I read this essay with interest as I work at the intersection of biology and engineering; I was disappointed. The essay fails to identify low-hanging fruit in automating biology and fails to explain how their company (Transistor Bio) is "picking" those low-hanging fruit. In retrospect it reads more like a poorly argued marketing pitch than an exposition on interesting and achievable problems in biology automation.<p>The company's website also leaves much to be desired; though they have reinvented the liquid handling robot [1].<p>[1] <a href="https://publish.obsidian.md/serve?url=transistor.bio/business" rel="nofollow">https://publish.obsidian.md/serve?url=transistor.bio/busines...</a>
As someone who used to think a lot of the stuff in here, and definitely no longer does, I can say that this is not someone who is a practitioner.<p>Adam, if you’re reading this, I would definitely encourage you to take a step back and go deep on how you might prove that the problems are where you think they are. The stuff you’re describing has all been done many times at this point and just either hasn’t turned out to be valuable to solve, or now has big effective companies doing it, or is <i>extremely</i> difficult for non-obvious reasons. Your characterization of total doom in modern experimentation is inaccurate.
Putting a layer of robotics over an in vivo organism still has the extreme complexities of an in vivo system at the core. Im not exactly sure what the breakthrough is supposed to be here. I guess I was maybe hoping for a more technical explanation of the bio of what they're doing but maybe this seems more meant as a marketing pitch?
i have been wondering why blood tests have to be so expensive? See [1]<p>Once the human person has interacted in drawing the blood, then a few drops might be needed to do some additional tests, like check for adequate Vitamin D, etc that the doctor did not prescribe, but is still useful to know, and can be an upsell, there should be just a marginal cost to automated machines/processes doing that test.<p>A further improvisation is to be able to track a person's details like past history, current complaints, and make a recommendation to add a few additional tests for a few dollars each?<p>[1] <a href="https://www.letsgetchecked.com/us/en/home-micronutrient-test" rel="nofollow">https://www.letsgetchecked.com/us/en/home-micronutrient-test</a>