Thomas Gorochowski

Synthetic biologist, programmer of cells, and lover of all things visual. Wakes up in the morning to learn some of natures secrets and do a spot of fly fishing.

[Niko McCarty. @NikoMcCarty]

New book chapter: "How to Weigh a Cell."

This chapter explains how scientists have weighed cells throughout history, often using simple equipment and back-of-the-envelope calculations.

It has lots of interactives, so you can "repeat" the experiments directly in your browser.

[Thomas Gorochowski @chofski]

Quickly grabbing a coffee before this year's Workshop on Molecular, Biological, and Multi-Scale Communications in Glasgow. Excited to share some of our research and learn more about this community. I'll do my best to live tweet the talks! #mbmc26
https://t.co/Ss0Ab7pHgi

[Wilfred Mijnhardt @wmijnhardt]

Knowledge preservation in the era of big science and AI: strategies for sustainable scientific research. Via @Nature

https://t.co/cmnsZRsqbM

[Thomas Gorochowski @chofski]

@timd_ca Do you sell super-hi-res images for framing? Would love some of these for my lab walls!

[Niko McCarty. @NikoMcCarty]

Beauty should be a core pursuit of biotechnology. There should be companies and nonprofits that engineer organisms solely for the sake of crafting beautiful things.

A few reasons why:

1/ Biotechnology has historically worked in reductionist ways, but many useful functions only emerge at the systems level. By engineering a systems-level outcome, like beauty, we will get much better at engineering organisms in predictable ways.

When I say "reductionist," I mean that most useful things in biotechnology (drugs and tools) were discovered by stripping molecules from their natural contexts. Scientists collect organisms from soil or wherever and then study their molecules in isolation. This basic approach has yielded everything from rapamycin to antibiotics and CRISPR.

This reductionism, though, means that that we know disturbingly little about how life actually works at a systems-level. My core argument is that, by studying beauty, we can remedy this.

Beauty has persisted through tens of millions of years of evolution because it is functional; bright colors help attract pollinators to a plant, for example, which helps the plant breed. If evolution has created all of this beauty for functional reasons, then it stands to reason that by trying to create **new** forms of beauty, we'll be able to discover and understand how these systems-level functions work! Indeed, we may even be able to create entirely new functions that biology hasn't evolved yet. These functions will not possible to understand via isolated molecules or reductionism.

Therefore, a company pursuing engineered beauty for the sake of beauty will probably make many fundamental discoveries about how organisms develop, interact, adapt to their surroundings, and so on.

2/ Beauty is a way to grow the field and bring more people into biotechnology. Nick Desnoyer’s flower design work, for example, has probably reached hundreds of thousands of people. The glowing plants from Light Bio, too, were featured in the mainstream press. You may not think that these examples are “important” for the universe relative to, say, an incrementally better cancer therapeutic, but there’s no question that they are way more popular to mainstream audiences and good, overall, for the field.

3/ The market is huge! Breeding is already widely used to engineer beauty, or at least to select for aesthetic preferences. Pugs are evolutionarily suboptimal, but they've been bred precisely to satisfy a certain aesthetic desire are now a multi-billion dollar industry. The Juliet Rose, developed via breeding over a 15-year period, debuted at the 2006 Chelsea Flower Show and is enormously profitable today. Why should deliberately engineered forms of beauty be any different?

If you are building a biotech company or nonprofit that is pursuing beauty, please reach out! I’d love to help.

[Jonas Sandbrink @JonasSandbrink]

I’m looking for a co-founder.

Frontier labs are over-refusing legitimate bio work because they can't tell who's a real researcher and who isn't. I’m solving this with BioTrust — building the credentialing layer between frontier AI labs and researchers. Strong early interest from frontier labs. Backed by funder Sentinel Bio.

I am looking for a builder who's run the trust and security backbone at a company in identity, fintech, compliance, health data, or cybersecurity. Someone with strong instincts on the trust-vs-friction calls. Finisher energy. Deeply motivated by mitigating catastrophic risk from AI and biology.

Full context and how to reach me here: https://t.co/jTeVLHn795

Tag the people you know who'd be unreasonably good at this.

[Thomas Gorochowski @chofski]

🤖📚🧪#AI is having such a big impact on #synbio and science more broadly. Check out our latest perspective "Knowledge preservation in the era of big science and AI" on this topic that emerged from a workshop led by Penn Rainford a year or so ago! https://t.co/0cm8aOAOih

[Thomas Gorochowski @chofski]

Made it to @SynBioBeta after very little sleep and this things is huge! First time, so if genetic design and unconventional computing and new approaches to bioengineering are your jazz, give us a buzz.

[Brady Cress @bradyfcress]

We then leveraged TRADE editing to "capture" entire pathways in vivo and move them between species without ever needing to extract their DNA--just molecular biology accomplished fully within the microbes. This allowed us to move functions across phyla.

[Thomas Gorochowski @chofski]

So ready for this: Interspecies Protocols from @longnow Needed now more than ever! https://t.co/jGB0xgqA9Z

[Thomas Gorochowski @chofski]

@hhlee I'd prefer a series: like X-Files, but less scary.

[Thomas Gorochowski @chofski]

@richnanophd @AdrianWoolfson @andrewhessel Thank you! We were so happy when the images came through. The nanoscale world is a sight to behold.

[Thomas Gorochowski @chofski]

🧬Want to synthesise kilobase-scale DNA? We got you covered!🥳 In latest from the lab we explore the "doodling" capabilities of DNA polymerases and ways to guide the sequences produced. Loads of data + beautiful AFM of the molecules themselves. #synbio ... https://t.co/tsAYLhua9Q

[Thomas Gorochowski @chofski]

Work emerged from discussions with the wonderfully creative @AdrianWoolfson and @andrewhessel, with Sim and Thea doing the heavy lifting in the lab. Would love to build a team to take this towards programmable DNA printers and I'm sure doodling plays a role in evolution! #synbio

[Reid Wiseman @astro_reid]

There are no words.

[Henry Lee @hhlee]

You hate markdown but you love agents. This is agentdoc https://t.co/NSWsxFxMFQ

Internally used at @CultivariumFRX but looks like a problem many people have.

[Israel Fernandez @IsraelF96135088]

This paper is top!

[Niko McCarty. @NikoMcCarty]

Applications close March 31st.

[Jake Wintermute 🧬/acc @SynBio1]

Today we’re launching American Wetware, a design studio for building with biology 🇺🇸💧

I’m doing this together with @thisischristina and @p_maverick_b

Our mission is to learn the design language of biology

[Thomas Gorochowski @chofski]

@SynBio1 @thisischristina @p_maverick_b Very excited for this! 😍 My lab's been trying to think about how to design *with* biology, mostly in terms of integrating evolution/adaptation, but cannot wait to see what your adventures unearth. Please have a public space somewhere I can visit and play with your creations!