Really great writing here, Abhi. Love the blend between awesome chemistry lessons and future-vision discussions. Great story telling. I know it's good writing when it's easy to navigate. You make it seem effortless.
My favorite lines:
"What actually happens when we ingest a drug? Say, aspirin. As you may expect, it begins chattering with the other biomolecules in our body."
Chattering is such a great word and provides the perfect mental image of what's happening.
‘What is that?’, you may ask. I’m not quite sure, but all you really need to understand is three things: "
I love that you don't explain this. In an LLM-reflex world it's easy to give us an additional 100 words about what this is. It's almost harder not to define it, to realize that it's not important to the story, and to remind the audience that there are bigger ideas at play. Great job bridling the author's knee-jerk response to explain everything.
As an aside, thank you for putting the word count + reading time in the subheader. Feels like Substack should automatically provide that info somewhere up front. Good on you.
In addition to invented knobs of control with regarding to biology, can't one also consider discovered or recently popularized knobs that were already present on biology such as bioelectricity? (Though I guess in "levinian framework", bioelectricity is more like a communication layer which itself needs knobs of control to interact with. And that these knobs seem to be standard molecular techniques like ion channels?)
Yeah, I have across Coherence Neuro before. They had this series of substack articles outlining their vision (though the stress there was on the need for longitudinal data more than anything). And then I saw your interview/podcast with them as well and learned the specifics how they actually worked
YESSS, the simultaneous limitations and yet endless extensibility of biology is one of the best parts of it! never seen it captured well in words, well done!
Really great writing here, Abhi. Love the blend between awesome chemistry lessons and future-vision discussions. Great story telling. I know it's good writing when it's easy to navigate. You make it seem effortless.
My favorite lines:
"What actually happens when we ingest a drug? Say, aspirin. As you may expect, it begins chattering with the other biomolecules in our body."
Chattering is such a great word and provides the perfect mental image of what's happening.
‘What is that?’, you may ask. I’m not quite sure, but all you really need to understand is three things: "
I love that you don't explain this. In an LLM-reflex world it's easy to give us an additional 100 words about what this is. It's almost harder not to define it, to realize that it's not important to the story, and to remind the audience that there are bigger ideas at play. Great job bridling the author's knee-jerk response to explain everything.
Thank you for the kind words!
As an aside, thank you for putting the word count + reading time in the subheader. Feels like Substack should automatically provide that info somewhere up front. Good on you.
Happy it's useful!
In addition to invented knobs of control with regarding to biology, can't one also consider discovered or recently popularized knobs that were already present on biology such as bioelectricity? (Though I guess in "levinian framework", bioelectricity is more like a communication layer which itself needs knobs of control to interact with. And that these knobs seem to be standard molecular techniques like ion channels?)
Yeah, I think newly discovered knobs are interesting, and I’ve previously covered an interesting line of therapeutic application of bioelectricity (https://www.owlposting.com/p/neurotechnology-for-cancer-ben-woodington
PROTACs also fall into this bucket :) I wish I made the essay longer!
Yeah, I have across Coherence Neuro before. They had this series of substack articles outlining their vision (though the stress there was on the need for longitudinal data more than anything). And then I saw your interview/podcast with them as well and learned the specifics how they actually worked
YESSS, the simultaneous limitations and yet endless extensibility of biology is one of the best parts of it! never seen it captured well in words, well done!