Industrial Romanticism/ What’s Going on With LK-99?/ “Proton Pump” For Photosynthesis Superpowers/ Navigating Deep-Tech VC/ The Moon Open For Business
Massimo Portincaso
Founder & CEO at Arsenale, Industrial Romantic and Antidisciplinarian Stoic
Industrial Romanticism. I started this week’s intro by writing about Amyris’ Chapter 11 and how this represents the end of one era and the beginning of a new one for synthetic biology. The intro took then a life of its own and morphed into a full-fledged article, which I decided to post separately.
I encourage you to read it, it is called?Industrial Romanticism and The Third Wave of Synthetic Biology. Just in case, here is the TL;DR, for your convenience:
P.S. It looks like LK-99 is most likely not what we all hoped it to be, and there are multiple lessons about the whole stories on which I’ll come back in future issues. The article below still offers a good overview of the potential of such a theoretical material, and emphasizes something I deeply believe in, i.e. that materials innovation will be what will characterize this century, even if LK-99 is not the Room Temperature Superconductor we were hoping for…
A?recent paper?(yet to be peer-reviewed) makes some astonishing claims about a semiconductor that “could be made via some relatively straightforward chemistry” instead of “exotic materials that only work under extreme conditions.” The material is called LK-99, and “all of its constituents are cheap and readily available.” A second paper made similar claims. If either is true, it would be akin to “finding a shortcut to a material that would revolutionize society.”
According to Ars Technica: “It's hard to explain just how strange these experiments are. Under normal circumstances, the superconducting material starts out behaving as a normal chemical and has to be cooled down to the critical point where exceptional behavior emerges. LK-99, by contrast, starts out superconducting and has to be heated beyond the boiling point of water to reach its critical temperature.”
If?(and it’s a big if) LK-99 lives up to its inventors’ claims, it could be “the physics breakthrough of a lifetime.” We could soon be riding “levitating trains as an easy way to commute,” and it’s the “perfect superconductor [to] help nuclear fusion become a reality”. Labs and researchers around the world are racing to reproduce the paper’s results.
And justifiably so…
“A technologically viable room-temperature superconductor isn’t just Nobel Prize territory. If you’ve patented it, it’s incalculable value essentially,”?says?Chris Grovenor, Professor of Materials at Oxford. “It’s transformational on so many things.”
News items:
MIT Senior Research Scientist?Jagadeesh Moodera?stands in front of a custom-built system used to fabricate ultrathin films
MIT researchers?have “created a simple superconducting device” that could “dramatically cut the?amount of energyused in high-power computing systems.” The “ultra-small switch” is about “1,000 times thinner than the diameter of a human hair” and “more than twice as efficient” as similar “superconducting diodes.”
You may not identify phytoplankton — “plantlike single-celled aquatic microbes” — as strongly with photosynthesis, oxygen generation, and carbon capture as readily as, say, the Amazon Rainforest. But the tiny organisms “generate more than 50% of the oxygen in the atmosphere, and they absorb nearly half of the carbon dioxide” and are an essential component of the “food web of the oceans.”
Recent research?finally resolves the long-standing mystery behind phytoplankton’s “unparalleled photosynthetic efficiency:” A “proton pump” responsible for almost 12% of the Earth’s oxygen and 25% of carbon “locked into organic compounds in the ocean.”
It turns out the enzyme behind phytoplankton’s photosynthesis prowess has been hiding in sight for years. Harvard Medical School cell biologist?Dennis Brown?said, ”I find it staggering that a proton enzyme that we have known for so many decades is responsible for maintaining such a crucial phenomenon on Earth.”
News items:
“Godfather of AI”?turned “doomsayer”?Geoffrey Hinton’s 2016 rallying cry to “stop training radiologists now…” because “deep learning would obviously be better… in five years” is an oft-cited example of AI hype. The profession still seems safe for now, but?recent AI developments?like?improved breast cancer detection?may “save clinicians time by maximizing our efficiency, supporting our decision-making, and helping identify and prioritize the most urgent cases,” says?Katharine Halliday, President at Royal College of Radiologists
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OTB Ventures?is a leading deep tech VC firm with almost $300M currently under management. Co-founder and GPAdam Niewinski?recently sat down to provide insights on deep tech’s future in Europe and the current AI moment.
Adam began his “entrepreneurial journey” at?BCG?in the late 90s and “began to see a new phenomenon emerging — the internet.” He left to launch a startup “set [him] on a path to co-founding OTB.” Niewinski believes the current deep tech market “is robust and healthy” and evaluates “about 1,000 investment opportunities a year.”
He sees Europe as catching up to the US in deep tech after years of lagging behind “due to [Europe’s] sluggish and inward-focused corporate culture, which has hindered innovation and limited ventures beyond their comfort zones.”
On AI, Niewinski is optimistic. “I believe AI will help us solve some of the biggest human challenges and take humanity to the next level…. As with all previous revolutions… some [will] lose out and be unable to adapt, but the vast majority will strongly benefit from it.”
News items:
Gene-editing startup?Amber Bio?just “emerged from stealth,” securing?$26M?in seed funding for its Crispr-based “RNA editing platform.” Most Crispr-based tools target DNA. Amber Bio claims that focusing on RNA instead “has the potential to correct a broader variety of genetic disorders while reducing safety risks.”
NASA is heading back to the moon — and “this time it means business.” The?lunar market?is expected to top “$100B… and could be game-changing for humanity.” NASA’s Apollo missions were about?reaching?the moon.Artemis?“wants humans to?live there, work there, and build there.” Ultimately, lunar infrastructure will be “a pitstop on the way to Mars.”
NASA’S?Steve Creech?said, “We want to leave behind a wake of commercial activity and commerce and more routine living and working in space.”
Prachi Kawade, Senior Analyst at NSR, has no doubt “the mood is going to be big business,” forecasting “about $137B in opportunities in the next 10 years, and… about 400-plus missions to be launched during this timeline.”
News items:
Dungeons and Dragons fans?“moved beyond nerd culture”?years ago, and apparently, they’re not geeking out over AI-generated images, either. After an?outcry?among?“skeptical D&D fans”?erupted over a suspect “ax-wielding giant,” artist?Ilya Shpikin?admitted to using AI to “generate… polish… or edit… certain details” of the character pictured above (left). Franchise owner Hasbro?quickly announced?that “artists must refrain from using (GenAI) as part of their art creation process for developing D&D.” Further, a?recent partnership?with “AI-driven” game developer Xplored would not include “the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop roleplaying game or its upcoming virtual tabletop.”
Rafaela Vasquez, the Uber AV test car operator who was “behind the wheel” when the self-driving vehicle killed 40-year-old pedestrian?Elaine Herzberg, pled guilty to one count of endangerment and was sentenced to three-year supervised probation. Herzberg was the first person killed by a “fully autonomous vehicle. Initially, Uber hired a lawyer for Vasquez, but her relationship with her employer went rapidly from “consoling to unnerving.”
Vazquez was busy watching?The Voice?when the fatal collision occurred, and police determined that an “entirely avoidable” incident took place due to her lack of attention. Initially, she was charged with “negligent homicide, a felony that carries a sentence of up to eight years in prison.” The case never went to trial, but her pre-trial defense “was stacked with arguments that pointed culpability at” Uber. NTSB rulings and whistleblower complaints about Uber’s “inadequate safety culture” lent credence to her assertions.
According to Fortune’s analysis of the outcome: “As companies across industries rapidly integrate AI at a breakneck pace, there’s a pressing need to interrogate the moral, ethical, and business questions that arise when human workers increasingly work with and at the behest of A.I. systems they had no role in creating.”
News items:
Recent research?into tumor cell vaccines (TCV) has led to “a flexible and potent design” for inducing an “on-demand” immune response in cancer patients “helps to effectively suppress tumor growth.” The TCV was shown to be effective against numerous “tumor cell lines including breast cancer, colon carcinoma, and lung carcinoma.”?