The Century of Biology

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2023-03-21 23:00:03

Welcome to The Century of Biology! This newsletter explores data, companies, and ideas from the frontier of biology. You can subscribe for free to have the next post delivered to your inbox:

If you enjoy this newsletter, it’s worth knowing that there is an entire conference dedicated to synthetic biology called SynBioBeta. You should consider joining, with the added benefit that I will be speaking this year! For a 10% discount on registration, you can use the code: H7TGP_JC10.

It has now been over a decade since Marc Andreessen first proclaimed that Software Is Eating the World. The software singularity that we’ve lived through between then and now can make Andreessen’s statement seem self-evident. At the time, it wasn’t. In the before times, even tech stocks like Apple were viewed with skepticism, and many analysts were consistently predicting that another bubble was getting ready to burst. This can be difficult to remember reading a Substack article built on top of Stripe payment infrastructure on a 12th generation iPhone, but it’s true.

As the business sectors Andreessen highlighted continue to be digitized, it seems like software is indeed eating the world. Despite all this technological progress, there are important problems that software can’t solve. This list of problems includes everything in the actual world of atoms. You can’t eat or drink software, or use it for shelter. It won’t heal you if you get sick. Biology can.