Pearl Freier

New Journal of Clinical Oncology @JCO_ASCO paper estimated potential savings of $661.8M for US taxpayer-funded Medicare if replace current Medicare Part D median formulary prices w/ @costplusdrugs pricing for 7 generic oncology drugs. ascopubs.org/doi/full/10.12… h/t @RuchikaTalwarMD

@chorye Is he the same person who was saying last week that the only reason Jennifer Doudna received the Nobel was because she's "exceptionally lucky"

This is a horrifically dumb take even for @BiotechMongoose. Even when the odds are long, and not in your favor, these awards matter. They give young scientists ambitious, almost impossible goals to aim for. Their impact is not only on the few people who win, but on everyone who stretches toward that standard, pushing science forward. When these opportunities disappear, so do the aspirations they inspire.

Sonny Rollins, the jazz legend dubbed the Saxophone Colossus who redefined the language of the genre with his inimitable improvisational skills, has died at age 95. rollingstone.com/music/music-ne…

@cremieuxrecueil I remember hearing about his DJ skills on a podcast or somewhere else but it's still an unexpected part of his byline there I think :)

I admit, I was never going to predict the last line of this article.

Tyler and I just published a list of the recipients of the New Aesthetics grants: newaesthetics.art/grants. Thank you very much to all who applied. There were far more applications than we expected. We funded 28 grantees and are excited to see what they create. My reflections on the whole thing: • Though there are clearly selection dynamics afoot, figuring out some route beyond the current aesthetic moment seems to be of wider interest in the art community than I would have guessed. Many applicants described their dissatisfaction with the status quo, some in strong terms. We had to close applications after a few weeks because there were so many. • It's too early to call it, but it seems that both beauty as an unapologetic goal (contra much that is in modernist and contemporary approaches), and ways to channel pre-modern styles into something new for the present era, are of growing interest. • The awards made me reflect on the perhaps obvious issue of how hard it must be for an artist to persistently do something new: schools, galleries, buyers, etc., all have structurally embedded preferences as well. These individual awards made me wonder what form supporting new clusters could take. • Architecture seems to me like the discipline most ripe for new ideas. One correspondent observed: "American architects are somewhat constrained by the association with the academy, in addition to the well known regulation issues. There is a tendency to overthink things so that the designs are formally interesting to someone deep in the conversation, but lacking poetry and magic. There are more firms in Europe, South America and beyond that “just do things” (especially in places where it is easier to build)." This was evident in the submissions. • AI seems to be making people rethink things in a quite fundamental way, just as urbanization/industrialization/popularization of photography did at the end of the 19th century. For some that will mean interesting new forms of AI-augmented art, but the effects of the rethinking will likely be wider. • Arts funding is clearly as precarious and scarce as ever. That's unfortunate, but it probably also means that individual actors can have meaningful impact, and I encourage others to get involved if interested. • There's a lot to know that is not written down, and I'm very grateful to those who have helped and advised me along the way.

For the whole U.S. job market, H1B workers are < 0.5% of employment. And in the tech sector it's < 9%. While there is certainly abuse of H1B & we need reform to cut this out, overwhelming majority of H1Bs make short & long term net positive contributions. It's not zero sum.

@garrytan This should be one of the first rules of X: don’t give distribution to the haters

*Nick's not a reject, he's great! (In case you were wondering, I am not so stupid as to quote tweet and give distribution to my haters)

Don't listen to the YC rejects, office-hours is actually helpful, and worth the tokens

On this Memorial Day weekend, I’m thinking about my father, a WWII veteran who landed at Utah Beach and served with General Patton. When he was 97, he tried to re-enlist!!! Listen to what happened.

On Memorial Day and every day, I’m grateful for the heroic men and women who gave their lives serving our country. Keeping them, their families, and loved ones in my thoughts.

"This award is one of the only paths that gives a tiny number of exceptional PhD or clinical trainees the funding to launch their own research groups directly, rather than spending many years in a postdoc first." @chorye wrote in thread below

The NIH Director's Early Independence Award was awarded since '11 to a small # of scientists early in their careers to encourage "paradigm-shifting research projects." Now it's being cancelled by HHS & NIH (like they've done to so many other grants). More ⬇️ h/t @pdhsu @chorye

Here's an unlocked link to the WSJ story above: wsj.com/politics/polic…

An example below of the "great" work done by Doge last year to save the USG from fraud, abuse & waste. Look at the amount of $ involved.

sooooo 𝕏 isn’t indexing your long form content. at all. your articles are not indexed anywhere. therefore they are not discoverable to ANY AI or web search anymore INCLUDING GROK.

It would be very easy to fix rampant abuses of H1Bs: just raise the minimum salary. It hasn’t been updated since 1990. The fact that we haven’t, shows that this isn’t about protecting American workers.

Are they trying to destroy our innovation economy? We have employees in the US legally applying for permanent residency. Now they can't work with us while they wait for an answer? Immigrant founders building companies here applying for green cards have to leave? Insanity.

"despite immigrants only making up 16% of inventors, they are responsible for 30% of aggregate US innovation since 1976" Making it even harder for the best science and engineering talent to come to US is an own goal.

The new White House policy requiring green card applicants to apply from outside the US is a capricious attack on legal immigration. It will hurt families, leave us with fewer doctors, teachers and scientists, and hurt American competitiveness in AI.

It's really unbelievable. What's the statistic about the Fortune 500 & how many CEOs & founders are either immigrants or have parents or grandparents who are immigrants. The US is only 250— most of the country probably has family members who immigrated to the US within the last 40-125 yrs.

To ensure our continued success and prosperity, we need a YIMBY-like movement for immigration, especially skilled immigration. The tech people around the administration have failed us.

@thoughtson_tech cc'ing @natashamalpani on your comments since it's her post

The question the post raises but doesn't answer: why did that specific method work, and what exactly would need to be true for it to generalize across the technical approaches being lumped together under "AI drug discovery"? My read is that the Phase 3 result doesn't validate a field, it validates a stack, and the problem is that almost no one in the coverage cycle is willing to do the unglamorous work of specifying which stack. When I mapped the capital and technical differentiation in this space, I found at least four distinct lanes with genuinely different model classes, data dependencies, and failure modes, meaning a Phase 3 outcome in one lane tells you almost nothing about the probability distribution in another. The Insilico rentosertib Phase 2 readout in IPF (published in Nature Medicine, June 2025) is the clearest prior data point for what clinical validation from a fully AI-discovered, AI-designed asset actually looks like, and even that result sits in a very specific immunofibrotic biology context with a very specific generative chemistry and target ID pipeline behind it (PandaOmics plus Chemistry42, for anyone tracking the actual mechanism rather than the headline). A single Phase 3 approval is not a stress test for the field. It's a stress test for one company's integration of proprietary data generation, generative chemistry, and clinical translation, which is exactly why the question of generalizability is harder than most takes are allowing. onhealthcare.tech/p/the-ai-drug-…

Nevertheless the two most promising abstracts imo were from US-originated ADCs: $ABBV's STEAP1/PSMA - 67% PSA50 and 45% confirmed ORR in heavily pretreated prostate cancer $LLY's NECTIN4 - 48% ORR in bladder cancer including 40% ORR in Padcev failures asco.org/abstracts-pres… asco.org/abstracts-pres… #ASCO26