Synthetic biologist, programmer of cells, and lover of all things visual. Wakes up in the morning to learn some of natures secrets and do a spot of fly fishing.
University of Bristol, UK
Joined October 2009
- Tweets6.5K
- Following1.6K
- Followers3.6K
- Likes10.2K
Thomas Gorochowski retweeted
The new goal at @AsimovPress is to publish exceptional, technical, long-form reporting on biotechnology; the types of stories that no outlet is doing.
We are allocating most of our budget toward paying great journalists and also artists who can bring these stories to life. The long-term aim is to win a Pulitzer for biotechnology reporting. This also means we'll be publishing less often, because these stories can take 3-6 months to produce.
We'll publish non-reported essays on occasion, but only if they have a thesis that is super compelling and, ideally, could *only* be written by a particular person. (e.g. We have a piece coming up about lead testing, written by a person who is developing those kits.)
Please email [email protected] if you have a big story that you are itching to write; especially if other outlets aren't willing to give you the time or funds to do it properly.
🚨New work on estabishing design rules for compact CRISPR-based genetic circuitry using Cas12m🧬
Work led by the hugely creative @JoShiv04. My fav bit is a 2-input, 2-output circuit able to regulate two metabolic pathways using only 730 bp of genetic code!
biorxiv.org/content/10.64898…
A big thanks to @BBSRC, @EPSRC, @royalsociety and others for funding and support. This is the second of numerous strains (SHARK was our first doi.org/10.1021/acssynbio.5c…) we are looking to release soon to help accelerate all sorts of synthetic and engineering biology!
Thomas Gorochowski retweeted
After recently moving to the University of Oxford, I am currently recruiting PhD students in the broad areas of web systems, social computing and Internet measurements. If you know of anybody, please let them know to reach out (deadline 2nd December)!
Thomas Gorochowski retweeted
After the labs IPO, there will be many multi-millionaires looking for their next gig.
May I suggest a millionaire - scientist buddy system...
We already have nice labs and plenty of cool, world-changing projects.
All we need is a match-making service. ;)
Thomas Gorochowski retweeted
Today is an emotional day for me. Together with Prof. John McCutcheon lab @ASU we have visualized by cryoEM what looks like a very funky ribosome from an insect endosymbiont.
We believe there are important evolutionary implications.
Here the pre-print:
biorxiv.org/content/10.64898…
Thomas Gorochowski retweeted
What the resolution of a neuron model does to the computation? 👇
neurovium.science/posts/pblo…
We show how higher-order neural interactions can appear pairwise under coarse-graining, concealing the underlying computation. Dendritic nonlinearities and their spatial organization matter for computational capacity, challenging whether point-neuron networks and scalar weights provide a sufficient abstraction for NeuroAI.
ps. Thanks to Tyler @tylerxhobbs, my writing now fashions the infamous "Fidenza"!
Thomas Gorochowski retweeted
If you’d like to buy the @AsimovPress book in the UK or Europe, please contact Ivy! 👇
Hi! @NikoMcCarty has offered to ship a very large amount of @AsimovPress ’ newest book, Making the Modern Laboratory, to Imperial in South Kensington, London, UK, where I’m offering to help distribute copies of their book. 🧬📚
Link to book: asimov.press/p/modern-lab
Thomas Gorochowski retweeted
Hi! @NikoMcCarty has offered to ship a very large amount of @AsimovPress ’ newest book, Making the Modern Laboratory, to Imperial in South Kensington, London, UK, where I’m offering to help distribute copies of their book. 🧬📚
Link to book: asimov.press/p/modern-lab
Thomas Gorochowski retweeted
We engineer both plants and bacteria to establish non-standard amino acids as a new molecular language for programming plant-microbe interactions. This work contributes to the growing toolkit for precision agriculture and we hope it accelerates the path to a sustainable future!
Thomas Gorochowski retweeted
⚡️Fully funded PhD opportunity @WarwickLifeSci @uniofwarwick ! We are looking for a talented PhD student to explore bacterial bioelectricity using live-cell imaging and quantitative biology. 🗓️Deadline: 23 Nov 2026 findaphd.com/phds/project/?p… #bioelectricity #PhD #PhysicsOfLife
Thomas Gorochowski retweeted
Our newest book is finally here!
Making the Modern Laboratory is a spectacular 504-page hardcover that tells the story of everything in the research laboratory and how it came to be, from pipettes to heat-resistant glass to microscopes and more.
It features dozens of articles (most of which will never appear in print), 100+ full-color images, and original writing from 36 authors. It's printed on Arena Natural Rough paper from Fedrigoni. These books are THICC and would make a great gift for both the science-curious and the working scientist. :)
We have spent the last year working on this project. It has been an insane labor of love. The best way to support our independent science journalism is to buy a copy. <3
Pre-order for $49, with free shipping: press.asimov.com/articles/mo…
Thomas Gorochowski retweeted
The main preprint from my postdoc is live!
biorxiv.org/content/10.64898…
The core idea is to try to make synthetic biology much more systematic and precise, akin to more mature fields of engineering.
This was an ambitious project, it started all the way back in February of 2020 and is only just now wrapping up! Thankfully there were no events in that timeframe, either around the world or specifically here at Harvard, that made things any more difficult than they needed to be.
The fundamental dilemma is that we are often forced to do one of two things when designing a synthetic circuits: either we can navigate a laborious design-build-test cycle where we iteratively optimize a circuit's performance tuning one parameter at a time, or we can screen a huge array of variants using techniques like directed evolution and pick the winners and have little insight into the molecular details of why one design worked better than the others.
Our idea was to try to get the best of both worlds, to combine precise mechanistic insights with extremely high throughput in such a way that we could systematically study the whole design space of a given circuit architecture.
Thomas Gorochowski retweeted
Design and characterization of peptide-responsive biosensors
doi.org/10.64898/2026.10.03.…
Thomas Gorochowski retweeted
The whole essay is really really good quantamagazine.org/are-memor…
This quoted post is unavailable.
I get goosebumps every time! @SpaceX bringing it!
🚀🌊 A month in Western Australia. A front-row view of Starship’s next chapter.
SpaceX’s Starship Recovery team spent weeks gathering critical re-entry data ahead of Starship V3’s debut flight, tracking the vehicle’s journey from Texas toward the Indian Ocean.
Watching the world’s largest rocket attempt re-entry from up close is the kind of experience most engineers only dream about.
Every flight creates data. Every failure creates lessons. And every lesson shapes the next Starship. 🔥🌌
A great CYBER visit to the Algal Innovation Centre at @Cambridge_Uni to see how some of the approaches and challenges to taking research with photosynthetic organisms out of the lab and towards scale-up and deployment. Excited to see what emerges from the visit! @UKRI_News
Thomas Gorochowski retweeted
I just published What Happens When Programming Cells Becomes Affordable: A Scenario medium.com/@andrewhessel/wha…
Thomas Gorochowski retweeted
This piece is about theoretical biology. But it's also about AI, and the gap between making a prediction and making a “conceptual leap.”
The greatest role of AI may be in exploring ways to make biology as compressible and comprehensible as physics. Read the latest essay. 🔻
Theory, in biology, has never gotten the same "respect" or "institutional standing" as theoretical physics.
This is a shame. Theory building in biology has been at least as fertile and consequential in the process of discovery as in physics. And yet, it has generally been hard to get funding for purely theoretical work in biology.
Biology also has difficulty compressing its empirical data into theories. In physics, there’s only one kind of electron, and what applies to one, applies to all. But biological cells and organisms are products of individual developmental and evolutionary histories. Biological variation can itself be irreducible and causally meaningful. This means that, often, biological models have many many parameters!
In our latest essay, @ulkar_aghayeva considers whether biology can be made as compressible and comprehensible as physics, and thus restore its institutional standing. She explains how a broad range of phenomena—including biochemical reaction networks, insect flight, and the eukaryotic cell cycle—are well described by so-called sloppy models. In such models, only a few parameter combinations are important to the observable behavior.
This discussion is particularly important in light of AI, and in answering this question of whether or not AI systems will ever be able to make great "theoretical leaps" for biology.
Read the piece and subscribe: press.asimov.com/articles/th…
