New book chapter: "How to Weigh a Cell." This chapter explains how scientists have weighed cells throughout history, often using simple equipment and back-of-the-envelope calculations. It has lots of interactives, so you can "repeat" the experiments directly in your browser.

Quickly grabbing a coffee before this year's Workshop on Molecular, Biological, and Multi-Scale Communications in Glasgow. Excited to share some of our research and learn more about this community. I'll do my best to live tweet the talks! #mbmc26 mbmcworkshop.org/2026/

Knowledge preservation in the era of big science and AI: strategies for sustainable scientific research. Via @Nature doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-7…

Beauty should be a core pursuit of biotechnology. There should be companies and nonprofits that engineer organisms solely for the sake of crafting beautiful things. A few reasons why: 1/ Biotechnology has historically worked in reductionist ways, but many useful functions only emerge at the systems level. By engineering a systems-level outcome, like beauty, we will get much better at engineering organisms in predictable ways. When I say "reductionist," I mean that most useful things in biotechnology (drugs and tools) were discovered by stripping molecules from their natural contexts. Scientists collect organisms from soil or wherever and then study their molecules in isolation. This basic approach has yielded everything from rapamycin to antibiotics and CRISPR. This reductionism, though, means that that we know disturbingly little about how life actually works at a systems-level. My core argument is that, by studying beauty, we can remedy this. Beauty has persisted through tens of millions of years of evolution because it is functional; bright colors help attract pollinators to a plant, for example, which helps the plant breed. If evolution has created all of this beauty for functional reasons, then it stands to reason that by trying to create **new** forms of beauty, we'll be able to discover and understand how these systems-level functions work! Indeed, we may even be able to create entirely new functions that biology hasn't evolved yet. These functions will not possible to understand via isolated molecules or reductionism. Therefore, a company pursuing engineered beauty for the sake of beauty will probably make many fundamental discoveries about how organisms develop, interact, adapt to their surroundings, and so on. 2/ Beauty is a way to grow the field and bring more people into biotechnology. Nick Desnoyer’s flower design work, for example, has probably reached hundreds of thousands of people. The glowing plants from Light Bio, too, were featured in the mainstream press. You may not think that these examples are “important” for the universe relative to, say, an incrementally better cancer therapeutic, but there’s no question that they are way more popular to mainstream audiences and good, overall, for the field. 3/ The market is huge! Breeding is already widely used to engineer beauty, or at least to select for aesthetic preferences. Pugs are evolutionarily suboptimal, but they've been bred precisely to satisfy a certain aesthetic desire are now a multi-billion dollar industry. The Juliet Rose, developed via breeding over a 15-year period, debuted at the 2006 Chelsea Flower Show and is enormously profitable today. Why should deliberately engineered forms of beauty be any different? If you are building a biotech company or nonprofit that is pursuing beauty, please reach out! I’d love to help.

I’m looking for a co-founder. Frontier labs are over-refusing legitimate bio work because they can't tell who's a real researcher and who isn't. I’m solving this with BioTrust — building the credentialing layer between frontier AI labs and researchers. Strong early interest from frontier labs. Backed by funder Sentinel Bio. I am looking for a builder who's run the trust and security backbone at a company in identity, fintech, compliance, health data, or cybersecurity. Someone with strong instincts on the trust-vs-friction calls. Finisher energy. Deeply motivated by mitigating catastrophic risk from AI and biology. Full context and how to reach me here: docs.google.com/document/d/1… Tag the people you know who'd be unreasonably good at this.

🤖📚🧪#AI is having such a big impact on #synbio and science more broadly. Check out our latest perspective "Knowledge preservation in the era of big science and AI" on this topic that emerged from a workshop led by Penn Rainford a year or so ago! doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-7…

Made it to @SynBioBeta after very little sleep and this things is huge! First time, so if genetic design and unconventional computing and new approaches to bioengineering are your jazz, give us a buzz.

We then leveraged TRADE editing to "capture" entire pathways in vivo and move them between species without ever needing to extract their DNA--just molecular biology accomplished fully within the microbes. This allowed us to move functions across phyla.

So ready for this: Interspecies Protocols from @longnow Needed now more than ever! longnow.org/labs/001/3/?utm_…

There are no words.

You hate markdown but you love agents. This is agentdoc github.com/citizenlee/agentd… Internally used at @CultivariumFRX but looks like a problem many people have.

This paper is top!

Applications close March 31st.

Today we’re launching American Wetware, a design studio for building with biology 🇺🇸💧 I’m doing this together with @thisischristina and @p_maverick_b Our mission is to learn the design language of biology

Such a dream team!

Hey everyone, we are organising a conference with the @BiochemSoc called Protein Evolution, Design and Informatics Edinburgh. We’ve got a great line up of speakers. If you’re interested in attending, abstract submission for posters/talks closes on the 13th of March. Link below!

Analysis and control of untemplated DNA polymerase activity for guided synthesis of kilobase-scale DNA sequences doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-6…

I'm writing a piece on biological computing, and would like to include more details on Cortical Labs and their "first code deployable biological computer." This is the same company that recently released a YouTube video purporting to show human brain cells playing Doom. If you know about biocomputing and want to talk about this, please DM me!