Max Berry

Biology guy. Designer babies and DNA synthesis

[Max Berry @yashgaroth]

Even if Minicircle has somehow done what thousands of researchers failed to do, follistatin itself is very unlikely to cause 30% life extension. Or muscle growth, at least with the levels they’re claiming. Placebo effects are real.

Anyway, check it out:
https://t.co/B0A4AL2Wla

[Max Berry @yashgaroth]

@algobaker Probably their groundbreaking innovations like "filter[ing] out generated sequences containing non-nucleotide characters"

[Max Berry @yashgaroth]

@NikoMcCarty I think your link got messed up, here's the working one https://t.co/Hv7xMIooQ0

[Niko McCarty. @NikoMcCarty]

Sometimes, when you think you are ten years "ahead" in biotechnology, you are actually ten years behind.

DARPA recently announced a ~$40M program to synthesize DNA directly in living cells, using pulses of light. This is a great idea! DNA synthesis is way too expensive ($0.07 per base, or thereabouts) and is the limiting ingredient for most experiments. If we could coax cells to make arbitrary sequences in situ, then we could skip the ~5 days it currently takes to order DNA from a company and clone it into cells. We could run biology experiments much faster.

But the more you look into this idea, the more you'll discover that biohackers have been talking about it for, like, several decades. And not just light-based approaches, either, but also really nice ideas centered around electrical pulses or other ways to make proteins without using DNA or RNA whatsoever. We should be funding more "out of the box" ideas. Biotechnology has followed quite a linear, status quo funding cycle for the last 10+ years at least.

I'm sure many of these ideas won't work out, but this whole website is a goldmine. I'm feeling inspired!: https://t.co/gU6RuVhkEd

[Max Berry @yashgaroth]

@peerbase_ sure, send it over

[Max Berry @yashgaroth]

I did a writeup on Minicircle, the gene therapy startup injecting people with ~plasmids~

tl;dr: Minicircle is claiming obviously implausible numbers in plasmid capabilities and delivery efficiency: several orders of magnitude above the state of the art.

Link in the next tweet

[Max Berry @yashgaroth]

@peerbase_ I added a short update at the top of the doc in August, after the follistatin longevity paper was retracted. A few more tidbits there too. I don't expect to add anything further, but you never know.

[Berkeley Genomics Project @BerkeleyGenomic]

Thanks to @yashgaroth for the talk!

Thanks to @michaelcurzi for video editing.

YouTube link:

https://t.co/6G4kRtSG4p

[Max Berry @yashgaroth]

@shelbynewsad https://t.co/ZPTnqDbMDz

[Max Berry @yashgaroth]

regular cells contaminated: oh no, mycoplasma! Three months of work down the drain :(

virtual cells contaminated: the moldovan hackers have demanded the ransom be paid in fartcoin before we can access the lab computers again :(

[Jiankui He @Jiankui_He]

Development of human embryo gene editing continues in the shadows.

[Max Berry @yashgaroth]

@Jiankui_He same

[Sergiy Velychko @velychko_s]

Thank you @dmgerhard for the great feature on Oct4 and super-SOX in @TheScientistLLC covering both our @CellStemCell papers!
https://t.co/Kui4Kckc0q

[Max Berry @yashgaroth]

@ashleevance Hasn't eGenesis raised half a billion dollars to make humanized pig organs? United Therapeutics is also working on it. Not that there isn't room for more players, but I wouldn't say it's being slept on.

[Max Berry @yashgaroth]

@hsu_steve Agreed, but naval reactors aren't the best example since they use 93% enriched uranium, which can be directly weaponized by a small child. Fine when they're surrounded by the military and/or ocean, less so otherwise.

Plenty of great designs out there that avoid that concern.

[Max Berry @yashgaroth]

getting a lot of questions about my "not interested in biological weapons" shirt that are already answered by my shirt

[Jiankui He @Jiankui_He]

I am not interested in biological weapons.

[Max Berry @yashgaroth]

@craigstolarczyk From Minicircle? Nah. I was hoping this would prompt them to release some more, but no dice.

[Max Berry @yashgaroth]

@aitherick Are there any changes from the preprint I cited in the writeup?

Reviewer 2: needs more details on plasmid design, blood testing is insignificant and doesn't need 7 pages of zero-data graphs. Control group comparison is missing. ug/mL -> ng/mL is fixed at least, but I called that

[Max Berry @yashgaroth]

@mm03993418 @4LOVofScience @aitherick @DavidIshee7 @NickDranias @DraniasMark @GeorgeColindres MIPs are probably an improvement over regular minicircles; they're certainly easier to make. Minicircle the company didn't invent or develop MIPs though, to clarify for anyone reading - MIPs have been around for a decade. Anyway, I crave blood (to run assays on).

[Max Berry @yashgaroth]

@patrissimo @eddylong33 @DavidIshee7 The Thermo Fisher follistatin ELISA should work ok, I can spike different quantities of recombinant follistatin into serum to get a standard curve. The more samples the better though, esp. given David's data about natural fluctuations. I have access to a few plate readers etc.

[Max Berry @yashgaroth]

@NickDranias I've done what I can with what I have available: Minicircle's very limited publications, and the entire wealth of scientific research into gene therapy over the last 30+ years. I agree that the health risk is near zero. If it wasn't, I would have been more forceful in my wording.

[Max Berry @yashgaroth]

@NickDranias I like Prospera's mission as an alternative to the FDA, the FDA sucks. But you must be vigilant about the kinds of people the FDA was originally founded to counteract, or else people will just point to those examples and say "see this is why FDA" and you're back at square one