The New Biology
The New Biology features long-form discussions with historians, technologists, and scientists who are working on some of the biggest ideas in biotechnology, from magnet-controlled medicines to virtual cells. Supported by Astera Institute.
Episodes
Biotech for Chickens — Robert Yaman
A dairy cow is worth $1,000 to $2,000 to a farmer, whereas a broiler chicken, raised for meat, generates just $4 of profit. Quantifying animals this way may feel uncomfortable, but those $4 are all a farmer can spend to keep a chicken healthy. And this places some really interesting constraints on how biotechnology must be scaled (in terms of vaccines and other interventions) in the anima
Engineered Microbes Seen from the Sky — Yonatan Chemla on Hyperspectral Biology
Scientists have studied bacteria under microscopes for 400 years. But Yonatan Chemla, a postdoctoral fellow at MIT, has developed a technology that lets us see microbes from a drone 100 meters in the air.In this episode, we discuss the emerging field of "hyperspectral biology," which uses hyperspectral cameras (first built by NASA in the 1980s) to detect molecules with unique light-absorp
The Bitter Lesson for Biology — Adam Green on Virtual Cells and Scaling Laws
Markov Biosciences, a startup in San Francisco, is betting that biology is about to have its GPT moment. In this episode, founder Adam Green explains the "bitter lesson" for biology, the idea borrowed from Richard Sutton that large unbiased datasets and the right training objective tend to outcompete models with hard-coded rules and human priors. Adam thinks, in particular, that the virtu
Magnet-Controlled Medicines — Andrew York & Maria Ingaramo
Nonfiction Laboratories is building a technology called “magnetogenetics” that promises to control proteins inside the body — such as antibodies or enzymes — using small magnets. In this episode, co-founder Maria Ingaramo and scientific advisor Andrew York explain how they engineered a protein, MagLOV, that responds strongly to magnetic fields, why most prior attempts have failed to repli
Mark Budde - How to speed up wet-lab biology
Plasmidsaurus took plasmid sequencing from $600 to $15 and turned a "boring" service company idea into a hugely successful company serving 70,000+ scientists. In this episode, CEO Mark Budde and Niko McCarty get into the bigger question: what does it take for companies to automate and scale wet-lab biology methods in the same way that Plasmidsaurus did for sequencing? They cover the early
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