S. Korea spent $200b trying to increase its birthrate. Hungary spends 5% of GDP. Both are failing. Yet the small country of Georgia spiked its birthrate massively without spending a dollar. How? They understood that fertility isn't about money. It's about status.

Genetics: being able to understand the genome without technology or money Genomics: setting fire to money to generate increasingly pointless data

My weirdest piece of writing advice is: write your first draft in google docs, and then edit *on your phone*. It sounds deranged, but I’d say >50% of my useful editing happens on my phone: -it’s hard to add things, but relatively easy to delete (good!) -the mobile layout is so

People: rightfully indignant about the own-goal of requiring a K99 for faculty hire Also people: similarly offboarding their own scientific judgment to other decision makers by over-indexing on journal names

if you're scrambling to apply to the YC fall popup batch — here's my Coversheet spreadsheet Make a copy, make it your own, paste your own application in here — and use Claude to make your own product better! coversheet.org/yc

Biotech is hard

Yes this is what the scientists I know are saying

Excited to read this, & to have come across a solid bio blogger I’d missed until now!

Naive question regarding space: - what do you do with limited seats for the lab? Right now I have four seats, but if I hire/get undergrads/PhD students, there aren’t enough seats to go around (there are enough bays). But I want everyone to be able to sit though…

This is the realest meme I’ve ever seen

Anyone I know going to Canada SynBio in Toronto this year? I'll be there, on a phage therapeutics panel! Excited to see what's up in my home country 🇨🇦 on the science/biotech side of things — it's been a few years!

every academic fellowship application

Seriously? I think I’m spoiled from my last postdoc at The Westmead Institute for Medical Research where space was abundant.. how are we all finding ways to do clean science when there’s physical overlap of humans for every few square feet of bench space?

Super excited to go to this!!!

🤔

Three of my favorite papers published this week: 1. A mechanism for bacteria to create *new* repetitive toxic genes to kill themselves in response to infection (!!)

the advice pendulum is starting to swing

Let’s please be aware of our word choice today folks!

Today I held a mother in my arms so she could cry her tears of frustration. She stays up all night to care for her crying kid who scratches herself until she bleeds everyday. She’s only 2 years old yet she’s spent most of her life putting creams after creams on her little body.