Principal Engineer at Google, AI and Infrastructure

Joined May 2009
Joan Smith retweeted
Pleased to share my lab’s new manuscript integrating genomics, drug development, cell biology, and mouse modeling to comprehensively evaluate the cyclin-dependent kinase CDK11 as a drug target in cancer.
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Joan Smith retweeted
At-home pregnancy tests were invented in 1967, but for years the FDA prevented them from being sold to consumers. Regulators believed that it was dangerous for people to be able to obtain this information directly - medical information had to come from a doctor, of course.
We’re updating Claude Fable 5’s biology safeguards to reduce false positives. In our testing, this update reduced biology-related fallbacks by about 85% across our product surfaces. Fable can now assist on a wider range of everyday health and educational questions. We believe the biggest positive impacts of AI will be in biology and medicine, and we’re committed to putting frontier intelligence safely into the hands of as many researchers as possible. Fable will continue to fallback to Opus 5 for requests we consider dual-use—including virology, toxicology, and molecular design—so it isn't yet usable for professional biology research and drug development. We're committed to closing that gap through trusted access pathways for frontier biology capabilities. anthropic.com/news/improving…
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You can write a self-replicating physical program in just 45 tokens (RNA bases). That's small enough to emerge spontaneously via brute force recombination at scale.
AI is cool and all... but a new paper in @ScienceMagazine kind of figured out the origin of life? The paper reports the discovery of a simple 45-nucleotide RNA molecule that can perfectly copy itself.
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I’m excited to share a new postdoctoral opportunity in my lab at Stanford to study the consequences of gene dosage alterations in iPS cells. Check out the posting below and shoot me an email if you’re interested -
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Thrilled to share our new paper describing the development and characterization of CDK11 inhibitors for cancer therapy. We also establish a new system that I think represents a huge leap forward in our ability to understand drug toxicity in a living organism.
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An interesting trend I found: Among the top 10 national winners at the Intel/Westinghouse Science Fair from 1990 to 2002, 66% of them are now in academia. Among the same group from 2003 to 2014, less than a third are academics.
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Check out our new study in @ScienceMagazine, where we take on a 100-year-old debate: what’s the role of aneuploidy in cancer? We discovered that genetically removing extra chromosomes blocks cancer growth - a phenomenon we call “aneuploidy addiction”. science.org/doi/10.1126/scie…
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Welcome Tavi Glenn Sheltzer-Smith! Born on 4/21/22. 8 pounds 3 ounces, 21 inches long. Mother and baby are doing great!
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a popular myth is that people who are Very Computer have computers that work. nothing could be further from the truth. the Very Computer are capable of generating much more novel and fascinating ways to make computers not fucking work and exercise this capability wantonly
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New paper from @joans and me! A pan-cancer, cross-platform analysis identifies >100,000 genomic biomarkers for cancer outcomes. Plus, a website to explore the data (survival.cshl.edu) and a (controversial?) discussion of “cause” vs. “correlation” in cancer genome analysis.
Genome-wide identification and analysis of prognostic features in human cancers biorxiv.org/cgi/content/shor… #bioRxiv
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I’m excited to share that I’ll be joining the Yale School of Medicine as an assistant professor! My lab will be moving from CSHL to Yale this summer. And we’re hiring! If you’re interested in working on cancer genomics, chromosome engineering, or drug targeting, drop me a line.
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Can’t wait for @wirecutter to tell me which vaccine to take.
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same idea
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I’ve spent more time just walking outside in the past 5 months than I have in my entire life and one thing that I feel more certain about than ever is how important it is to have free public parks, playgrounds, and outdoor green spaces accessible to all people in all communities.
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Hosting Prof. Nancy Goroff for a Zoom call with @CSHL. Last year, Nancy was writing NSF grants for her chemistry lab - now she's running for Congress! Nancy wants to return evidence-based decision making to government. We need scientists in public policy, now more than ever.
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Our new paper on the regulation of ACE2 is out in @Dev_Cell: Cigarette smoke exposure and inflammatory signaling increase the expression of the SARS-CoV-2 receptor ACE2 in the respiratory tract. cell.com/developmental-cell/…
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