A Summer Hiatus

Pausing before scaling

When I was a little kid, I wanted to be a writer. After having my mind thoroughly blown by Star Wars, I filled countless marbled composition books with my own stories of imaginary alien worlds. In my teens, reading Dostoevsky novels made me want to capture deeper truths about the human condition, and my interests drifted towards poetry.

Initially intending to study English, a series of introductory biology courses at my university changed my life. I was exposed to a world that felt as wonderful and alien as Star Wars, but was real, and was moving incomprehensibly quickly inside every cell in my body. I fell in love with the world of the cell.

I dove into the world of research, spending all of my hours in the lab.

I’ve now spent over a decade as a student, scientist, and engineer in biotech. I’ve gotten the chance to work in a number of great labs and to publish some interesting technologies and results along the way.

For most of this time, it wasn’t obvious to me that I should focus any of my effort on writing about biotech. While doing so would represent the intersection of my two primary obsessions, the poems about immune cells that I submitted to JAMA Oncology were never accepted and didn’t seem to get me anywhere. So I stopped reading as many novels and focused on scientific papers.

During COVID, things changed. I had decided to defer from starting my PhD for a year, and was working remotely as a scientific software engineer. Suddenly, there was no journal club or departmental seminar with cookies and coffee on Wednesdays. My consumption of science was done in isolation.

Because I couldn’t find any outlets covering the science that I was most interested in, I started this newsletter as a virtual journal club, breaking down a new bioRxiv preprint every Sunday.¹ The wave of initial interest caught me off guard. My goal was to reach 100 weekly readers in the first year. I reached that number in the first 24 hours.

After over a year of this format, this newsletter has mushroomed into something else altogether. Aside from two brief breaks in August of 2021 (starting grad school) and June of 2022 (getting married!), I’ve written continuously about a wide range of topics in biotech—including science writing, business strategy, biotech philosophy, techno-economics, and in-depth company storytelling.

Now, I’ve written over 200,000 words and have nearly 200 times the number of readers that I’d originally hoped for.

Before I write the next 800,000 words, I’m taking what I sincerely hope will be my last hiatus from writing this summer. My goal is to complete the last chapter of my research career: my PhD thesis at Stanford.

Once I complete my research, I have a vision to scale the impact of The Century of Biology and to place it on a sustainable foundation that will give me greater bandwidth to write more essays of higher quality.

Why am I doing this?

Over the course of this century, our ability to engineer living systems will continue to improve dramatically. This has extraordinary consequences for improving human and planetary health. We’re developing the tools to cure genetic diseases, create sustainable alternatives to petrochemicals, and engineer our immune cells to detect and destroy tumors.

My mission is to distill the most important data, companies, and ideas from the frontier of this revolution into coherent essays. The beauty of writing is that it is telepathy. I can beam these essays across the Internet into your inbox, and ultimately into your mind. This can lead to learning, agreement, disagreement, new ideas, collaboration, behavior changes, investment, and policy decisions.

In other words, my mission is to accelerate this revolution by telling its story.

I want to sincerely thank you for joining me on this journey so far. If you feel that you’ve derived value from this newsletter, the best way to support my work is to share your favorite essay with a friend who you think would enjoy it. Let’s accelerate the biotech revolution together.

Until next time, in the Fall! 🧬

---

Thanks for reading. If you don’t want to miss the return of this newsletter in the Fall, you can subscribe to have the next essay delivered to your inbox for free:

Viriditas!

1. You can find my original mission statement here.