IFP

No one should be able to order a bioweapon through the mail. @IFP & @JoinFAI are proud to co-lead an open letter calling for mandatory DNA synthesis screening & recordkeeping. Signatories include: - Sam Altman, CEO & Co-Founder, OpenAI - Dario Amodei, CEO & Co-Founder, Anthropic - David Baker, Director, Institute for Protein Design; 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry recipient - Patrick Collison, CEO & Co-Founder, Stripe - Paul Graham, Founder, Y Combinator - Demis Hassabis, CEO, Google DeepMind; 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry recipient - Emily Leproust, CEO & Co-Founder, Twist Bioscience - Lawrence Lessig, Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership, Harvard Law School - Gerald W. Parker, former Special Assistant to the President for Biosecurity and Pandemic Response - Mustafa Suleyman, CEO, Microsoft AI - Alex Tabarrok, Professor of Economics, George Mason University - Alexandr Wang, Chief AI Officer, Meta; Founder, Scale AI - Christine E. Wormuth, President & CEO, Nuclear Threat Initiative; 25th Secretary of the Army Read the letter and see the full list of signatories: screendna.org Many DNA synthesis companies voluntarily screen orders to mitigate biosecurity risks, but no law requires them to do so. Leaders in AI, biotech, life sciences, national security, and the nucleic acid synthesis industry agree that Congress should act to strengthen safeguards against biological threats. @deanwball put it well in the WSJ: “If you’re synthesizing the stuff that yields biological life and viruses, we’re asking you to screen to see whether it is dangerous in some way. That seems like a reasonable thing for society to insist upon.”

There’s recently been a ton of discussion (and some real concern) across the science community about NSF’s new X-Labs program. But I hadn’t seen anyone make the affirmative case for why scaling team science is actually the experiment we need right now. So I wrote it. In short, I’m bullish: fas.org/publication/bu…

Let me just say, if Democrats reject a permitting deal with a robust transmission provision because of NHPA angst, I will be very, very disappointed. (Also: some of the most important aspects of NHPA analysis burden clean energy disproportionately: ifp.org/reforming-sect…).

@char15299 @CatsAndTechNY @willpoffwebster Yes there are many NIMBY communities, but there are also many places in the middle or neutral on housing construction. This may be just enough of a carrot to make sure they fall on the side of construction instead of stasis.

.@jasonhehehe and I in @CityJournal today. We argue that the Trump Admin's H-1B fee is doomed. But he can fix the H-1B program by selecting H-1Bs based on an applicant's earning potential.

The paper “solves this long-standing problem of how you learn about landmarks in the world,” - @lisa_giocomo, Stanford University. By @natmesanash thetransmitter.org/learning-and-m…

Since 2022, @IFP has hosted the Economics of Ideas, Science and Innovation online PhD course. It includes lectures from luminaries of innovation economics like @ChadJonesEcon, @KRoyMyers, @inaganguli, @pierre_azoulay, @Afinetheorem, and others. Until now, the only way to see those lectures was to be an econ PhD student and join the course live. We think the insights and ideas included in this course are so important, though, that this year we recorded the lectures and will be publishing all of them on Macroscience. In our launch essay, @mattsclancy lays out five reasons to study the economics of innovation. Find out what they are, and watch the first lecture - Ben Jones providing a framework for thinking about the economics of ideas - here: macroscience.org/p/five-reasons…

Since 2022, @IFP has hosted the Economics of Ideas, Science and Innovation online PhD course. It includes lectures from luminaries of innovation economics like @ChadJonesEcon, @KRoyMyers, @inaganguli, @pierre_azoulay, @Afinetheorem, and others. Until now, the only way to see those lectures was to be an econ PhD student and join the course live. We think the insights and ideas included in this course are so important, though, that this year we recorded the lectures and will be publishing all of them on Macroscience. In our launch essay, @mattsclancy lays out five reasons to study the economics of innovation. Find out what they are, and watch the first lecture - Ben Jones providing a framework for thinking about the economics of ideas - here: macroscience.org/p/five-reasons…

News in Phase I trial reform (‼️) The HHS and the FDA are making strides. The latest development: new reforms on manufacturing standards and implementing an expedited Phase I pathway are in the agency’s Unified Agenda and RINs have been assigned. Important signals, because it means these ideas are moving from aspiration toward binding regulation (RINs are regulation identification numbers, meaning the reforms have been assigned "codes"). But first, why does this matter? As I've argued many times, accelerating Phase I trials is one of the highest-leverage things the US can do to speed up biomedical innovation. Phase I is the first time a drug is given to humans. It's where scientific promise meets clinical reality, and where the most valuable evidence in all of drug development, real in-human data, first gets generated. It's also the point where small biotechs live or die, since crossing successfully from preclinical to clinical is what unlocks the next round of investment and starts the flywheel turning. The problem is that the US is slow at this. Getting to a first-in-human trial here takes 18 months to two years and several million dollars before a single patient is dosed. Australia does the same work 6 to 12 months faster and roughly twice as cheaply, with no loss of safety. And it has been doing this for three decades! How is this possible? Again and again, the US picks process over efficiency. Chemistry, manufacturing and controls (CMC) requirements are a clear example: because the regulatory guidance is vague, sponsors overengineer their manufacturing to stay safe, which for some complex products like cell therapies can leave a drug ten times more expensive than it needs to be. This is the backdrop behind Operation TrialBlazer, the department-wide push HHS launched on June 22. It includes proposals for phase-appropriate CMC expectations and an Expedited Phase I pilot built around Qualified Research Institutions. Now, the promise of this initiative seems to be materializing in the form of formal regulatory process, which hopefully means these changes will stick around. It’s an important step toward a durable regulatory framework to give industry stakeholders certainty. So what are the two proposed regulatory actions? 0910-AJ30 (amending 21 CFR Parts 56 and 312) is the expedited-IND and Phase I piece: the IRB and IND changes that would let eligible trials start on a faster timeline, much closer in spirit to Australia's model. 0910-AJ31 (amending Parts 210 and 211) modernizes good manufacturing practice for advanced, distributed, and point-of-care manufacturing. These are the flexible, small-batch production requirements that early-stage and personalized therapies would most benefit from. The full text isn’t out yet but keep an eye on the NPRM under RIN 0910-AJ30 for Phase I changes. There will be a chance to comment soon. In the meantime, the Operation TrialBlazer RFI is open now: comments on the Expedited-IND pilot are due July 22, 2026 (Docket FDA-2026-N-4699), so weigh in. federalregister.gov/documents/2026…

Some bittersweet news to announce today: I recently left @IFP to join @coeff_giving as Managing Director of Public Policy, where I'm building a new US AI policy team, overseeing the Abundance and Growth Fund alongside @mattsclancy, and managing CG's government affairs work. Building IFP has been the defining professional project of my life, and this was one of the hardest decisions I've ever made. In just four and a half years, our team became, pound-for-pound, the most effective think tank in DC. I feel insanely proud of the work we’ve done and the incredible team we’ve assembled. I sometimes joke that when @alecstapp and I launched IFP, we felt like two kids in a trench coat pretending to be a think tank. And now we're a proper institution! But it feels possible to step back now because they've hit escape velocity. The talent density at IFP is bonkers. And I have complete confidence they'll keep racking up counterfactual policy wins with Alec at the helm and our superstar directors. I'm staying on the IFP board and staying in DC. In some sense the new role is a continuation of the old one. All of IFP's policy issues are reflected in CG's portfolio, but now I'm working at a new layer of the stack. So why leave? Because AI is hitting Washington like a tsunami, and DC is still radically underprepared. I hold a lot of uncertainty about timelines, but it seems very plausible that the next 2–10 years will bring the fastest technological upheaval we've ever had to navigate. The new team I’m leading is a bet on how to prepare: proactively scanning the horizon, identifying gaps in the policy ecosystem, headhunting founders, and launching new organizations, while strengthening the democratic institutions that will have to steer through the transition to powerful AI systems. I've written an essay laying out the larger vision here: calebwatney.substack.com/p/a-long-seque… There is no master plan or silver bullet here. I suspect getting AI "right" is going to feel more like a chaotic, iterative process of institutions trying to make better decisions over time as the facts change underneath them. As John von Neumann wrote in 1955 about mastering an earlier technological revolution: “What safeguard remains? Apparently only day-to-day — or perhaps year-to-year — opportunistic measures, a long sequence of small, correct decisions.” Each of the small, correct decisions ahead will look small only in the sweep of the full historical picture. Up close, every one of them will require heroic levels of effort and coordination. Coefficient Giving is scaling rapidly to meet the moment, part of what Nan Ransohoff has called the “third wave of American philanthropy”, potentially large enough to fund thousands of new projects and organizations. The binding constraint is unlikely to be money. It will be people: grantmakers and policy entrepreneurs and others with the judgment to make a long sequence of small, correct decisions, and the ambition to build the institutions we wish we had. I'm hiring a team of exactly those people, starting with generalist grant makers and a chief of staff. If you share this vision, please apply! And if you are building something that we’ll need in the years ahead, reach out. jobs.ashbyhq.com/coefficientgiv…

The US spent 50 years eradicating screwworm from North and Central America. Over the past 5 years, those efforts have unravelled. This week on Construction Physics, the fall and rise of screwworm. construction-physics.com/p/the-fall-and…

The US spent 50 years eradicating screwworm from North and Central America. Over the past 5 years, those efforts have unravelled. This week on Construction Physics, the fall and rise of screwworm. construction-physics.com/p/the-fall-and…