starting a cloud lab for assembling genes. first external contributor @pylabrobot, started team autom8 @retrobio_

Joined December 2020
17 Photos and videos
ben ray retweeted
I wrote about the call by frontier labs to start regulating DNA synthesis. I, and many lab biologists, think this would be damaging to American biotech. You can read my thoughts in core memory.
The good doctor came in hot today. corememory.com/p/america-can…
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ben ray retweeted
Set is ready @ElonMusk We built it 25min from downtown Austin and can shoot anytime in the next 7 days on 1h notice. Humanity is on the verge of becoming a multi-planet species and spacefaring civilization. My goal with this interview is to help people viscerally feel what that future is going to look like and get everyone excited to help build it.
I guess this is a good time to announce we are currently in the process of building a set for an interview with Elon. Will be finished next month and should be legendary. Elon - lmk if you're in
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ben ray retweeted
My second interview with @JimBelosic, Founder of @SendCutSend. 0:15 Beating China in manufacturing requires scale 1:10 Automation is not a magic bullet 2:12 Scaling profitably 4:31 Delivering a great customer experience 8:44 Why SCS raised $110M 11:20 Expectations are promises 15:33 Increasing speed and capacity 18:46 Focusing on customers 22:20 Frugality and generosity 25:06 Creating The Anything Factory 26:33 3pm is the new midnight 27:49 Figuring out the next bottleneck 30:37 Finding buildings with enough power 35:21 Lowering prices 37:36 Gambling to turn on factories faster 39:03 Aim for perfection and you’ll end up at excellence 40:04 Maintaining a maniacal sense of urgency through impatience 41:30 Seeding SCS DNA at new factories 43:08 Solving challenges 45:32 Finding great capital partners 48:40 Focus on customer pain 51:59 Learning from Home Depot 54:16 Bringing manufacturing back to America 55:11 Building capacity creates demand 57:01 Handling demand surges 58:21 Being default skeptical and sensing bullsh*t 1:00:27 Getting back to building
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ben ray retweeted
the HighRes MicroSpin is now supported in PLR our second centrifuge after the Agilent VSpin great first PR @claudioreiter! also thanks @_benray and @koeng101!
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ben ray retweeted
The era of cyborgs is upon us. In this episode (Substack tomorrow), we hang with Alex Smith who is controlling a robotic hand with his mind. This is the first step toward helping people who have lost limbs, but it's also clear that this technology could push us toward some weird futures. Elective amputations perhaps?
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ben ray retweeted
May 6
Replying to @srikosuri @koeng101
Hey Sri! Nice to meet you here. I have emailed you about 18 years ago when i was working for BGI and i started to assemble genes using oligo pools synthesized with CustomArray. Now i am developing more interesting things using our own oligo microarray synthesizer
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“The logical thing to do is to use conventional equipment in an unconventional way to get to scale, and then start modifying the equipment to increase the rate”
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ben ray retweeted
I guess this is a good time to announce we are currently in the process of building a set for an interview with Elon. Will be finished next month and should be legendary. Elon - lmk if you're in
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ben ray retweeted
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ben ray retweeted
We use @pylabrobot to program our laboratory automation in python. What's shocking to me is remembering that many people *don't* do this. Most of the world's laboratory automation uses proprietary software you can't even version control. 🤯 Essay ⬇️
Most lab automation software is proprietary, expensive, and painful for anybody who codes, so we ditched it. Our liquid handler runs on Python PyLabRobot, and we're sharing our protocols open-source.
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ben ray retweeted
“laid back” is what high agency ppl look like from the outside when they’ve correctly identified which games are worth playing & simply declined the rest.
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ben ray retweeted
Automation software is not written in normal languages, and you lose a lot of features because of that! There's really no reason for it either, other than vendors being able to lock you in. So we use @pylabrobot.
Most lab automation software is proprietary, expensive, and painful for anybody who codes, so we ditched it. Our liquid handler runs on Python PyLabRobot, and we're sharing our protocols open-source.
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ben ray retweeted
Apr 11
HOME. The Artemis II crew has arrived back on Earth, ending a nearly 10-day journey around the Moon. The trip took them farther into space than humans have ever gone before, and now they're safely home with us. go.nasa.gov/41r9eL0
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we take less-than-truckload logistics seriously
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ben ray retweeted
Artemis II, Dark Side of the Moon
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ben ray retweeted
Its insane how good of a filter this is Eliminates 99.9% of people
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ben ray retweeted
some of these are pretty good
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ben ray retweeted
Biomanufacturing needs automation to scale. And nothing is more autonomous than biology itself.
What if biology already invented the best bioreactors? Imagine if I told you that there was a magical capsule that could fit in your palm. You can program the capsule to produce an infinite variety of valuable medicines. And they can be made for less than a dollar, at huge scale. It sounds like an alien technology. But I'm just describing an egg. Neion Bio is building the drug manufacturing company of the future by leveraging the miraculous infrastructure biology has already built. Their vision is to enable a future of abundant, low cost biomedicines around the world by using egg-based biomanufacturing. It was a true privilege to invest in this team with Packy. We've seen what they've already accomplished over the past ~1.5 years. Now the world can read about it in the NYT, covered by Zimmer. Crazy. Sam and Dimi are working to build something very important here.
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