Andrew Bellinger

@GVteam, Previously CSO/CMO @Vervetx, co-founder CSO @Lyndra, co-founder @Corner_tx

[Arthur MacWaters @ArthurMacwaters]

It’s kinda crazy to me that we melt sand down, clean it to 99.99999% purity, literal wizards have to draw it slowly into an ingot, we cut it, inscribe a hundred billion little on/off switches on it, and when you run electric current through it you can do basic arithmetic, which when you do enough of it can do any math on the planet, and which describes reality well enough that we can teach it the ontological meaning of words and their distance from each other on a high-dimensional space, and if you ask, it can tell you what word comes next and that apparently is powerful enough that if you do it a hundred billion times it’s the smartest thing to ever exist

oh yeah and we use this primarily for email

[Elliot Cohen @elliotcohen]

Nearly nine years ago, @TJParker and I went to Bentonville to talk to @Walmart about building a different kind of pharmacy.

While we were there, we visited The Walmart Museum. If you haven’t been, go! I loved seeing the history of a company that started with a single store and changed what people everywhere could buy and afford. We were building PillPack at the time, and spent much of that trip talking about what healthcare could learn from retail.

Today we’re launching the new Walmart Better Care Services, a healthcare store powered by General Medicine. Starting today, customers can browse more than 900 products and services across a dozen different provider groups, compare cash and estimated insurance prices, and get what they need. Walmart defined the experience, chose the products, services, and providers. Our technology makes it all shoppable.

A lot has happened since that first trip. We sold PillPack, built Amazon Pharmacy, and started @GeneralMedicine. We’ve spent most of our working lives trying to make getting healthcare easier. And somehow it still feels like we’re just getting started.

We have incredible clinicians and treatments in this country. But finding the right care, figuring out what something costs, and actually getting it remains convoluted and complicated. Something that should have been a quick purchase becomes a project. Too often, people just put it off altogether. And when the problem is serious, all that hassle lands on top of what’s already hard. When transactions are easy, you take a whole layer of complexity off the table.

We launched General Medicine a year and a half ago. A few weeks ago, we wrote about the idea behind it: healthcare needs a store. Helping Walmart build one for its customers is that idea reaching the scale we’ve been aiming at since PillPack.

I love that we have our own store. We get to build things we’ve wanted to exist for years, hear directly from customers, and keep making them better. But I’m just as excited about helping other companies build theirs. We learned at PillPack how much more you can do when you work with companies that already serve millions of customers. Tech platforms, retailers, health systems, payers, and manufacturers all bring something different. There’s a lot more we can do together than any of us could do on our own. With Walmart, we get to work with a retailer and pharmacy that’s part of everyday life all across the country.

This one is particularly special to me. We walked into Bentonville nine years ago hoping to build something together. It took a little longer than we expected, but here we are.

Build the store. Then build more stores.

[Team Talarico @TeamTalaricoHQ]

Texas was built by hope. By people who had no business believing — but believed anyway.

To every Texan who’s ever wondered if anyone in power is paying attention: We are taking our state back.

Because a little bit of hope is a dangerous thing.

[Mitt Romney @MittRomney]

“we will pay any price….to assure the success and survival of liberty.” Is this still true? Do we prize liberty or do we prize power and purse? No more clear test than the choice between Ukraine and Russia. Abandon Ukraine and we abandon liberty. Eventually even our own.

[Andrew Bellinger @ambellinger]

@baseballcrank How are you labeling accurate prognosticating as hysteria… maybe the people who normalized and ignored the data were the “hysterical” ones? Or at least ones with their heads in the sand

[Sajith Wickramasekara @sajithw]

Full house at Benchtalk Boston for @nlarusstone unveiling Science Foundries, a new way to run scientific processes end-to-end with agents and scientists working as a team.

https://t.co/bDZJna9Nz6

[Andrew Bellinger @ambellinger]

@nikillinit 100%

[Sundar Pichai @sundarpichai]

Today @TheLancet published our AMIE study with @BIDMC_Medicine, the first prospective study of patient-facing conversational diagnostics in a real clinic.

AMIE is a research system people can chat with before doctors appointments. Testing AMIE outside the lab with real urgent care patients showed how technology can help gather medical histories safely. Clinicians reported that the summaries helped them prepare for visits in 75% of cases and influenced their approach to care in more than half. AMIE’s differential diagnoses also matched the doctors’ final diagnoses 90% of the time giving clinicians more time to focus on patient care.

It’s Google’s first-ever paper in The Lancet’s main journal!

[Andrew Bellinger @ambellinger]

@wolfejosh @VariantBio Cool company

[Team Talarico @TeamTalaricoHQ]

.@ezraklein: “What is, to you, the ‘rage economy’?”

@JamesTalarico: “The billionaires own the algorithms and the news networks. They have created for-profit platforms that divide us on an hourly basis — by party, by race, by gender, by religion. They elevate the most extreme voices very strategically to provoke our outrage, because that leads to more clicks, which leads to more money for them.

They are selling us conflict right into our bloodstream, and they’re calling it connection.

And I think it’s left people starving for actual community.”

[Stanford University @Stanford]

The most important briefings of the day.

Karl Deisseroth, professor of bioengineering and of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, shares the news of his Nobel Prize with his kids.

[Boston @BostonMassUSA]

Massachusetts is also the third most densely populated state. There are few places on earth where so many people live among so many trees.

[Brycen 🏆 @Brycen2047]

Only Josh Allen gets away with no intentional grounding call here

[History With Jacob @HistoryWJacob]

The entire history of the United States can be counted in just three overlapping lifetimes. And the third man just wrote the soundtrack for Toy Story 5.

In 1776, John Gray was a 12-year-old boy in Virginia. He grew up to fight in the Revolution and stood at Yorktown when Cornwallis surrendered. He lived until 1868, the last verified veteran of the Revolutionary War.

Before Gray died, a boy was born in Michigan in 1852 named John Harvey Kellogg. He would go on to invent the corn flake with his brother. He survived far into the 20th century and passed away in 1943.

And just two weeks before Kellogg died, a baby was born in Los Angeles named Randy Newman. Today he is an American icon, the voice behind decades of songs and film scores.

A boy who watched the Revolution. The man who gave us corn flakes. And the songwriter who wrote "You've Got a Friend in Me."

Just three lives, laid end to end, and you have crossed the entire history of the United States.

[World of Engineering @engineers_feed]

Polyethylene contains approximately 46 megajoules of chemical energy per kilogram (about ten times the energy content of TNT by mass) stored stably in its carbon-hydrogen bonds rather than as explosive potential.

The Oak Ridge molten-salt process announced this week is essentially an engineered way to release that energy as liquid fuel rather than letting it sit in a landfill.

[Vineeta Agarwala @vintweeta]

This is cool. Combination of expert human scientists + novel LLM-generated ideas + scaled experimental testing yields new potentially useful materials

“Giving the AI control over which experiments to run was decisive”

Congrats @AndrewLBeam and @LilaSciences team!

[Andrew Beam @AndrewLBeam]

I'd like to share one of my favorite stories about a discovery we made at @LilaSciences.

We’ve been working for a while on catalysts for clean hydrogen. One day, our AI proposed chemistry that a scientist who’d studied this exact reaction for 12 years thought had to be wrong.

That composition became our strongest lead, sustaining more than 1,000 hours of oxygen evolution with little loss of catalytic performance.

The scientist is John Gregoire (known as JG to us), who left his Caltech research professorship to become our Chief Autonomous Science Officer, and has been working to build some of the world's most sophisticated automated labs at Lila.

Making clean hydrogen from water requires electricity to drive two reactions: one produces hydrogen, the other oxygen. The oxygen-producing half, the oxygen evolution reaction (OER), is particularly difficult.

In proton-exchange-membrane electrolyzers, the catalyst must drive that reaction efficiently while exposed to strong acid and high voltage. Most materials either corrode or require too much energy to serve as an effective catalyst. Iridium oxide is the industry standard, but iridium is one of the rarest metals on Earth. Depending on it creates a supply constraint on scaling this technology.

JG’s former group at Caltech spent 12 years exploring catalysts for this reaction. He knows how unforgiving these conditions are.

Early in this project, the scientists checked the AI’s suggestions closely, occasionally overruling them. The choices were mostly familiar and sensible. As the experiments progressed, the team stepped back, retaining safety review while letting the system choose what to try.

By the second campaign, which took just four weeks, it was producing results they hadn’t expected.

The system had started exploring palladium-based oxides. When JG and Rafael Gómez-Bombarelli, our physical sciences CSO and an MIT professor, saw the results, they thought the model had gone astray. These were combinations that JG would have told his grad students weren't even worth testing.

But the measurements were promising, so the team kept testing.

Across 2,942 catalysts spanning 53 material systems and 26 elements, the platform uncovered an unexpected family of palladium-based oxides with a promising combination of activity and durability. It screened around 240 catalysts a week, an order of magnitude faster than a standard lab by our team’s estimate.

The best contained tiny additions of indium and manganese, together accounting for about 0.09% of its metal atoms.

At 10 mA/cm² in 1 M sulfuric acid, it maintained an overpotential below 0.5 V for more than 1,000 hours and retained 96% of its palladium. Unmodified palladium oxide crossed that voltage threshold after only 200 hours.

Under the microscope, the team saw a needle-like structure that developed during operation and appears to be associated with the improved durability. We’re still working to understand exactly why it works.

Palladium is also a precious metal, but its supply base is much larger than iridium’s. These catalysts contain neither iridium nor ruthenium, potentially giving us another option.

Giving the AI control over which experiments to run was decisive. The system combined predictive models that learned from our experimental data with LLM reasoning that helped decide where to search next. It could pursue chemistry our scientists would have passed over, have the lab make and test it, and use the measurements to choose its next experiments. Each round of results changed where it looked next.

More than 90% of the screening workflow was automated, with scientists providing oversight and transferring samples between instruments.

These are laboratory results. There’s still substantial work ahead to establish performance under industrial conditions.

People ask when AI and automated labs will start accelerating science. For us, it’s already changing what gets tested and how quickly we learn.

We can make hundreds of materials a week, test them, and use the results to decide what to try next, including ideas our own experts would have passed over.

I want a lot more of this: AI helping us discover things we can actually use to make the world better.

Full story and preprint below 👇

[Andrew Bellinger @ambellinger]

@DaveARicks @CRISPR_LuCas 100%

[Headquarters @HQNewsNow]

Barack Obama at his last press briefing with reporters, 2017:

"I have enjoyed working with all of you. That does not, of course, mean that I've enjoyed every story that you have filed, but that's the point of this relationship. You're not supposed to be sycophants. You're supposed to be skeptics. You're supposed to ask me tough questions. You're not supposed to be complimentary, but you're supposed to cast a critical eye on folks who hold enormous power."

[Becky Pferdehirt @beckypferdehirt]

The concept of terraforming Mars seemed like science fiction to me before I met @erika_alden_d. It has been a pleasure to support the @Pioneer__Labs team as they build the roadmap to achieve this ambitious goal, and then begin to execute on the hard science, step-by-step.