saxonov

[Byrne Hobart @ByrneHobart]

@DelgadoforNY “It’s not just ex, emdash. It’s Y.”

Glad to see you aren’t completely against automation.

[Dan Primack @danprimack]

RIP

[Stanford Medicine @StanfordMed]

Stanford Medicine investigators and their colleagues have found that one of humanity’s most ubiquitous infectious pathogens bears the blame for lupus, the chronic autoimmune condition.
https://t.co/bqFmVLYT3h

[Garry P. Nolan @GarryPNolan]

Ideas aren’t just born fully mature into commercial realization. They require refinement, testing, well-integrated teams, and, moreover, a need for their purpose.

I am thrilled, therefore, to announce the acquisition of Scale Biosciences by 10X Genomics. I co-founded Scale Bio with Frank Steemers (formerly of Illumina), along with Professors Jay Shendure & Cole Trapnell (University of Washington). Together, we integrated quantum bar coding and combinatorial indexing technologies for single-cell analysis of protein, gene expression, and epigenetics at the multi-million cell scale. We join now with the technological and global reach of 10x Genomics.

I am incredibly excited to join 10x Genomics as a scientific advisor to amplify the broad-scale application of these ideas to researchers and patients worldwide. There is near limitless value in the data suite now produced by combined technologies at 10x that, along with the rapidly enabling landscape of artificial intelligence, will bring exciting new insights, and thereby therapies, across a range of biomedical needs. It’s an exciting time to be in the biosciences, watching as ideas evolve from scribblings on paper to helping patients!

[Jay Shendure @JShendure]

Thrilled at the news of @10xGenomics ' acquisition of @scalebio, which I co-founded with Frank Steemers (ex-Illumina), @coletrapnell and @GarryPNolan. Further thrilled to joining 10X Genomics as an scientific advisor and for the synergies that lie ahead!

[10x Genomics @10xGenomics]

This acquisition will bring together two pioneering companies with a shared vision: to make single cell analysis more powerful, affordable and accessible to researchers worldwide.

Learn more: https://t.co/rtqbg7lFOa

[High Yield Harry @HighyieldHarry]

In 2025, he would raise $50 million from a16z

[saxonov @saxonov]

@fchollet More value per dollar of compute, means you’ll spend more dollars on compute

[saxonov @saxonov]

This is exactly right

[Alice @AliceFromQueens]

We actually do NOT know that financial incentives fail to increase birth rates.

We only know that the meh-sized incentives that have been studied don’t do much.

There is of course some price that will do the trick.

Maybe it’s time we learned what it is.

[𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @CharlesCMann]

@nealstephenson lays out the case for beginning to look at geoengineering about as bluntly, and as clearly, as I can imagine:
https://t.co/ywteJHkm70

[saxonov @saxonov]

@BoWang87 Yes

[Greg Brockman @gdb]

During my sabbatical, one project I really enjoyed was training DNA foundation models with the team at @arcinstitute.

I've long believed that deep learning should unlock unprecedented improvements in medicine and healthcare — not just for humans but for animals too. I think this work moves in that direction, as one fundamental step towards modeling virtual cells.

So much of progress in modern medicine has come from improving our understanding of the biology. I predict in upcoming years we'll find that humans are just not that good at understanding biology compared to neural networks.

Neural networks seem particularly well-suited for biology because:

- DNA is the language of biology. For humans, our spoken languages are natural while DNA feels foreign. For neural networks, human languages and DNA are equally foreign. It'd be quite amazing to see neural networks as fluent in DNA as we've seen them be in human language...

- As more biological knowledge has been discovered, biologists have had to become more specialized to compensate. It's possible to get a PhD by studying one specific mechanism in a cell. By contrast, breadth isn’t a challenge for a neural network — they can readily absorb all human knowledge. (Of course, with great progress to be made on depth of understanding and reasoning.)

- For humans, the reams of available data make biology overwhelming. For neural networks, more data leads to better results.

At a personal level, it was very fun to apply my existing skills with training and scaling neural networks to an entirely new domain. I felt lucky to temporarily join a great team which has already been making great progress. It was a good reminder of how versatile this technology is — in some ways, it's completely unreasonable that the same generic algorithm and engineering should yield results in DNA in addition to language, code, images, videos, etc.. Overall, it makes it feel like the AI field has been creating a “data abstractor” over these past 80 years, which can be pointed at any kind of data and derive some useful sense of its structure to help make all of our lives better.

We made exciting progress, and the @arcinstitute team should have more to share in upcoming months! I had a lot of fun working with them, and think there’s a lot of exciting discoveries waiting to be had coupling computational techniques with their wetlab capabilities.

[Russ Altman @Rbaltman]

As a biomedical data scientist, @ogevaert uses a new cellular measuring technique that maps the geography of cells making up a cancer tumor and predicts how certain cells will behave based on who their neighbors are. This is the future of measuring cancer. https://t.co/eUxgpMIGfx

[saxonov @saxonov]

Incredible

[Nat Friedman @natfriedman]

Ten months ago, we launched the Vesuvius Challenge to solve the ancient problem of the Herculaneum Papyri, a library of scrolls that were flash-fried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.

Today we are overjoyed to announce that our crazy project has succeeded. After 2000 years, we can finally read the scrolls:
This image was produced by @Youssef_M_Nader, @LukeFarritor, and @JuliSchillij, who have now won the Vesuvius Challenge Grand Prize of $700,000. Congratulations!!

These fifteen columns come from the very end of the first scroll we have been able to read and contain new text from the ancient world that has never been seen before. The author – probably Epicurean philosopher Philodemus – writes here about music, food, and how to enjoy life's pleasures. In the closing section, he throws shade at unnamed ideological adversaries – perhaps the stoics? – who "have nothing to say about pleasure, either in general or in particular."

This year, the Vesuvius Challenge continues. The text that we revealed so far represents just 5% of one scroll.

In 2024, our goal is to from reading a few passages of text to entire scrolls, and we're announcing a new $100,000 grand prize for the first team that is able to read at least 90% of all four scrolls that we have scanned.

The scrolls stored in Naples that remain to be read represent more than 16 megabytes of ancient text. But the villa where the scrolls were found was only partially excavated, and scholars tell us that there may be thousands more scrolls underground. Our hope is that the success of the Vesuvius Challenge catalyzes the excavation of the villa, that the main library is discovered, and that whatever we find there rewrites history and inspires all of us.

It's been a great joy to work on this strange and amazing project. Thanks to Brent Seales for laying the foundation for this work over so many years, thanks to the friends and Twitter users whose donations powered our effort, and thanks to the many contestants whose contributions have made the Vesuvius Challenge successful!

Read more in our announcement: https://t.co/rUlrdGXBMs

[Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias]

“Build a new city” seems like a good idea to me, but really everyone should be asking themselves why the existing San Francisco Bay Area isn’t the largest metro area in the world rather than the second-largest in the state.

[bioRxiv Cancer Bio @biorxiv_cancer]

Systematic benchmarking of imaging spatial transcriptomics platforms in FFPE tissues https://t.co/AqnJPINOSu #biorxiv_cancer

[Joey Politano 🏳️‍🌈 @JosephPolitano]

To recap, this is as if the US was struggling to invade Mexico so disgruntled Blackwater mercenaries seized San Antonio, shot down several helicopters, and drove halfway to DC before the Prime Minister of Jamaica negotiated a ceasefire where the Secretary of Defense was fired

[Jason Crawford @jasoncrawford]

“The most generous independent estimates of the cost-effectiveness of the TSA’s airport security screening put the cost per life saved at around $15 million.… Less optimistic assessments place the number at $667 million”

[Prof. Akiko Iwasaki @VirusesImmunity]

An excellent article by @patrickc highlighting the barriers for academics like myself to develop universal and nasal COVID vaccines. We need government to empower someone to intervene and lift the roadblocks. Funding alone is not enough. Please read & RT👇🏽
https://t.co/9aCYHnKZpw

[Michael Mina @michaelmina_lab]

To clarify Again

A Rapid Ag test is THE BEST tool ppl have to answer "Am I Infectious?" or "Should I keep Isolating?"

We knew 2 years ago that Symptoms do NOT well define if Contagious

"5 or 10 days" is Simply an Average from an era before ppl had tests to check virus at home