Medical genetics

Today, he's actually partner and head of healthcare and life sciences at Breyer Capital, where he invests across healthcare, life sciences, and AI.

But he's also simultaneously pursuing his fellowship training, um, in medical genetics and genomics at Harvard and Boston Children's.

Um, so what I think what makes Morgan's story particularly interesting to me, aside from the fact that he's obviously brilliant, um, is that he hasn't simply moved from medicine into investing.

He's actually built this career where those two actually inform each other.

Now, the second piece I would say is I think a lot of clinicians assume that their only contribution to, uh, industry or to external activities is solely through the lens of being a physician, and I wanna challenge that a little bit.

Of course, being a physician is a huge part of the contribution, but when you come to research, or you come to business, or you come to the nonprofit world, you also have to come with a little bit of a beginner's mindset.

Like, even if I were to receive a pitch today about medical genetics, I'm not going to walk into that meeting saying, "I'm an expert in medical genetics, and therefore, you know, this is wrong and this is right." So it's, for me, I, I love, um, uh, Bayesian statistics, and it's all about kind of training your priors and, and kind of sampling from these different distributions that when it's your time to be up to bat, uh, you've, you've had sufficient experience to draw from to really inform that perspective without being too heavy-handed.

Now, my advice for folks that are in kind of the medical school, uh, s- you know, uh, area of training is, uh, is actually to try to do something else on the side if they think that they have a long-term career interest.

I guess to get started, who's Mammoth? What are you looking to change?

Yeah, so the company was started about eight years ago, spun out of Jennifer Deltner's lab, as you mentioned, really with the goal of delivering on what we see as the promise of genetic medicine.

Maybe like any new technology, anytime something comes out, whether it's AI or CRISPR or maybe even semiconductors or the steam engine or whatever, you kind of... always think everything's going to happen in like the first couple of years.

And I think inevitably people are somewhat disappointed, but for the best technologies and the ones that are truly transformative over the next like five to 10 years, you really do deliver on that promise.

So what... true medical breakthrough do you think would change that? And how close are we really to major progress on these things that people care about most? Like, for example, curing cancer or slowing aging? Like, are we actually pretty close on some of these things in terms of the information that we have now? And we just need to scale some of the solutions through trials? Or is this something that we desperately need AI to help us with through better data and modeling? What's your take there?

Yeah, I think the optimistic view is both in terms of AI and not AI, I think we're very close on a lot of this stuff.

For example, I guess when we started on genetic medicine, I think we're about to see an explosion of that.

And actually, that kind of genetic medicines and CRISPR is perfect for AI.

I was at the University of Chicago.

I was in Department of Medicine, Genetic Medicine.

Mm-hmm.

The chair was a Hispanic dude, a real cool dude.