Riskgaming Lux Capital

Ever since the invention of CRISPR technology about a decade ago, biologists have gained increasing power to discover new DNA sequences, cut and mash them up, and then print them in ever larger volumes through biomanufacturers. That freedom and openness is the opening to a long-awaited Century of Bio, with scientists bullish on the potential to discover cures to long-resistant diseases.

On the tails side of the coin though, there are fears that the open nature of these tools afford a rebel scientist the means of inventing and distributing well-known or completely novel pathogens that could threaten the lives of millions. It’s not the premise for a bad Hollywood B-movie, but a top security threat that experts at the White House and in the intelligence and defense communities are rapidly trying to solve.

Today, I have Kevin Flyangolts of Aclid joining us. Aclid is using artificial intelligence to identify what new sequences of DNA might do, scaling up screening efforts that might allow biomanufacturers the ability to verify their customers’ intentions in a more thoughtful and comprehensive way.

Kevin and host Danny Crichton talk about the recent history of bio, the rise of biohacking, the differences between bioweapons, cyberweapons and financial crimes, why we need new approaches to biosecurity, whether executive, legislative or industry approaches might work best, and whether designer bioweapons are as dangerous as many are making them out to be.Finally, a note: in line with the launch of our first riskgaming scenario on the Lux Capital website, Hampton at the Cross-Roads, we have officially condensed the “Securities” podcast name into just “Riskgaming,” which I think captures in one word the risks and opportunities that come from science, technology, finance and the human condition. Same show, more focused name and a great future.

Every quarter, Lux publishes our latest quarterly letter to our limited partners, highlighting the key themes we’re working on as a partnership. These topics are — unsurprisingly — bold, as the frontiers of science fiction transition into the world of the possible. But this time around, we’re emphasizing a new thesis that we think combines the future and the past, and might just help the entire world to boot.

Lux co-founder and managing partner Josh Wolfe joins host Danny Crichton to discuss Lux’s new theme of “maintenance.” As Josh wrote, “Maintenance is not about preserving the status quo but thoughtfully fueling forward progress by improving on humanity’s past achievements.” Josh discusses the opportunity with maintenance, as well as why the repair of our society and its infrastructure is a growth industry since “the value of maintaining existing systems grows as entropy accelerates, and as we reach the Entropic Apex, that value becomes concomitantly unbounded.”

This week’s solar eclipse captured the imaginations of millions of Americans throughout an arc across the continent. One of those entranced was Sam Arbesman, Lux’s scientist-in-residence and a local of Cleveland, which sat in the full zone of totality. Sam also happened to live in Kansas City during the 2017 eclipse, so he has (accidentally) eclipsed-chased in his choices of residence.

Briefly, Sam and host Danny Crichton talk about the eclipse, the mesmerizing impact of science, and the unique community that comes together in cities lying in the darkness. Lux is “light” in Latin, and so what happens when darkness descends across the Earth? Surprisingly, something magical and optimistic, showing how science and mathematics has the ability to transmute our passions into something great.

During a recent interview, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang emphasized his interest in how Nvidia’s AI processing chips could transform the science of life. He noted that this science, when properly understood, could evolve into a new form of engineering. Currently though, we lack the knowledge of how the extreme complexity of biology works, nor do we have models — namely AI models — to process that complexity.

We may not have a perfect understanding of biology, but our toolset has expanded dramatically over the past ten years. Now, with the combination of data, biology and AI, we’re seeing the early signs of a golden era of biological progress, with large-language models that are able to predict everything from protein folding to increasingly, protein function. Entire spaces of our map are being discovered and filled in, and that is leading to some bullish scientists and investors to call the period we are living in the century of biology. But much remains to be done, and that’s the topic of our episode today.

Host Danny Crichton is joined by Lux Capital’s bio investor Tess van Stekelenburg. Tess and Danny talk about Nvidia’s recent forays into biology as well as the new foundational model Evo from the Arc Institute. They then look at what new datasets are entering biology and where the gaps remain in our global quest to engineer life. Finally, they’ll project forward on where evolution might be taking us in the future once unshackled by nature.

Astrobiology has seen a series of revolutions over the past three decades that have completely reinvigorated the field. Scientists who were curious about life and biological organisms across the universe once had to handle the so-called giggle factor: the idea that they were kooky crazies searching for UFOs and little green men. With a dramatic improvement to the quality of our instruments and a torrent of new and better data, that giggle factor is now no laughing matter: we increasingly have the means to make progress here like never before.

My guest today is Adam Frank, the author of The Little Book of Aliens and a professor of astrophysics who is focused on improving our ability to identify biosignatures and technosignatures of life throughout the cosmos. He’s just one contributor to a growing community of scientists reinventing our approach to the search for life, a vitality that is leading to the potential first dedicated satellite focused on the search, the Habitable Worlds Observatory.

Alongside host Danny Crichton and Lux’s scientist in residence Sam Arbesman, we talk about the trilogy of revolutions that have brought new vigor to astrobiology, how artificial intelligence is upending the search for life, and what we can also learn about Earth and our climate in searching space for the answers of life.

Humans are enamored by a good story. The world overloads our mammalian senses, and so we seek any simplifying structure to narrate what we are witnessing and make it more accessible for processing. That simplification doesn’t just reduce the complexity of the world, but also makes it difficult to see the extent by which luck drives the successes of our geniuses — and the failures of others. From scientific discoveries and power-law venture returns to legislative breakthroughs and decisions during war, the world is, essentially, chaos.

That might trigger a bout of deep existentialism for many of us, but for Brian Klaas, the hope is that confronting the stochastic nature of the world can lead to better governance and progress. In his new book Fluke, Klaas argues that we need to upend the simplistic statistical analyses and modeling that are common across social science and other domains and replace it with one that can encompass a theory of flukes. That means understanding timing, path dependency, and how the world is a complex system that is far more of a continuous variable than a binary one.

With Lux’s scientist-in-residence Sam Arbesman and host Danny Crichton, we all talk about how chaos rules our lives; how a better understanding of complexity can improve investments, science, and life; Darwin’s luck of publishing his research on natural selection; the dangers of the human penchant for finding narrative; the random luck of our life experiences; and why understanding flukes can be a counterpoint to the ideas of moneyball.