Founding @WildMicrobes to get more bacteria to make more stuff. Lover of oceans, forests and biodiversity everywhere. Evolve!
Boston, MA
Joined March 2009
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Tim Wannier retweeted
I was ashamed to realize that I did not notice at the time when one of humanity's greatest accomplishments was announced: photos of Pluto, taken from the edge of our solar system looking back. Blue Haze is up there with Earthrise and Pale Blue Dot as stunningly beautiful works of art, testimonies to human ingenuity and daring, and opportunities to reflect on our place in the cosmos.
Tim Wannier retweeted
A juvenile bar-tailed godwit named "B6" set the world record for the longest non-stop migration by an animal by flying WITHOUT STOPPING 13,560 km (8,425 mi) from Alaska to Tasmania, Australia.
The journey took 11 days, in which time the bird lost half its bodyweight.
ALT https://www.usgs.gov/centers/alaska-science-center/news/juvenile-bar-tailed-godwit-b6-sets-world-record
Tim Wannier retweeted
Germany messed up.
@energybants made one of the greatest charts about Germany's energy transition three years ago.
It shows France utterly mogging it with nuclear and it shows how much damage Germany has inflicted on itself by getting rid of its own nuclear.
The left prefers feelings and beliefs, but facts and data are sometimes worth examining. Shall we?
1. Germany has spent about €400 billion on its “green” energy transition, an unbelievable amount.
2. Higher energy prices have imploded energy-intensive industrial production, costing countless well-paid jobs.
3. By shutting clean nuclear plants while keeping coal and gas, German energy production generates 10 times more emissions than France’s. Yep, 10 times more.
4. Production moved to Asia, where the same products generate far more emissions in manufacturing and shipping. A Chinese-built car shipped to Europe causes 70% more emissions than one built in Germany, cement production causes twice as many.
In short, €400bn spent to ruin German industry, destroy jobs, and harm the climate badly. Why do the Germans do this to themselves and the planet?
Tim Wannier retweeted
SI labs will never solve alignment.
they’re trying to solve a philosophical and theological problem as an engineering one.
they’ve assembled some of the greatest engineers on the planet, but put socially dysfunctional nerds with an incredibly shallow understanding of human nature in charge of defining what superintelligence should value.
humanity has spent thousands of years trying to align humans and always failed, we can’t even agree on what is good and now we expect a handful of engineers to solve the same problem for superintelligence? lmao, the hubris
you can’t align something with humanity if you don’t understand humanity in the first place.
at this point, you’re probably better off developing ASI and asking it how to solve alignment.
Tim Wannier retweeted
These NYC apartments are standing empty, not because the owners don't want to rent them, but because rent stabilization laws prohibit them from charging enough to earn back the costs of necessary repairs.
My latest for @WSJFreeEx
Tim Wannier retweeted
of course that's your contention. you're a first-year frontier bio guy. you just finished reading about CRISPR, probably watched a Doudna talk too. so now you're convinced everything is just gene editing.
that's gonna last until next month when you discover base editing, and then you're gonna be talkin' about how cutting DNA was barbaric and double-strand breaks are a legacy approach.
then you're gonna read about delivery, and suddenly everything's about lipid nanoparticles and how editing was the easy part and the whole goddamn thing is bottlenecked by getting it to the right organ.
that'll last until somebody shows you AlphaFold, and then you're gonna be in here regurgitating DeepMind, talkin' about de novo enzymes and virtual cells and how wet labs are economically obsolete.
then six months from now you'll watch one assay fail four times in a real lab, and start telling everybody the bottleneck was never ideas, it's validation.
somewhere in there you'll find a guy named Keith on Telegram, and you'll start doing reconstitution math in your head at dinner.
and by next year you're gonna be standing right here explaining to me you reversed your biological age by six years because you picked the clock that said so.
Tim Wannier retweeted
100% correct. Would be a swing-ish state too (roughly D +5). Time for Delaware to shit or get off the pot. 3 counties, seriously? Buddy, that's a barley a congressional district let alone a state. It either needs to annex the rest of Delmarva or be contracted into Pennsylvania.
Tim Wannier retweeted
This is incredible
We’re releasing a broad range of new mathematical results produced by an internal frontier model.
We’ve been consulting with the independent Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence at the Institute for Advanced Study, and we have drawn on their advice and public recommendations to inform how we release these results.
github.com/openai/math
So interesting - I had no idea that trees make anthocyanin in the fall.
Nobody knows why leaves turn red in the fall. It's actually an open scientific fight, unresolved since the 1800s.
Yellow and orange are easy to figure out. Those pigments ride in the leaf all summer, hidden under green chlorophyll, and they show up when the tree withdraws the chlorophyll in fall. Red is different.
Trees manufacture red anthocyanin pigment from scratch in autumn, spending fresh energy on a leaf they are about to throw away.
Why invest in a house you're demolishing? One camp argues photoprotection: red works like sunscreen while the tree salvages nutrients out of the dying leaf. Another argues coevolution: red is a warning flag to the insects that would lay eggs on the tree.
A 2022 review of the red-versus-yellow debate found agreement on almost nothing, and as NPR reported in 2025, scientists still can't settle it.
If you've planted a tree with red fall leaves, you've also planted a scientific mystery.
Tim Wannier retweeted
Three Falcon rockets vertical at three of our launch pads in Florida and California → spacex.com/launches
Tim Wannier retweeted
As someone who did this kind of genome mining work during my PhD, some thoughts on this Anthropic announcement:
First, the very simplified version of what they did is that they noticed two genes (one known, one new) sitting next to a weird repeating piece of DNA. More specifically, they described an unusual reverse transcriptase (RT) associated with a repetitive DNA array and an unknown accessory protein. This kind of process was used to understand CRISPR back in 2002 and was key to the gene editing tools we use today.
To put this into context, though, people have been finding RTs associated with CRISPR arrays since 2008, and this general kind of genome-neighborhood mining has been used to discover new biological systems for decades. The basic genome-mining strategy is well established, and there are now mature tools and published pipelines for doing much of this. There are papers that discover and experimentally validate dozens of new systems using this approach in a single study. Doing it in bacteriophage genomes is also nothing new (eg CasPhi).
Finding a weird cluster of genes and repeats is often the easy part. The hard part, and where the real discoveries come from, is figuring out what the system actually does. Eg for the bridge-RNA discovery in 2024 from @arcinstitute or the discovery of CasPhi in 2020 from @DoudnaJennifer they figured out the pieces of the system and the rules for what makes it work so it can be used.
Anthropic does not yet know what this does. They’ve shown that the repeat array produces RNAs, but not what those RNAs do, what the RT does with them, or whether the system has any of the programmable properties that make the CRISPR comparison justified.
I’m genuinely rooting for all of the frontier labs to seriously get into biological discovery, and I’m excited about what comes out of it. But announcing these very early, incremental findings with the framing of a major discovery doesn’t help. I’d much rather they set the bar high now, so that when an AI actually discovers a fundamentally new biological mechanism, everyone appreciates how big a deal it is.
Claude has discovered a previously unknown enzyme system hidden in the DNA of bacteriophages. Beside the enzyme’s gene sits a long array of repeating DNA—a structure that looks somewhat similar to CRISPR.
We don’t yet understand what this system does, but only a handful of known systems share its features, and all of them are able to cut, copy, and paste DNA. Historically, the discovery of such programmable systems has helped revolutionize medicine. CRISPR, for instance, is now the foundation of genetic medicines. But it will take much more work to learn what this system does, and whether it can be put to similar use.
Read more: anthropic.com/news/claude-di…
Tim Wannier retweeted
I wish we didn’t need these again, but here is the honest version of Anthropic’s biology announcement 🥳🥳🥳
(Caveat: I haven’t worked in bioinformatics for many years.)
The good: Anthropic ran ~950 Claude agents over a large biological sequence database. Claude searched, wrote code, compared sequences and genomic neighborhoods, and found an interesting pattern that apparently had not been noticed before: a known reverse transcriptase associated with another gene and a repetitive DNA array.
That is cool. Automating this kind of open-ended bioinformatics search at scale is useful, and Claude may have found a lead a human would have missed.
But: Claude did not do a biological experiment. It searched databases and analyzed data.
Humans then took the candidate into the wet lab. And the wet-lab result so far is modest: they showed that the repeat array produces short RNAs.
We still don’t know what the system does. No function, mechanism, phenotype, targeting, defense activity, or programmability has been demonstrated.
This is also where the CRISPR framing gets ahead of the result. Right now, “it has some features reminiscent of known programmable systems” is a hypothesis for what to investigate next, not a discovery that it behaves like CRISPR.
And there is a missing baseline: bioinformatics has had tools for finding unusual gene neighborhoods and candidate systems for years. The interesting comparison is 950 Claude agents vs. an expert using the best existing computational pipelines - not Claude vs. someone manually looking through 200,000 sequences.
So my honest announcement would be:
Claude autonomously found an interesting candidate for a previously uncharacterized biological system. A small human wet-lab experiment confirmed that part of the candidate is expressed. We don’t yet know what it does.
That is a good result.
But in a regular biology lab, this isn’t the finished paper. It is the result you show at lab meeting and say: “This looks interesting. Now we need to figure out what the hell it does.”
Maybe that next step leads to a major discovery. But that discovery hasn’t happened yet.
Claude has discovered a previously unknown enzyme system hidden in the DNA of bacteriophages. Beside the enzyme’s gene sits a long array of repeating DNA—a structure that looks somewhat similar to CRISPR.
We don’t yet understand what this system does, but only a handful of known systems share its features, and all of them are able to cut, copy, and paste DNA. Historically, the discovery of such programmable systems has helped revolutionize medicine. CRISPR, for instance, is now the foundation of genetic medicines. But it will take much more work to learn what this system does, and whether it can be put to similar use.
Read more: anthropic.com/news/claude-di…
Congrats, Erika! And Max, Devon and team. So happy for this to be announced. Let’s get this sucker on a rocket!
Today, Pioneer Labs is announcing our first step towards terraforming Mars. 🚀🌼
With equipment that fits in just a single rocket launch, we can convert Martian dirt, water, and air into enough building materials to construct a small city on Mars.
To do it, we made the first microbe for Mars. We found the best microbe on Earth and used evolution to teach it how to source all of its nutrients directly from Martian materials.
The first astronauts will be greeted with safe shelter already filled with water, oxygen, and rocket fuel for the return journey.
This is the first step toward using biology to make Mars a friendly place for life. It lets us live off the land and helps us build the next great frontier.
It's the first of five organisms we need to green Mars ⬇️
Tim Wannier retweeted
Today, Pioneer Labs is announcing our first step towards terraforming Mars. 🚀🌼
With equipment that fits in just a single rocket launch, we can convert Martian dirt, water, and air into enough building materials to construct a small city on Mars.
To do it, we made the first microbe for Mars. We found the best microbe on Earth and used evolution to teach it how to source all of its nutrients directly from Martian materials.
The first astronauts will be greeted with safe shelter already filled with water, oxygen, and rocket fuel for the return journey.
This is the first step toward using biology to make Mars a friendly place for life. It lets us live off the land and helps us build the next great frontier.
It's the first of five organisms we need to green Mars ⬇️
Tim Wannier retweeted
With our existing deployments in Guatemala, Honduras and Jamaica, and the new ones that are currently being developed for the Dominican Republic and Colombia, we'll soon have tackled most of the key plastic inflow points to the Caribbean.
Update: we are coming to Baranquilla, Colombia! 🇨🇴
We just signed an MoU with @alcaldiabquilla to deploy Interceptor solutions in the Magdalena River and the Caribbean...
...to protect key ecosystems such as mangroves and beaches, and safeguard the livelihoods of fishing and tourism communities.
Baranquilla, and the recently announced project in Santa Marta, mark the start of our work in Colombia: the 13th country we'll be operating in.
Barranquilla is part of our 30 Cities Program to stop up to one-third of all global river plastic by 2030...
And we still have more news on Colombia and other projects coming soon - stay tuned!
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Buenas noticias: ¡estamos llegando a Barranquilla, Colombia! 🇨🇴
Acabamos de firmar un Memorando de Entendimiento con @alcaldiabquilla para desplegar nuestras soluciones Interceptor en la cuenca baja del río Magdalena y el mar Caribe, y así proteger ecosistemas clave como manglares y playas, cuidando también el sustento de las comunidades que viven de la pesca y del turismo.
Barranquilla, sumada al proyecto que anunciamos hace poco en Santa Marta, marca el inicio de nuestro viaje en Colombia: ¡el decimotercer país en integrarse a nuestra operación global!
Además, forma parte de nuestro ‘30 Cities Program’ con el que buscamos frenar hasta un tercio del plástico que llega a los océanos desde los ríos para 2030.
Muy pronto tendremos más noticias sobre Colombia y otros proyectos. ¡Sigan atentos!
Tim Wannier retweeted
A fully and rapidly reusable rocket will fundamentally change how humanity accesses outer space. “The Holy Grail of Rocketry” continues the ongoing Starship series with a look back at the scrappy days of SpaceX engineers proving reuse was possible and takes you onboard a high-seas race to recover a floating Starship