephen Skolnick @StephenSkolnick]

There is something fishy about the biblical “rib”.

You know, the one God took from Adam, to make Eve?

I realized that something did not add up when I was about ten years old. Went to the museum during day-camp one summer. Saw a real human skeleton for the first time.

[Stephen Skolnick @StephenSkolnick]

Is there a just-so story about "why man is missing a rib"?

It always bugged me. But I've figured it out.

[Stephen Skolnick @StephenSkolnick]

@thrialectics @male_leo_xxvi I mean, I don't know any southern-French people, but I at least know where we can find some.