Goal

The goal is to solve medicine, meaning that all diseases either have a cure, or are preventable and accessible to everyone.

This is an insanely large and ambitious goal, that one organization couldn’t possibly achieve alone.

So while our north star is trying to solve medicine, the day to day is about facilitating innovation and resources towards that goal. The real goal is to build a process that solves medicine.

Innovation

Let’s talk about innovation.

In the book “Why Greatness Can’t Be Planned” by Joel Lehman, Kenneth Stanley, the authors use the analogy of trying to cross a foggy river using stepping stones.

You don’t know which stone will lead to the next stone and the next to eventually cross the river. This is exploration and there will be failed paths, backtracking and the need to move laterally.

This is hard work, with no promise of results.

So we are looking for stepping stones, or platform ideas. Things we can build on that open up a ton of new possibilities.

Think things like the MRI. We are probably still finding new ways to use MRI’s. This is a tool we can use to explore even more space.

The second thing is proving it out. There are often leaps, where all of a sudden everyone is working on the same things. That is because someone proved it out.

More and more people are working on reusable rockets, why? Did we have some major breakthrough in technology or physics?

No, someone proved that it was possible and so people were then willing to invest in it. Many ideas already exist but sit waiting for someone to champion them and prove that are viable.

The Process

The high level loop that feedback on its self.

Recruit/Reframe

Hard problems need new approaches and minds. Recruit new resources to try to make progress. Reframe the problem in ways to make it more accessible. Many biology problems aren’t “biology” problems but problems of information theory, mathmatics, chemisty and physics.

Understand/Unblock

Do deep dives into subjects to understand them in ways, that allows the recruit/reframe step to happen. Find the high leverage areas and unblock them.

Intervene/Interject

Actually making an intervention. The goal is to solve medicine. It would be easier just to try and provide resources. But with out this proving ground all the other steps are never really proven out. You need a reality check against reality and to do that you need to try and intervene.

Strategies

So to innovate and work towards solving medicine, these are the guiding strategies.

More people working on the problem

We are at a point where knowledge is more accessible than ever, especially with LLM’s where people can start to take an active role in their own health. If the premise that each person is biologically different in many ways, then treatments need to be bespoke.

So this strategy is about getting more people involved and in the search. There are some diseases that are extremely rare and we want some to be looking at them.

We want as many diverse backgrounds looking at the problem in new ways as well. Group think is a real thing and people can get stuck in old ways of thinking. We need to shake things up and bring as many new ideas to the table as possible.

More Data and more sharing

Apart from more people, we need more data and new ways to capture more data. Our current AI tools feed on vast amounts of data, so we need more of it in which to train the next generation of models on.

This also needs to be completely open, so people can use it to train models and answer new questions.

Simulation first approach

Mice models and general studies are not enough, we need to find ways to simulate biology so we can run virtual experiments at speed and scale. The combinatorics is just too high to try and run studies for everything and we need to leave the poor mice alone as we are just torturing them and learning nothing.

The future of biology is simulation and computation based.

Stepping Stones

Invest in pure research with no goals other than to learn. We won’t know until much later what was useful and what wasn’t, so we need to explore openly. We are looking to find new paths and to fail. Failure is one of the best ways to learn and share those failures openly.

Ultimately I think that medicine is about mastering the cell. I think the future of medicine, if we ever really want to master biology, will be basically that, where we can manipulate things on a nano scale. Where we have full control over every cell in the human body.

In software there is this idea of a CRUD (Create/Read/Update/Delete) model.

For many entities you want to do four basic operations on it. Say when you join a website you need an account. So that website will support the CRUD model for accounts.

A user can create an account, then when they come back you can find and read that account. The user moves or needs to change something so then can update information for that account. Then in the end they decided to no longer use that site and requested deletion.

I think this is also a good framework for thinking about cells. For deficiencies or with aging maybe we want to be able to create cells.

Diagnosis and measurements, we want to be able to find and read the state of various cells.

For existing cells, due to problems we want to update and alter a cell.

Then finally, cells especially cancer cells if they can’t be updated and repaired need to be deleted.

Practical solutions

While exploring for new stepping stones, look for low hanging fruit that could be taken off the board. Are the simple things that could be done today but just need a small push to get done?

AI Scientist

Ultimately what we really want is to have AI be able to find, experiment and prove out medical treatments.

The other strategies are used to feed into an AI system that can do that.

Tactics/Projects

Those are the strategies. To do that the org will look to work on projects aligned with those strategies to make progress towards our ultimate goal of solving biology.

This could be a combination of directly doing research or creating tools/services as well as offering competitions and trying to direct outside involvement.