Skip to main content

Nick Myerberg

Aug 3, 2026

7:39
For listeners who've only really followed the headlines, I'd love if you could walk us through the actual history here of, let's say, the first wave of AI-native biotechs, AlphaFolds, the enormous funding that followed, and from where you sit now, what did that first generation actually promise? And then I'd obviously love to talk about what's different this time around.
8:03
Yeah, it's a great question.
8:04
And I think it's really easy to look at AI for biology and say that it began in recent memory.
8:10
And I don't think it did.
8:11
I think biology really spent more than a century creating representations and doing calculations that made a difference.
8:20
You can go back to the early 1900s and look at people like Darcy Thompson, Fisher, Wright, Haldane, Lotka and Volterra doing modeling for ecology and see the early seeds of people trying to produce this computational revolution in, at that time, kinds of biology that were very far from the cell.
8:39
Even more recently, if you look to the 60s through the 80s, we had this massive focus in computational biology and drug discovery in particular.

11 MINS LATER

19:54
Is that the postmortem? Is that we couldn't tell a good model from a bad one? And so capital flowed towards whoever's demo was the most powerful?

We value your privacy

We use cookies to understand how you use our platform and to improve your experience. Click “Accept All” to consent, or “Decline non-essential” to opt out of non-essential cookies. Read our Privacy Policy.