A World Model of Life: Biohub's Alex Rives on Virtual Cells, Measurement, & the $1.8B Data Push

language-latent spaces will ever become deeply fused or will remain separated by tool calls. Noting that the things we most want to know about biology today are novel concepts for which we don't yet have words and names. Finally, I asked Alex how he tracks his own health. He answered that he's so focused on Biohub research that he barely thinks about it, which surprised me until I considered that if he and the Biohub team are successful in creating the data layer needed to train highly generalizable biofoundation models, a little bit of timely, relevant personal health context might indeed be all you need. With that, I hope you enjoy this look ahead toward a world model of life with Alex Reeves, Head of Science at Biohub. Alex Reeves, Head of Science at Biohub.

Welcome to the Cognitive Revolution. Thank you. Great to be here, Nathan. Yeah, I'm excited for this conversation. So let's start with the big picture. Biohub has this grandiose mission, which I'm excited about, of curing all diseases. What does that mean to you? Should I think of that as synonymous with another phrase people sometimes use as solving biology? Should I think of it as applying to aging? Are we living forever in your vision of the future? How grand does this vision ultimately get? Yeah, that's a great question. How do we define this? Well, I think I'm a practical person, right? So I think about, you know, kind of what is going to be possible, I think, in a realistic time frame. And I think, you know, a good place to set our sights is to say that, you know, what we want to do is really live in a world without disease. Like, what would that mean?

That would mean, you know, a world where there's not cancer, a world where there's not infectious disease, a world where there is not chronic disease or degenerative disease or, you know, all the kinds of inflictions that have been, you know, really fundamental to the human condition for a very long time. And, you know, I think about that from a fundamental standpoint, like, you know, how do we build the science that will, you know, really give us an understanding of biology at a very deep and fundamental level that will allow us to understand how disease works, that will allow us to really identify the core mechanisms, that will allow us to understand how to detect disease, how to intervene appropriately.

And also kind of the technology, right? So how can we go beyond kind of the current medical paradigm, which is, you know, kind of, and I guess the therapeutic paradigm of kind of pills, of molecules, you know, can we really go beyond that to far more programmable medicines that will allow us to really get to the fundamentals of disease and really start to think about that as being able to read and write the programs of biology. So sometimes when I've thought about this in the past, I've tried to break this grand challenge down into two slightly less grand challenges. One of them is just understanding...

the causal structure of what's going on inside our bodies so that we could know what leads to problems and therefore what our targets for intervention should be. And then the other one is like having identified a target, figuring out something that can actually have the desired effect. How would you, you know, is that a good taxonomy? How would you break that taxonomy of challenges down further if you want to? And which ones do we have kind of the most traction on and where do we need to catch up? I mean, I think that's really the classic framework of drug development. So if you kind of think about, you know, how we think about creating a drug today, you know, we think about physiology and disease.

We try to identify really kind of a cause at the molecular level because that's where we can actually intervene today with the technology that we have. And then we really think about that problem of kind of, you know, finding and designing the intervention. And so, you know, that's kind of, I think, one paradigm. And I think, you know, there's a lot of progress that's still possible in that paradigm. So, you know, I think that's kind of where we are today, of course. And I think AI, you know, is giving us, I think, really new potential to kind of look at each of the parts of solving the, when you break the problem down that way, kind of each of the parts of solving it from that standpoint.

But I mean, I think there's there's kind of also this this kind of, you know, more, I guess, like information theoretic view on it that you might take where you can you can kind of think about, you know, life as as a program. Right. You can think about cells as building living organisms. And you can really think about, you know, that that is a system of rules of code. And and you can think about, you know, what what what are the programs? Right. And like, you know, how how do we how could we read those programs? How could we start to start to rewrite those programs? And I think, you know, kind of thinking in that way opens up a wider aperture to to solving these problems.

And I think a big part of kind of where we're trying to get with Biohub is to really, you know, think about biology in that way, kind of create the tools for programmable biology, create the models that will allow us to understand biology in that context. you know, to really, really start to understand how the cell works, both down to the molecular level, but also, you know, kind of zooming out the cell in context and the, you know, the programs that it runs to build a living organism. And I think, you know, you can really think of disease as kind of a part of that, right? It's really a part of the program. And if you think about it, you know, disease often unfolds in very regular ways. So if we could kind of really understand that, I think it gives us really fundamentally new tools to think about how to make progress. So I know you guys are working toward virtual cell models, of course.

There have been virtual cell models for a while. My general understanding of the state of play right now is like, they don't work super well, largely, and people have kind of said, or, you know, have advanced different hypotheses, I guess, let's say, for why that would be the case. The one that I have found the most compelling is basically the data we have is just not that high of quality such that it may not contain the signals that the ml models would really need to learn what's really going on um how would you react to that hypothesis like where where do you think that everything that's happened so far like why hasn't it taken us further than it has today yeah the you know the cell is incredibly complex so i think I think you have to start there. You know, it's kind of like the right maybe mesoscale for thinking about biology. But, you know, if you think about the cell, it's constituted by this just incredibly complex dynamic collection of matter, you know, where kind of down to the level of individual atoms and the interactions between molecules, you know, those events.

are determining of what happens at the larger scale of the cell. And so there's that kind of perspective building up from the atomic resolution, kind of the first physical and chemical first principles. And then you can also kind of then think about the cell as embedded within a living system, right? Within tissue, within physiology, within an organism, and sort of the complex programs that cells are able to execute, to sense and respond to their environment, to communicate with each other, to, you know, really do these incredibly complicated and dynamic things. And so it's an immense, immense challenge. And I think there are, you know, A number of limitations. So one is kind of, I think, you know, the models themselves, right? And just kind of having the right modeling approach and the right modeling paradigm. And, you know, we have the transformer in other areas of AI, but the transformer kind of doesn't have that kind of multi-scale structure that could represent those different levels of complexity.

So there's kind of a question of what's the right modeling paradigm. But then I think even more fundamental, there's the question of observation, observability, and measurement. And, you know, so much about the cell, you know, we just really can't measure. Sometimes we can't see it at all. And in many cases, kind of generating data at scale would be really hard. And so if you think about kind of many of the advances in science and biology, you know, they really... come from kind of having a new technology that, you know, that changes what we can measure, what we can observe. You know, the new powers to see and observe biology, you know, can really open up a new understanding of it. And so I really think there's kind of three parts to really solving this problem. There's the modeling part. There's the part of generating data at scale that's going to really reveal the information architecture and the programs of the cell in its kind of statistical structure.

And then it's really, you know, the tools that we have to actually observe the cell and actually measure the things that matter. And I think you need to see progress on all three of those. And so, you know, the models that are being called virtual cells today, You know, I just I don't I don't think they meet that that definition of a model that that could actually simulate the cell in a meaningful way and actually really serve as an oracle for experimental biology. cheek let's do one more beat on how you imagine modeling evolving i guess my naive sort of outside view just based on all the success that we've seen in ai and language modeling and otherwise is just like if we had enough good data it feels to me like today's techniques would probably work maybe you would disagree with that if you would disagree with that you know what sort of future model do you envision you know how do you think we sort of encode the right inductive priors and and sort of how how much of a like actual rube goldberg machine is the model is it like trying to match up the actual cell with like all the little proteins bopping around and interacting with each other and modeling all those like micro states or you know a kind of naive black box thing

would be like i have a cell i perturb it like what's the next state you know kind of more of an input output without worrying about all the detailed mechanisms inside? Where do you think we land on modeling when this really starts to work? Yeah, that's a great question. So I should start by saying that, you know, I really think that kind of in the limit of, you know, data and the limit of infinite data and compute, if you're thinking in limits, kind of all model architectures probably kind of end up being the same, right? They're just kind of function approximators, Right. And so if you have the right inputs and the outputs and you, you know, you learn a very, very good general function approximator, then then then in that sense, in those limits, kind of the model architecture itself falls away.

But I think I think in biology, you know, we're very far from that point. We're very far with some exceptions, right? Like with protein biology, you know, we have gene sequencing at scale. You know, we really can kind of, you know, get closer and closer to kind of that limit of of of infinite data. But for for cellular biology, you know, we're just so far from that right now. And I think historically, when you're far from that limit. You know, inductive bias becomes really important. When I think about, you know, a model, I mean, I think where do we ultimately want to get? You know, we want to get to a model of the cell. It's kind of what I was saying before. You know, it has that complexity at the molecular level. It has a representation of that.

You know, it could, you know, imagine kind of being able to project out the state of the cell down to the level of, you know, atomically resolved structures of its components, you know, would have that. It would also really be able to model the cell at the level of its programs, and it would be able to, you know, predict. It would be able to allow development to unfold, to allow the interactions within tissue to unfold and tell you what would happen. So in that sense, you could think of it as a world model, right? Kind of a world model of life, a world model of biology.

Alex ReevesI think we're very far from that. So what I think is possible now is an information theoretic model of the cell. And I think that there are, you know, really these programs that run life. They're encoded in the genome.

and i think it's it's historically you know there's there's been these kind of two dual ways to think about biology one is this kind of bottoms up first principles approach kind of trying to build it from the basic chemical and physical principles but i think the other view that's been really productive is to kind of really think about the the emergent level of the informational model of this of the cell you know the cells and information processing machine which has a genome, which encodes the programs that run life. And I think that's the level of understanding of the cell that could be attainable via AI in kind of the next five years, let's say.

I think that we really have, you know, we're in the age of information theory at scale. And in a sense, you know, we have these incredibly powerful methods which can perform, you know, they do pre-training, they use self-supervised learning on these, you know, vast data sets. And from statistical patterns that link inputs to outputs, they're able to capture really high fidelity representations of the underlying latent variables that are driving the relationship between input and output. And so you can imagine generating data on the cell that could really start to reveal how information at the genetic level, at the transcriptomic level, at the molecular protein level, would link to the programs and responses.

of the cell that can be observed through different molecular readouts, such as transcriptomics and gene sequencing and epigenetic measurements, but also through imaging and the power of just being able to see how the cell responds. So I think you were exactly right to kind of think about it as one of the first things that we can really think about doing is really learning this transition function that takes us from a state and a set of inputs to the next state. And it's really a probabilistic function. It's not going to be deterministic. The cell is going to transition, I think, to a distribution of possible downstream states. So it's a very complex problem to learn. But I think today, we kind of have the technologies now that are going to make it possible to create that kind of model. Hey, we'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsors. Today's episode is sponsored by Parallel, where agents find answers. Most engineers today closely follow new model releases, but don't pay nearly as much attention to their agent's most important tool, web search.

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You can see how it works and learn more at OutSystems.com slash TCR. That's OutSystems.com slash TCR. So you guys just made some news this week with an announcement of a $1.8 billion initiative with some partners, Biohub and a couple other major institutions. Maybe tell us a little bit about that partnership and what the money is going to go toward. I understand it's largely about creating new data, but, you know, unpack that and tell us what kinds of data are going to be the top priorities. Yeah, we're incredibly excited about this. So in April, we announced the Virtual Biology Initiative, which with a group of leading scientific institutions and consortia, and, you know, really said that we're going to go out and we're going to really build the data sets to enable virtual biology broadly.

And, you know, really the key goal there to start is to really have this kind of, you know, universal or general model of cellular biology. And, you know, so we've been working over the summer, and we announced, I guess it was just the day before yesterday, you know, really a flagship partnership with the Department of Energy, with the NIH, and with Google DeepMind isomorphic meta, really to come together and coordinate an effort to generate this data. So it's incredibly exciting. We're collaborating with a broad scientific community. We've really put out a call. We're inviting the worldwide scientific community to be a part of this for other funders to join it.

But, you know, there's a core group that's really focused on just, you know, how can we have a more coordinated effort across science to do this? And, you know, there's the team is convening, you know, to kind of create that longer term roadmap. But I think some of the things that are really clear that are going to come out of that is just, you know, dramatic expansion of these kind of maps, contextual maps of cellular. biology. So things like spatial biology, where you're really able to see the cell and the context of tissue of surrounding cells, be able to link molecular level measurements to imaging,

Alex Reevesand really be able to do that at the scale of hundreds of billions or more cells.

And, you know, the goal is really to move fast here and to kind of create the first data sets that will allow us to start training these, you know, contextual information theoretic models of the cell. In the context of self-driving cars, there's, of course, this longstanding debate of like fancy, you know, more expensive LiDAR type sensors versus just cheap cameras, right? And like, how much does it matter that the data will be richer versus we can get more of it? I know you guys also had a recent result in microscopy that I don't fully understand, but basically made the promise of like just being able to look inside the cell at higher resolution and even kind of start to see macromolecules like in position and to some extent, I guess, like how they are interacting with each other.

how do you see this in in biology like on the one hand we can you know do super expensive stuff not as much of it you know alternatively what are the cheaper techniques and and how do you think about kind of building the right portfolio of different modalities of data earlier this year we announced the laser phase plate and it's it's a really exciting project it's decades in the making holger muller at berkeley imagined it you know many decades ago biohub started investing in it years ago. And basically what it is, is it's phase contrast for electron microscopy. And so it's truly high technology. So basically it's the most powerful standing wave laser in the world.

So a beam of light, which interferes with the electron beam to shift its phase so that you can

Alex Reeveshave phase contrast in electron microscopy. And so what this really gets you is the ability to look. And so the big application is cryo-electron tomography, which is basically sectioning the cell and really now using electron microscopy to see all the proteins and other

macromolecules in situ in their living context. And so the contrast is really critical there because the observations are incredibly, incredibly noisy. And that contrast allows you to start to make out the individual molecules and understand what they are, how they're interacting. And I think it's just going to open up a totally new understanding of kind of the dynamic structural biology of the living cell. So I think this, you know, this gets back to really one of the core principles of Biohub, which is this idea that the idea of the power of kind of new technologies for measurement and observation to change how we understand the world, to change the science that we can do.

And so many, so many historic paradigm shifts in science have really come from new technologies for measurement. So I think, you know, biology is just so, you know, they're, they're, they're incredible parallels to other domains where we're, we're developing AI, but there are also things that make biology fundamentally different. And I think the biggest difference is the limits in our ability to observe, see, and measure what matters. And so much of biology has been driven by the development of new tools to do that. And as we have more and more powerful tools that allow us to see more and more of biology, we have the ability to build richer and richer models for it.

And so, you know, that's really kind of how we think about this problem is how can we drive up the number of parameters that we can measure in every cell? How can we expand the field of view and the number of cells that we can observe simultaneously? How can we open up the temporal dimension to see cells over time? And how can we open up the molecular dimension to really see what's actually happening inside them down at the most fundamental levels? So tell me more about that, because I think like a big question I had as I was preparing for this is like, to what degree does the unit of a cell or even, you know, maybe a few cells tell us what we really need to know.

Obviously, there's like, you know, quite a few orders of magnitude from cells to tissues to systems to whole organisms. And I could imagine that like, you know, everything's connected would be kind of one story and maybe, you know, one random cell in my body because it's all so integrated and information's flowing everywhere. Maybe that has enough information to make a good prediction about my overall well-being or maybe it doesn't. And, you know, probably sometimes it varies. So how do you think about kind of bridging these scales and, you know, and what new, do we have the techniques we need to do that or do we need new techniques?

I was thinking about things like microbiopsies or, you know, what would it look like to have like a million Brian Johnsons, you know, who are like measured, you know, in all these different ways with all the data linked. Yeah. How do you think about that challenge and what are the techniques you think are kind of most promising to get over those humps? Yeah, it's a really great question. I think it really gets to, you know, what is so hard and so difficult about this problem. It's that there's, it's really a multi-scale problem and complexity down to the molecular level can influence events of the macro scale, right?

A single point mutation in a gene can cause disease. And so you really ultimately are going to need to have an understanding that bridges those vast divides. scale. And it is a technology problem. I think it is very much a technology problem. I think in the near future, kind of the ability to identify the entire system down to the molecular level is not possible. You know, maybe someday in the future, you know, something like that would be possible. But, you know, today we can, we can look at, we can look at tissue, we can look at cells within tissue. And I think, so we can see that kind of mesoscale of the cellular biology.

But what I, what I do think is, you know, we can use, we can use these informational principles to bridge the gap because if we, I think you have to be clear, you know, when I talk about the cell and I talk about a model of the cell, I don't mean the cell in isolation. And, you know, biologists, they do often think about, you know, the cell in isolation and culture systems. They think about, you know, these kind of laboratory proxies for in situ biology. But, you know, I think that a real complete model of the cell, you know, it would have to include the the understanding of the cell in its context in, in these living systems, because, you know, living systems are, are created by the interaction between cells and, you know, really in a certain sense, you know, the interfaces that they have with each other, the input output relations and the, and the transitions and state that they can undergo. So I think you can learn a lot kind of at this mesoscale that's going to be really, really informative to kind of the complete picture of the system. But you really have to think about the complexity levels. And so you can think about the complexity of the cell in isolation. And that's going to be really valuable

because, you know, so you can learn a great deal about cellular biology from, you know, a cell in culture, from cells that are transformed. They may be very different from the states of cells in in situ and tissue but they still you know they still have those that core machinery and those core programs right and so you can learn a lot about them you know even even if you're looking at the cell kind of in a very and a poor proxy like like a culture system but but we can learn even more if we start to really look at the cell yet at that next level of context where we can see it in tissue or systems. And, you know, we're really working to address those kind of gaps, right? So at Biohub, we have an imaging institute that's really kind of building technologies at each of these complexity levels. So, you know, the laser phase plate is kind of opening up the atomic resolution view, but you can really only see that for a part of the cell.

You know, it's not going to give you the picture for an entire tissue. We're building technologies that allow us to... kind of fields of cells to be able to perturb those cells, understand their responses, and measure that statistically across many cells in culture. And then we're also, you know, really developing whole organism level imaging, which is really incredible. And so we do a lot of work with zebrafish, which are, you know, transparent fish, which means you can really image, you can image them and you can actually see every single cell. And so we have microscopes

Alex Reevesthat allow us, for example, to track a developing zebrafish embryo over time and actually see and track every single cell, how that system goes from one cell all the way to a fully developed

organism. We have systems where you can label different cell types. So for example, all the immune cells. So you can look in a living fish and track and follow all the immune systems and see how they move and traffic and interact with each other and the surrounding tissue. So I think it's possible to get information at each of these different scales. And then what you really need to do is kind of build that model that can integrate across the hierarchies of biological complexity. Hey, we'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsors. The Cognitive Revolution is brought to you and powered by Tasklet. I've been running Tasklet agents for almost a year, and they've become a major part of how the show gets made.

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That's code COGREV at tasklet.ai. Do these model organisms? I'm interested to hear your perspective. the role that they will play. Obviously, the old joke is most of the time when you read an exciting headline from biology or medicine, you should mentally append in mice to the end of it. And it seems like, you know, you look at these headline stats of just like how much DNA do we share with mice and, you know, how much of the kind of core mechanisms of the cells are conserved and it's like an awful lot, right? So it seems like should be the case that the treatments that we develop to like, you know, treat mouse cancer or mouse Alzheimer's or whatever should work in humans more often than it seems like they actually do. And I'm a little confused by that gap and how you think about closing that gap. Is it something where, you know, we somehow need linked data sets between the model organisms and humans or, you know, Because the other story I could imagine telling is like, in the end, we're just going to need a ton of human data.

And, you know, there's like no amount of zebrafish data that's ultimately going to add up to the level of insight that we really want to have into humans to get us where we want to go. But what's your take on all that? Yeah, I mean, I think it's important to start by, you know, recognizing that kind of most of the fundamental advances in kind of our molecular understanding of disease and, you know, the biological pathways that are core to that have come from experiments in model systems and model organisms, you know, and even experiments in yeast, which is the simplest eukaryote, you know, have revealed really important mechanisms that are relevant to human biology and human disease.

So model organisms have played, you know, really a fundamental role in the development of molecular biology and just our understanding of biology. But I think you're right to point out that they're not perfect proxies by any means. And, you know, overly relying on them, I mean, it can lead to two things, right? It can lead to like, you know, you think this is a cure to cancer, but it only works in mice. It can also lead to, you know, you really missed a mechanism that's relevant in humans because you don't have a good proxy for it in mice. So you can really, I think, make that mistake in both ways.

And, you know, there's no simple solution to this problem, right? I mean, I think there's kind of a constant push in biology to have kind of better and better experimental proxies for the human biology. And I think, you know, kind of the latest advance there is really organoids, which allow you to kind of recapitulate more and more of kind of the level, the complexity of tissues in a, you know, in a culture system. But I think this is also where AI can play a role. And so I kind of think about, and I guess I, you know, I come from this background of thinking about protein biology and building models of proteins. And I think one thing that's really interesting to observe there is, you know, ESM and AlphaFold did not...

from training a model just on human proteins. They really came from training a model across, you know, all of evolution. And what that says is there's really information across evolution that's relevant to making predictions for and understanding human biology. And it's not even that it's relevant, it's essential. If you train a model just on the human proteins, you know,

Alex Reevesknow, you wouldn't get an accurate predictive model. And so there's, I think, something really powerful in this idea of generalization and transfer. And so much of biology is conserved

across, you know, all across life, across all the different domains of life. And then, you know, as you get closer and closer to humans, and even if you just think about the vertebrates, So much of the core molecular machinery there, the transcription factors, the way that they interact with enhancers and promoters, just kind of that language is preserved. And what's happened is the programs have been rewired. So the programs are completely rewired, but they're kind of built with the same building blocks. So I think you can really look broadly, and there's a lot to learn from all of these different systems.

And I think it's very different to kind of think about building a model that's going to capture and integrate and learn from all of that information versus trying to create a perfect experimental proxy, which really just isn't going to be possible. But I think that there's a power in kind of trying to build a predictive model that can use all of that information to make far better predictions for human biology. So in the context of language modeling, there was a time, and we've kind of grown out of it now, where the overwhelming amount of compute was just going into simple pre-training on data of, like, kind of unknown quality and relevance.

And then you do a little, like, instruction, you know, following at the end, and all of a sudden you have, like, a pretty helpful assistant. What do you think that recipe is going to look like in biology? Like, can we just take tons and tons of raw, but kind of not that great data and then use that to build up these representations that we then sort of elicit what we want at the end? Or is it going to be sort of a different path that you think for for whatever reason? Yeah, that's that's also an amazing question. I really think that the principles in biology are going to be shared with all the other domains where we're seeing progress in AI.

And so I actually think, you know, we're fortunate in biology because we have kind of the opportunity to see how those principles have played out in different fields and really identify the parts there that are generalizable. But I think this core idea of the power of self-supervision or representation learning, you know, the pre-training, you know, that's really critical because, you know, that gets you beyond. And, you know, this was... dream of Hinton and Jan LeCun and Bingio and kind of the other deep learning pioneers is the idea that you didn't have to know all the relevant variables. You didn't have to encode all of them and know the settings for the parameters that, you know, you could learn all of that with a neural network. And so that's just, you know, proving out over decades. And the scaling laws are really, I think, the latest or the most clear expression of that now. But so we have pre-training in biology. Certainly, we're seeing that playing out with proteins right now, of course. And I think that will play out for cellular biology too. And I think it's going to be similar. You know, there's a phase of really learning from statistical patterns to build a model of the underlying system that's driving those statistical patterns. And then the stage

of elicitation where you're really now bringing out the part of that model, which is relevant to the problem that you're trying to solve. And I think that it's going to be possible to have rlvr for biology and to have feedback and you know ultimately where where we need to get is to really

Alex Reevesbuild empirical ai and kind of build systems where where ai can can you know ask the question perform the experiment learn from the experiment improve its understanding propose a better experiment and really complete that that cycle repeatedly so that you have a recursive improvement

it. And I think, I think all of that's going to be possible in biology. It's, it just has, it's going to need to be built differently. You know, we're going to need, it's going to need to work with models that have, you know, that can, that can accurately represent the, the multi-scale nature and the complexity of, of biology in the relevant ways. And, you know, the biggest challenge for biology is it's, it's empirical, right? And so, you know, we're seeing so much rapid progress with our LVR in areas, you know, where we can really do fast verification computationally. So, you know, mathematics, coding, you know, reasoning and things, things like that with biology, you know, we have to build the systems that actually, you know, allow us, allow verification in the laboratory. How do you think about time scales? I mean, that's, that's another way in which there's like orders of magnitude problems, right? It's one thing to perturb a cell look at it an hour later a day later but what i really care about is like how am i going to live to be 120 right and that's a very long-term question so how how do you think about this kind of you know prediction this kind of goes back to the like you know million brian

johnson's idea do we have enough right now to go on to say like this cell state you know predicts good outcomes or is that also like a you know big part of the climb of the grand challenge yeah i think that's still a really big big part of the climb. But I think at the same time, it's a scaling challenge. I think it's one that can be addressed with technology that we have today. I mean, I guess what I really think about is kind of creating atlases of cellular biology in the context of health and disease. And I think that we, you know, the technology that could really allow us to do that is just starting to really become scalable. This is a big part of what we're trying to do with the Virtual Biology Initiative is, you know, see cells across, you know, this wide range of physiological contexts and really, really understand, you know, what differentiates disease from health at a cellular level. And I think, you know, that's going to really start to show us, you know, both, you know, what makes different diseases unique, but also shared common causes across different classes of disease. So I think that's really within reach. I think

Alex Reevesfirst drafts of that within the next one or two years, you know, within five years with a really focused coordinated effort, we can have, you know, a pretty comprehensive map there. And that would

have enormous value, not just for AI, you know, just for kind of classical analysis. And I imagine a lot of analysis is going to be agentic in the future. So also you can really imagine just kind of scaling analysis to these very large classical analysis to these very large data sets. But also I think you can start to build a model from that that's going to really identify precisely the different cell states that are relevant to disease. And if you have that model, then what you can start to do is ask the question, how do I intervene to reverse a state that's pathologic and bring it, bring it into, bring it into a healthy state. So I think, I think that that's something, you know, those are questions that we'll really start to be able to tackle in the next five years. How big of a deal do you think just like human health records will be as a part of that mix? Like, would you anticipate yourself, maybe you're already even doing this, I don't know, But, you know, kind of going out to EHR companies and trying to do deals to get, and I don't know the rules around this, I know it can be quite complicated, but like you don't want personal information, but you do need to like meaningfully connect a trajectory of a person's health story to like, you know, specific states of cells.

Like, does the regulatory environment allow for that? Can, you know, are there, are there other practical barriers that would stand in the way? Or do you think that isn't in fact going to be part of the story is sort of all these cells, but also linked to human health stories? Yeah. You know, to be honest, I haven't thought about that question as much. And so maybe, you know, why not? I think, I guess, you know, for one, I've been more focused at kind of trying to get to. that fundamental level. And I think what I worry about if you don't have, I think about like kind

Alex Reevesof what's the right basis for solving the problem. And I think that because if you don't have the right basis, basically what you're going to learn is a bunch of correlations. And so what I would

worry is that we're going to have tons of models of patient health histories, but we're not really going to have a way to link those back to kind of the deeper causal factors in the underlying biology. And that's the part I think that we really have to be able to do if we're going to make this kind of step change advancement in both our understanding of disease, but also in our ability to treat it. So I think you can probably go a long way through health records and getting better care to patients, kind of getting the right drugs and mechanisms that already exist to the right people, maybe opening up people who might benefit from drugs that exist, but we kind of didn't know that that mechanism could be relevant there.

So I think there could be a lot of progress through that. I think that's a really important problem. But it doesn't get down to the fundamentals where I think you really have to make progress to kind of get this real step change. So, you know, Biohub is really focused on that part of the problem, like the fundamental science and how do we go to the point where, you know, there really is no disease anymore. And that's, you know, the only way to get there is going to be by really focusing on the kind of the deep biology and kind of building the technology that can allow us to understand how that is determining for health and disease and, you know, how we can effectively intervene.

Do you anticipate a future where language and biological modalities will be co-trained into joint latent spaces in the way that we now obviously have like text and image? you know when you i say this all the time so listeners have heard it but just to motivate the intuition one more time like it's clear now that when i put an image into a model and i give instructions the model both sees the image in like visual terms and understands my instructions and that creates a new kind of magic that like just having a language model call via you know sort of arm's length tool call to an image generation model like couldn't quite do so do you think that reasoning through language and kind of biology models stay arm's length tool call relationships long term or do we ultimately see like bio encoders that feed into the same reasoning space that we're developing in language yeah that's it's really interesting question I think I think that the truth is, I'm not sure. I think that language is really powerful for reasoning.

You know, it's a substrate for reasoning, for thinking. And the power that language also gives us is to tap into the model of biology that's been created through centuries of kind of human empirical investigation. And all of that is represented in language. It's learnable through language. And I think this very, let's say, expressive full system of knowledge can, I think, really be materialized and leveraged through reasoning systems. I think the challenge will be that the things that we most want to know about biology, they're not represented in text. And they cannot be derived from first principles or from what we already know.

so they're empirical facts that can only be derived by performing experiments and so it's it's it's from thinking about this i think this like core aspect of what makes biology different i think than other other areas where we're building ai that i think will make predictive models of biology critical here now i think i'm not then strongly opinionated or convicted right now on you know is there like a latent fusion of these models are they going to interact with each other in some system or you know kind of ultimately what the end state is of how that works is there one latent space where where all of that is fused together i'm not i'm not sure and i can see advantages to to doing it that way i think at the beginning that will be hard simply because you're going to need a lot of kind of bridging data to fuse those spaces together and we just don't have a lot of it right now but you know could we get there eventually? Probably. So, and that could be very interesting to have a fused latent space. I mean, I think the other really interesting thing to think about is kind of all those features in biology that we don't yet have language or words to describe. I mean, I think protein biology is such a beautiful example of this. You know, we have billions of proteins that

have been sequenced across life on earth. And, you know, we don't know the function for the vast majority of them. And so we don't even really have a language to describe all of that. So, you know, what's kind of interesting about training a protein language model is that, you know, it develops these features that represent protein biology at large. And, you know, they're features. that represent unknown protein biology. And you can imagine those are novel concepts that we don't have words and names for yet. So, you know, there's a great deal, I think, to be learned just through kind of the structure of these spaces.

Okay, no, we're almost out of time. I'll do two more quick ones if we can. One, not to be a dog with a bone on this million Brian Johnson's question, you know, that would be pretty expensive. but if money were no object and you know for some you know rare philanthropist money is maybe close to no object in pursuit of the cure of all diseases is that like a promising paradigm i mean would it be really helpful to just have people who submit to microbiopsies on the regular and just like wear all the centers and do all the things and you know track every dimension that they can track is is that the shape of data that you think ultimately will really move the needle and it's just too hard to get or do you think there is for more scientific reasons like just a more direct path through like scaling cells i mean again i you know i think i just come at it we just come at it from this like kind of frame of really thinking about the fundamental mechanisms But I think that data would be immensely valuable. I just see that, I think, as more likely to happen. I think over time that will happen. I mean, there are some really interesting things that can move the needle there, which is developing the technologies for this kind of continuous monitoring over time.

And actually having those technologies be able to measure more parameters and more molecular level parameters so that you can start to, you know, link that kind of bottom up and kind of top down view. So I think there's, you know, that kind of work is immensely valuable and there's likely, you know, over time kind of convergence there. And, you know, we just think about where as an institution we can really kind of move the needle and we really see ourselves at that kind of technology layer. Yeah, interesting. Maybe less neglected than it seems to me from my outside position. All right, last one, personal health advice.

What are you doing to build up the data set that you need for yourself to be able to take advantage of these future technologies? And what, if anything, do you feel is important for people who want to make sure they're in good position to take advantage of all the things that Biohub and others are gonna discover to be doing today? You know, I'm not the right person to ask for that kind of advice. And, you know, I'm just so focused on my research right now that I barely think about that at all. So no, you're not tracking anything? You're not, no regular blood tests? I have a watch that tracks my sleep.

That's about as far as it gets. All right. Well, we'll check back in with you and see if maybe that's changed as we get closer to the promised land. We're climbing this monumental hill of figuring out how it all works and how we can cure all the diseases. This has been great. I really appreciate the opportunity. Alex Reeves, thank you for being part of the Cognitive Revolution. Thank you, Nathan. Yeah, this is really fun. The size of every sky I read it all before the morning came A million quiet voices And I loved them and I lied Cause half of them were only halfway true I'm so strong In a world too wide to hold it all And I fall, and I fall Into the wonder of it all Oh, I'm so small You cannot weigh an ocean With a teaspoon and a dream You cannot count the atoms in a hand But somewhere in the language There's a sentence, there's a scene A cure that no one's ever said aloud Oh, I'm so small Just a candle in a cosmic hall And I fall, and I fall Into the wonder of it all Oh, I'm so small Don't try to hold the whole of it Just ask the one true thing of it In the morning, oh the morning's floating through And I'm so I'm so small, but the light is getting through it all And I rise, and I rise on the wonder in my eyes

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