Weekly Dose of Optimism #200

Conception, Synthetic Cell, Brain2Qwerty, Nuclear Updates, America's Next 250 + Extra Doses

Hi friends 👋,

Happy Friday and welcome to our 200th Weekly Dose of Optimism.

A full 200 weeks after Dan and I started writing the Weekly Dose at the depth of the despair market in the July 2022, the optimism is at an all-time high around these parts. We write this 200th Dose to you on the eve of America’s 250th birthday, just two days after the USMNT beat Bosnia and Herzegovina, a man down, to advance to the round of 16 and the Sixers (finally) fleeced the Celtics in a trade. Welcome to Philly Jaylen Brown. Come join him Lebron. America feels like it’s on fire, because it’s way too hot outside for one, but more importantly because the energy around the World Cup has been exquisite, we’ve played the role of host to the world well, the markets are soaring (if scary), and everyone’s a little happier in the summer.

Since we started the Dose four years ago, obesity has been cured, cars have begun driving themselves commercially, AI has become very smart and useful, there has been a renaissance of atoms companies in America, and multiple new advanced nuclear reactors have gone critical. That was just a quick list off the dome; if you’ve been following along, you know that practically every week is that jam-packed.

And this week is no different, so…

Let’s get to it.

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(1) Conception Bio Generates First Early Human Eggs from Stem Cells

Imagine telling George Washington that in four generations, scientists in the nation he founded would turn blood cells into egg cells, which might become human.

The team at Conception, a startup in Berkeley, is doing just that. The company says it has grown the first early human egg cells, called primary oocytes, from stem cells. To do it, they drew blood, reprogrammed the blood cells into induced pluripotent stem cells, then coaxed those into miniature human ovaries that in turn grow the eggs inside them. Their early eggs went through meiosis, and support cells wrapped each one in a follicle, recreating the defining structure of a real developing ovary. The whole thing is absolutely insane.

In vitro gametogenesis has worked in mice since 2016, when Conception’s collaborator Katsuhiko Hayashi made mouse eggs that grew into healthy, fertile pups. Humans have been far harder, which is why this took Matt Krisiloff, an OpenAI founding-team alum who’s talked openly about wanting a child biologically related to both him and a partner, eight years of trying. The urge to reproduce is one of nature’s strongest, and Matt is putting his to work on behalf of all humankind.

The caveats, for now, are that these are early-stage oocytes, not mature eggs ready for IVF, and clinical use is years away. But what it points to is a world in which we can make as many healthy eggs as we need from a single drop of blood. Elizabeth Holmes weeps.

There will be a lot of debate over the ethical use of these eggs, I’m sure, in the coming years. They will allow for two biological fathers, improve the efficacy of embryo selection (more eggs to choose from), extend a woman’s fertile life (and restore it in cancer patients), compress generations of breeding (no gestation period, theoretically), and de-extinct more animals.

To my mind, it passes the “increase the range and depth of experience in the universe” test.

(2) This Cell Feeds, Grows and Reproduces. And It’s Manmade.

Carl Zimmer and Marco Hernandez for The New York Times

Big week for tiny little cells.

Where Conception took human stem cells and turned them into an egg, scientists at the University of Minnesota created the first synthetic cell with a complete life cycle assembled entirely from non-living chemicals. They call it SpudCell.

For as long as we’ve had biology, making a living cell required a living cell. Cells divide, life reproduces sexually and asexually, thanks to Yamanaka, we can turn specialized cells into iPSCs and then into whatever kind of cell we want, etc…

SpudCell is built different, created in a lab and able to do things like “feed, grow, reproduce and compete with one another for food.”

I would try to compress an explanation of how they did it, but honestly, the NYT does an excellent and visual job and you should just read their version or the 190-pager the lab put out.

Kate Adamala, the lead researcher behind SpudCell, argues that the core functions of life “do not need some magical spark.” With SpudCell, we may be able to begin engineering life from scratch, instead of starting with an E.coli.

Drew Endy, whose belief that “Atoms are Local” and humans should be able to grow anything Elliot has written about a bunch, is teaming up with Adamela on a non-profit research organization, Biotic, that will open source and develop the work with hundreds of scientists. To the New York Times, Endy compared “SpudCells to a biological version of the Wright flyer, the crude plane that the Wright Brothers used to make the first sustained controlled flight in 1903, ushering in the age of airplanes.” Let’s fly.

(3) Meta Releases v2 of Its Mind-Reading Model

Relative to the other two, this is pretty ho-hum, but Meta just released a new version of its model that can read minds from outside the brain and translate brain activity into words. Whatever. Yawn.

(4) Nuclear Race Update

There’s so much happening in nuclear around the July 4th criticality target date that we’re giving it a whole section with the highlights:

• Radiant receives 100 pounds of (not boring capital portfolio company) Standard Nuclear’s medium enriched uranium TRISO fuel for its first reactor

• Aalo loads fuel bundle into its first reactors and begins splitting atoms pre-criticality

• Valar Atomics powers NVIDIA Spark with nuclear power

• Deployable Energy achieves criticality in Unity demonstration reactor

• It looks like Aalo is going to attempt to go critical today.

And it’s only Friday morning… let’s see what nuclear fireworks this weekend brings.

(5) America’s Next 250

By Scott Nolan

I don’t normally include the week’s essay as one of the five main entries in the Dose, but I can’t think of a better way to head into this monumental 4th of July Weekend than by reading Scott’s on how much progress America has made in its first 250 years and what it will take to blow that out of the water in the next 250.

EXTRA DOSES: Science Breakthroughs, RocketLab, Etched