skosuri's comments

Aspartame breaks down in the digestive track and doesn't enter circulation. It breaks down into three well known compounds that are found in much greater amounts in our natural diets, phenylalanine, aspartic acid, and methanol.

The amounts of these digestion products are much lower than those obtained from many other natural dietary sources.3,25 For example, the amount of methanol in tomato juice is 6 times greater than that derived from aspartame in diet cola.25 The amino acids aspartate (ie, anion of aspartic acid) and phenylalanine are very common in the diet, found in foods such as lean protein, beans, and dairy, with 100 g of chicken providing an almost 40 times greater intake of aspartate and a 12.5 greater intake of phenylalanine than a diet soda.25 In the body, the 3 digestion products follow their normal metabolic pathways, being broken down further, taken up by tissues in the body, or excreted. Thus, due to the rapid digestion of aspartame in the gastrointestinal lumen and small intestinal mucosal cells before reaching the bloodstream, the intact aspartame molecule is never present in internal tissues in the body or breast milk.3,25,28 The absence of aspartame in the breast milk of lactating women consuming aspartame was recently confirmed.21

https://academic.oup.com/nutritionreviews/article/74/11/670/...

I am a founder of a startup (Octant - a16z backed) that has a small & growing software engineering and data science team (see the Nov who's hiring post). Some thoughts on some of the discussion here:

1. Compensation – In academia, you will likely take a big salary hit (much of this is discussed). There are a few exceptions like newer institutes like Chan Zuckerberg, Arc Institute, etc that are paying much more competitive salaries though. In well-backed startups and larger biotech/pharma, cash is likely equal (or often more) to software comps elsewhere – the bigger hit you take is usually in equity – no one has been able to match FAANG on total comp with RSUs in the mix. Startups can provide options, but it's not very fungible. For example, we benchmark salary on comparable A16Z pre-public non-bio companies use as well as stats from the broader SV SWE salary datasets. There are startups in bio that pay even higher to lure talent.

2. Research vs Product – Over the last decade, there are a bunch of highly profitable tech companies and large funded new startups (e.g., Calico, Altos, Deepmind, etc) trying to take on bio as the next frontier. These places (like those named in the blog post) pay very competitively. Thus far, these places often turn into a big mess because it becomes hard to deliver products (like drugs) in a mostly academic-y atmosphere. I don't think anyone has really cracked this nut yet (or if it's even possible).

2. Culture of SW importance – In a lot of startups these days, this has changed quite a bit over the last 5 years. Lots of software & data science first startups. I think in the larger pharma/biotech though, the centrality of drug discovery takes a lot more oxygen than software, which are often thought of as innovation bets and different places have different levels of long term commitment.

3. I think one important difference is the type of company. There are many software companies in healthcare/bio that are software products supporting R&D, healthcare, drug development etc. Many of them have done quite well (e.g., Benchling, Komodo Health etc in A16Z portfolio alone) and are basically just software companies that just happen to be in bio. There are many others like most drug discovery companies (like us) where software and data science is enabling, but the product is often ultimately drugs. For a lot of SWEs, this becomes problematic because people often want the satisfaction of having externally deployed software products to push into the world. The heroes and heroines of this world are often drug hunters over tool developers, and this has cultural consequences as well. Some people are really good with this (getting a lot of satisfaction out of enabling new drugs to treat serious disease), but a lot of folks aren't.

4. The current biotech crash has been bigger and more sustained than the tech crash thus far. High interest rates impact this industry much more than others, because revenue on new drugs, which drive a large part of the industry usually take a decade or more to develop before revenues are flowing. This is less of an issue in healthtech companies that can often deploy much more quickly (90% of healthcare costs are not drugs).

5. Finally, there are many happy SWEs and DS in bio at companies that value software and can build good careers in it building products that ultimately help human health in new ways. It's a pretty amazing time in biology, with a suite of new technologies to read, interpret, write, edit, deploy molecules/DNA/cells that are really unlocking many of the mysteries of human diseases. I feel lucky every day we get to continue building in this space.

Octant | Software Engineer | Full-time | ONSITE Emeryville, CA | https://www.octant.bio/

Octant is a well-backed (Largest investor is A16Z) team of experienced technologists and entrepreneurs at the frontiers of biology, chemistry, and computation. We are developing an integrated platform combining synthetic biology, high throughput chemistry, and modern informatics and software infrastructure to scale discovery of small molecule therapeutics. We are hiring Senior Software and Informatics Engineers to build robust and scalable software and data systems and capitalize on the tremendous volume of data we're producing (see here: https://www.octant.bio/blog-posts/octants-multiplexing-super...).

No biology/chemistry background required! Learn more about our open roles here:

- Senior Software Engineer: https://www.octant.bio/jobs?gh_jid=4597401004

- Bioinformatics Engineer: https://www.octant.bio/jobs?gh_jid=4305558004

I imagine how hard this must be on you and your family and kudos for having the energy and wherewithal to try to organize. I think there are a few people/places that might be worth reaching out to in order to learn more.

1. AllStripes (https://www.allstripes.com/) -> It might be worth reaching out to them to get put in contact with other foundations that might be working on the same thing.

2. Reaching out to RareBase (https://www.rarebase.org/) or Ethan Perlstein (https://mobile.twitter.com/eperlste) to talk about how they work with similar foundations.

3. There is a new company called (https://www.vibebio.com/) that are working on helping fundraise for patient communities using DAOs. I think Alok Tayi is one of the founders there.

4. I know there are some tech founders with family members of rare disease that have gone through similar experiences. For example, I think Rohan Seth at clubhouse has one (https://www.lydianaccelerator.org/). They might be good resources to reach out too.

Very little drug development happens in academia. You are missing all the time, money spent in public and private markets in the biotech ecosystem that Pharma largely is the back end buyer for through off-balance sheet acquisitions/deals. VCs collectively spend tens a billions a year on biotech (~40B this year), and much more in public markets (IPOs and secondary public finances).

In the example you bring up. Moderna raised and spent billions over a decade since it was founded on the 'academic invention', and didn't have a product until their vaccine. The same is true for BioNTech. There was a large chance these companies could have folded, and before the pandemic, most were deeply skeptical.

Congrats @jrkelly and team! Exciting day for synthetic biology, and love the pictures of the NYSE: https://twitter.com/Ginkgo/status/1438837881649381377?s=20

Yay! Come work with Nicholas, he’s awesome. I’m a cofounder at Octant and feel free to reach out to me as well (dm here or sri@ the same email address). Also, if you are interested in what some of our SWE/ML interns have done over the last couple of years, read some of their blog posts here:

https://www.octant.bio/blog/datascienceandmachinelearningint...

https://www.octant.bio/blog/softwareengineeringinternship

https://www.octant.bio/blog/2020/9/8-bits-and-atoms-my-octan...

Jesse Bloom of the Hutch is giving a talk tomorrow on the functional consequences and antibody escape about escape mutations in SARS-CoV-2; these are his slides. The talk tomorrow at HHMO can be found here: http://janelia.org/scienceofcovid19

For the last twenty years I thought things would eventually just come back to center. I’m not sure anymore. It’s possible it’s as follows: One side will win. History will be written by those winners. Pick your side and fight for it?

People have used electron diffraction using cryo-em scopes to do sub-angstrom resolution. For example, my colleague Jose Rodridguez published this a few years ago.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41594-017-0018-0

Lol. Totally agreed.

Totally agreed with you Re: teaching. I think universities are systematically not valuing teaching enough in my opinion. That said, at my university (UCLA), if you are a great teacher, teaching large, popular and impactful classes; you will get recognized and promoted for it. But when people bring up the publish or perish trope, it's not about spending time building better classes and teaching material.

In terms of 6-12 months, if you don't have that much time, it's likely your past bets haven't paid off and people aren't that willing to give you more resources. I definitely had lots of projects that still haven't paid off 7 years into them; but I get to keep playing on them because some of my other bets have. That's the way it works, but I don't think that is that bad. There are many professors with terrible ideas that they think are great and are indignant that no one will support them unconditionally.

What would you propose as an alternative to peer-feedback? I really enjoyed academia and didn't find it soul sucking. Does it suck to get rejected sometimes? Yes. Does the work eventually get out; yes? With pre-prints these days, most of the people that are in the field already read the paper before acceptance if it's good. So the journal/conference name itself is largely a symbolic judgement of your peers.

Agreed with this. One big thing that is missing here is teaching. If you are an amazing teacher, things will be much better for you longer term. You will also enjoy the job a lot more.

Post-tenure? Peer-recognition & Funding.

>>And this is it. A reward system based on paper publishing and conference speeches is fundamentally broken.

What should it be based on? Should academics be judged on performance? If so, how?

I don't know. I think people overblow this publish or perish thing. Shipping something and regularly is a thing that's important to practice; whether in industry or academia.

The reason it's important is that both cases, at some level, one needs to justify the use their use of resources. Places without some real world feedback are usually not a great thing long term.

Same goes for publishing in glamour journals/conferences. In the end it's a competition for attention, and things often have to be judged by presentation and storytelling as well. Prioritizing your time on working on your best projects is likely a good thing. If you feel something strongly that no one else sees, you will likely have less resources to accomplish it. That's life everywhere.

Octant Bio | Software Engineer (Full-stack) | SynBio Platform Engineer | Emeryville, CA | ONSITE | Full-time | https://www.octant.bio/

Octant is decoding biology’s complexity to build better drugs by engineering biology itself. We combine large-scale synthetic biology, functional genomics, multiplexed assays, high-throughput chemistry and computation to design multi-targeted drugs towards some of our most vexing diseases. You can read more about our mission here: https://www.octant.bio/blog/introducing-octant

We are now looking to hire our first SWE to help bring our software practice to the next level. We have many computational scientists and biologists who code, but we now need to get more serious about laying the foundation for our software stack. You will design and build internal products and tools that push the boundaries of synthetic biology, genomics, and drug discovery; manage and improve our codebase, data models, warehousing, pipelines, software architecture, and systems.

To give some examples of what we do on the software side, check out our recent open sourced work for COVID-19 testing called SwabSeq: https://www.octant.bio/swabseq or our plasmid sequencing workflow called Octopus: https://www.octant.bio/blog/2019/9/29/octopus

We are also hiring for a Synthetic Biology Platform Engineer. We are looking for people excited to scale DevOps in Synthetic Biology working on scaling our platform by combining molecular multiplexing and automation. You can read more about our platform here: https://www.octant.bio/blog/2020/9/14-octants-multiplexing-s...

If you are interested in applying, please see the links on how to apply.

SWE Posting: https://www.octant.bio/job-description-software-engineer

Platform Development Engineer Posting: https://www.octant.bio/job-description-platform-development-...

Team/Stage: We are a ~30-person team (https://www.octant.bio/team) and are backed by many of the top VCs that cross the boundaries on technology and bio including A16Z, 8VC, Lux, Refactor Capital, SV Angel and more. We are full of people that cross disciplinary boundaries, and we are looking for more that are energized by that kind of environment.

I’m the founder/CEO. Happy to answer any questions here. You can also contact me directly here on HN, on twitter (@srikosuri), or my first name (sri) at our domain name.

Octant Bio | Software Engineer (Full-stack) | Emeryville, CA | ONSITE | Full-time | https://www.octant.bio/

Octant is decoding biology’s complexity to build better drugs by engineering biology itself. We combine large-scale synthetic biology, functional genomics, multiplexed assays, high-throughput chemistry and computation to design multi-targeted drugs towards some of our most vexing diseases. You can read more about our mission here: https://www.octant.bio/blog/introducing-octant

We are now looking to hire our first first SWE to help bring our software practice to the next level. We have many computational scientists and biologists who code, but we now need to get more serious about laying the foundation for our software stack. You will design and build internal products and tools that push the boundaries of synthetic biology, genomics, and drug discovery; manage and improve our codebase, data models, warehousing, pipelines, software architecture, and systems.

To give some examples of what we do, check out our recent open sourced work for COVID-19 testing called SwabSeq: https://www.octant.bio/swabseq or our plasmid sequencing workflow called Octopus: https://www.octant.bio/blog/2019/9/29/octopus

Happy to answer any questions here. If you are interested in applying, please send a note along with your resume to [email protected]. You can also contact me directly here on HN, on twitter (@srikosuri), or my first name (sri) at our domain name.

Class F stock has a variable number of votes? Is that a standard way to keep control amongst the founders?