Tim Lantin

a lot of excellent ai-bio startups are based on sufficiently complicated theories of change that slide decks are no longer sufficient to grasp them in their entirety. these days, you must cross your eyes, think really, really hard, and trust the fuzzy bubble that emerges

Over 50,000 people in the U.S. die from pancreatic cancer every year. After this drug is approved and widely used, that number will remain essentially the same. In absolute terms, they are reporting a median survival shift of around six months. Yet we know resistance inevitably develops, as it does in all cancers subjected to drugs targeting mutations in the RAS/MAPK/PI3K pathway. If the goal is to meaningfully reduce cancer mortality, this does not move the needle. This is where decades of focus and billions in NIH/NCI funding have concentrated. National Cancer Institute is funded at roughly $9 billion per year, and a substantial portion of that budget is devoted to oncogenes and what is marketed as targeted therapies. This is then layered on top of a drug development and healthcare model where drugs like this can cost over $100,000 per patient. These are incremental gains at the late metastatic stage, where the biology is already stacked against you. Meanwhile, the two areas that actually determine population-level outcomes—early detection and prevention—remain neglected. If we are serious about reducing the number of people who die from pancreatic cancer, the priority cannot be continuing to optimize late-stage interventions that predictably yield temporary gains. The goal should be zero deaths. Right now, we are not on a path that gets us there. It is not surprising that this view is being met with backlash. Much of the criticism is coming from people whose incentives—academic , financial, or institutional—are tied to maintaining the current system in biomedical research and the biotech and pharma sectors that profit from it.

we should be trying to build The Culture. you all know that right? the whole point of all of this is to build The Culture.

"Man won't fly for a million years" – NYT 1903

Look closely. Between these two moments, our species has performed miracles. We have mapped the blueprint of life within our own DNA. We have built “brains” of silicon that can outthink their creators. We have pushed back the darkness of disease. Infant mortality has plummeted, and millions of children who would have been lost to the earth in 1972 are today alive, dreaming, and contributing to the global chorus. We have sent robotic emissaries to the edge of the interstellar dark and peered back at the beginning of time itself through mirrors of gold. Technologically, we are a different species. We are more connected, more informed, and more capable than any ancestor could have imagined in their wildest fever dreams. And yet, look again. From this distance, the borders remain invisible. You cannot see the “holy” ground over which we spill the blood of our children. You cannot see the walls we build to keep our neighbors out or the ideological trenches we dig to bury our common humanity. Despite our leap from vacuum tubes to artificial intelligence, we remain haunted by the same ancient tribalisms. We use 21st century technology to prosecute Bronze Age grudges. We have changed the climate of our world, but we have yet to change the climate of our hearts. We are still a toddler civilization, playing with matches in a library of irreplaceable wonders. The contrast is our great paradox. We have the power of gods, but we still possess the temperaments of the territorial primates from which we rose. We have learned to fly between worlds, but we are still struggling to learn how to walk together on this one.

I'm joining the OpenAI Foundation to lead the Life Sciences & Curing Diseases program. We're starting with three areas of grantmaking: * AI for Alzheimer's * Public Data for Health * Accelerating Progress on High-Mortality and High-Burden Diseases Time to get to work!