Synthetic Biologist - Foundry Theorist - American Wetware - stay humble biodesigners
Cambridge, MA
Joined June 2014
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Jake Wintermute 🧬/acc retweeted
I had considered doing this for cats but 1) cats are already optimized for war and 2) historically cats have not aligned with NATO
Warhound, the brain child of Ben Lamm and Palmer Luckey, emerges from stealth to genetically engineer dogs for military and law enforcement.
spr.ly/6011BHZNMF
Screen addiction is the new obesity. When a dopamine hit becomes too easy to obtain, it overwhelms our natural capacity to self-regulate
Like obesity, the puritanical American instinct is to fight this with discipline and shame. And like obesity, this approach will fail and keep failing
We need a pharmaceutical intervention. Only Ozempic for social media can save us
Americans have a "revealed preference" for doing less of basically everything except going online and I have serious doubts that this is making us happier.
slowboring.com/p/americans-n…
People are watching mathematics and software engineering for signs of the fast takeoff when really they should be watching porn
Jake Wintermute 🧬/acc retweeted
Yes real lab work takes time but if you continue to decouple design from execution it becomes a lot easier to optimize the execution steps. Lots of slow wet lab time comes from scientists explaining protocols to each other instead of well optimized handoffs. Rate limiting step is often humans chatting instead of cells growing
Jake Wintermute 🧬/acc retweeted
This probably the first time horse embryos are being sold after being genetically selected. Imagine if this started happening more and in cattle and pets. The impact this would have on animal breeding.
Our first genetically selected horse embryos going up for public auction on Sunday! Expecting it to sell for $35k+
Wheely is a really fast stakes broodmare we purchased after we found she had a variant in her growth hormone that could possibly create speed and size advantages
In her 1967 essay "The Pornographic Imagination," Susan Sontag compares pornographic literature to mathematical logic
Each represents "a total universe," a closed system where every detail serves a single purpose
Naturally this implies that pornographic literature is verifiable and will soon be solved by AI
Jake Wintermute 🧬/acc retweeted
Obvs happens but nice to see it so boastfully laid out
Watch Wall Streeters hop over Anthropic’s biosecurity guardrail with ease bc they’re bros, while blithely admitting they don’t have ANY of the biosecurity measures required for rank and file bio researchers doing real work
🦂 This was a very fun collaboration with the team @citrini! Thank you to @TwistBioscience and @adaptyvbio for the rapid turnaround on experimental validation and to Susana Vázquez Torres (@CNIOStopCancer), Tim Jenkins (@DTUtweet ), and Dan Bedinger (@carterra_bio) for their thoughtful review.
Read more in our blog post: anthropic.com/research/claud…
Jake Wintermute 🧬/acc retweeted
Weekend project complete: Run (Free)BindCraft on your mac!
Check out the latest version 1.0.6 which supports experimental support for apple silicon (github.com/cytokineking/Free…).
In the 1960s Polaroid screened 5,000 chemicals in the process of developing color film
I'm very familiar with high-throughput chemical screening for drug discovery, but less so for other industries. What other non-biology domains need biology-like automated screening?
Jake Wintermute 🧬/acc retweeted
It will be morbidly interesting to see the diversity of schemes which AI cooks up to kill exactly 50 people
Anthropic's proposed AI safety bill sets "killing or seriously injuring more than 50 people" as the risk threshold for blocking the release of an AI model
In contrast, when a single patient (Jesse Gelsinger) died in a gene therapy clinical trial in 1999:
- The institute that ran the trial was dissolved
- The senior scientist running the trial was banned from clinical work for 5 years
- Gene therapy saw deep cuts in funding and research activity for a decade
Tech and biotech have just profoundly different cultures of risk. As AI companies increasingly engage with biomedical research, a culture clash is inevitable
politico.com/news/2026/10/16…
