live laugh lobotomy | neuroscience | diagnostics/biotech/psychedelics GTM | propaganda enjoyer | kiwi 🇳🇿
Australia/LA
Joined January 2025
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Decade for biotech
Would love to chat to anyone working with
- 3d printed organs
- diagnostics
- BCI
- genomics
- sleep and mood disorders
- psychedelics
- optical and sound medtech
Benjamin retweeted
Costumer had a bug in the middle of the hike so had to pull out the starlink
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
This photo is from @pabsclimbs' Oct 2025 post about a Yosemite vibecoding session promoting Dome (modified Starlink Mini), not a recent customer incident.
x.com/pabsclimbs/sta…
Benjamin retweeted
Full HUGE* If True episode on Neuralink and the future of brain computer interfaces
I toured @neuralink and got a close up view of their new R1 surgical robot, to see the future they and @elonmusk are building and how it is already changing lives...
00:00 What if you put a chip in your brain?
01:02 What does a human brain feel like?
02:17 How does your brain work?
03:58 Can a brain computer interface read your thoughts?
05:19 How do you get a chip into your brain?
08:07 What’s inside Neuralink’s implant?
10:06 How do you build a brain implant?
11:07 How does robot do brain surgery?
12:20 What could you do with a brain chip?
15:05 How are brain computer interfaces already being used today?
16:07 How are brain chips huge if true?
Benjamin retweeted
🚨: Scientists in South Korea printed a living human eye - it was successfully implanted into a blind patient - restoring vision and connecting to the nervous system.
Benjamin retweeted
I somehow always get asked about less invasive BCI approaches. Here is which physics limits they hit and won't get you to high bandwidth I/O
fMRI - obv great for research. Never wearable because of B0 field. Also slow, hemodynamic.
Ultrasound - has some decoding results mainly NHP, some human with windows. Skull attenuation + coupling makes intact-skull wearable hard. Hemodynamic too.
EEG - volume conduction + skull LPF. Averages over huge populations, kills HF content. Cool for demos, not high bandwidth.
ECoG - you're already invasive. Still mostly population LFPs. For spikes just go a layer deeper...
Photogenetics - genetic modification won't get approved any time soon, still needs light delivery
Benjamin retweeted
A major discovery published TODAY in Nature may change how we think about gene editing, cellular aging, and cancer immunotherapy.
Scientists at Columbia University have identified DRT10, an ancient bacterial antiviral defense system with an extraordinary capability: it uses RNA instructions to manufacture DNA.
Unlike conventional CRISPR cutting mechanisms, DRT10 offers a fundamentally different approach to engineering genetic material.
The most fascinating finding?
DRT10 appears evolutionarily related to telomerase, the enzyme responsible for maintaining telomeres—the protective structures at the ends of chromosomes.
Researchers have already demonstrated that DRT10 can synthesize human telomeric DNA repeats inside human cells.
The implications are remarkable:
• Could engineered telomere maintenance delay cellular senescence?
Could therapeutic CAR-T cells be modified to persist longer and improve cancer treatment?
• Could this ancient bacterial machinery inspire an entirely new generation of genome-engineering technologies?
These remain unanswered questions. No anti-aging or cancer treatment has yet been demonstrated.
But the scientific significance is profound: a bacterial defense mechanism may help us understand and eventually manipulate one of the fundamental processes governing chromosome stability and cellular lifespan.
Published October 12, 2026 | Nature
#Genetics #CancerResearch #CARtCellTherapy #Longevity #Biotechnology
Benjamin retweeted
Last night an AI agent performed brain surgery on a mouse.
We gave it 19 gene therapy vectors in a spreadsheet, a mouse model of epilepsy, access to a motorize surgery rig with cameras and one goal: reduce seizures.
It picked the drug. It picked the brain region. It derived the coordinates from three papers. Then it drove the stereotaxic arms into the brain and injected 250 nanolitres while watching the entry site through the rig camera for bleeding.
A licensed vet gated every irreversible step and held a physical kill switch to stop the AI agent.
Thread on what it decided, what it saw, and the moment it refused to let me override it.
[Writing this on the spot out of excitement, but I've been 18hrs in front of my laptop coding and coordinating this, so keeping it brief and descriptive, more cohesive thoughts on this soon...]
Benjamin retweeted
BREAKING: For the first time, a therapy designed to reverse the age of cells has been tested in humans.
2 of the first 3 patients improved on their vision tests.
Benjamin retweeted
ai x bio just had another insane 2 days:
- Anthropic acquires one-person Mithril Medicine
- Former ByteDance researchers launch Mol-1 for molecular design
- UK invests £100m in world-first AI Biosecurity Lab
- Prima Mente: brain cell DNA detection from blood
- Formation Bio: $600m to invest in individual drug programs
- Biosphere: $21m DoW contract for biomanufacturing
- Pythia Labs: AI-designed antibodies
- Atlas Bio: clinical trial simulation models
- Adaptyv: protein design challenge to distinguish cancer / healthy cells
and then there's Anthropic's 6 partnerships:
- Generate: AI helped immune cells kill cancer more efficiently
- BigHat: lead optimization
- Divergence: antibody components to treat food allergies
- BMS: AI clinical trial planning
- Enveda: AI manufacturing + clinical trial paperwork
- The Column Group: launch AI-powered biotech, Pleiades
anything i forgot?
Benjamin retweeted
Today, in collaboration with Anthropic, we’re excited to share rapid initial progress towards an antibody treatment for food allergy, which affects over 200 million people worldwide, discovered with the help of Claude.
At Divergence Labs, we believe that AI can unlock the next generation of antibody therapeutics with more effective mechanisms than before. Such mechanisms are urgently needed in food allergy, which involve overcoming one of the tightest affinity protein pairs in immunology, IgE and its receptor FcεRI, on mast cells.
Treatment with Xolair—the only approved antibody for food allergy—sequesters circulating IgE, but mast cells remain sensitized for weeks to months due to the extraordinarily slow dissociation of IgE from FcεRI.
We envision a treatment that actively pulls IgE off of FcεRI, without waiting for natural dissociation. Like picking a lock, this requires the right combination of geometry and force.
Our research team, working with Claude, ideated on mechanisms to accomplish this disruption, and converged on an antibody format with two arms with different functions and epitopes. Within one month, we designed, synthesized, and experimentally confirmed the biophysical function of the two arms, which we are now assembling into full therapeutic formats.