Weekend Reading: T Cells, Creating Proteins, and SNI Awards

April 6, 2019 • #

🦠 T is for T Cell

After reading The Breakthrough, I’ve been doing more reading on immunotherapy, how it works, and what the latest science looks like. Another book in my to-read list is An Elegant Defense, a deeper study of how the immune system works. The human defensive system of white blood cells is a truly incredible evolutionary machine — a beautiful and phenomenally complex version of antifragility.

🧬 Engineering Proteins in the Cloud with Python

This stuff is crazy. Using modern compute, data science, and gene sequencing, you can now design proteins from your laptop:

Amazingly, we’re pretty close to being able to create any protein we want from the comfort of our jupyter notebooks, thanks to developments in genomics, synthetic biology, and most recently, cloud labs. In this article I’ll develop Python code that will take me from an idea for a protein all the way to expression of the protein in a bacterial cell, all without touching a pipette or talking to a human. The total cost will only be a few hundred dollars! Using Vijay Pande from A16Z’s terminology, this is Bio 2.0.

👩🏽‍💻 Spatial Networks Named a “Top Place to Work in Tampa Bay”

This is a fun one. I’ve been at Spatial Networks almost 10 years now. When I joined we were maybe 10 or 12 people, now we’re about 60 and still going up. It’s exciting to see the hard work paying off and validated — but like I say to our team all the time: it feels like we’re just getting started.

Topics:   weekend reading   biology   immune system   science   genetics   work