epigenetic includes anything that is not explained by just your genes themselves now if I'm telling you that all your genes are the same roughly speaking but you have completely different cells all across your body then there's a lot that's not explained by your genes
deterministic thinking yes though 0 100 black white life doesn't work that way the point of biology is it's complex anything in a headline that's too assertive it's non biology the biggest issue I guess is that right now we entirely rely on sequencing you Dy the cell up you cannot look at it without
drying it up we're looking at cellular autopsies every single day and calling it a life science and it just feels like there's something fundamental missing [Music] there well hello everybody it's jimo sha with yet another infinite Loops today to's guest is somebody I'm very excited
to chat with it is parmita Mishra the founder of PRC genetics I love that name a combination of precision and genetics you were a former research assistant at Penn Medical you have a degree in computational biology from the University of Pennsylvania you have a
levels with eye distinction in math economics and biology you are a triple maybe quadruple threat type of woman F welcome thank you so much very nice being you here so I I have a particular interest and full disclosure oan Ventures is a an investor in uh parida's uh company uh
the the reason that I was INRI in addition to sharing a lot of your beliefs that we need to uh get to individualized treatments for people and understanding of the epigenetics of your particular human body uh was a 2020 paper that you wrote on the role of epigenetics and autoimmune
diseases uh that's very near and dear to my heart because my eldest sister Le died from lupus in 1971 when I was 10 and my mother had lupus did not die from it thank God uh but back then it was really the dark ages of understanding uh autoimmune disorders at all most of my
siblings and I have uh the autoimmune uh uh Gene luckily in most of our cases it is uh presenting only in a very mild format in my case it's some skin problems and and others and my sister's also super super mild but why don't we start uh assuming you you I don't know if you're a movie fan
but there's a a great movie where uh it's about Wall Street during the crisis and the all of the Quant Geeks are try to explain something to the CEO and who Jeremy Irons and he goes no no no no no please present this to me and make me understand as if you were talking to a
golden retriever so let's start with some let's start with some uh definitions genetics vers epigenetics and there's a major difference and maybe our listeners and viewers would love to hear what that is so I think uh first of all I'm so sorry for your loss um I I I must say
that and um I I'll get into this soon but I fundamentally see disease as an engineering problem from the perspective of the the person treating the disease and it every death that I hear about makes me very angry and um I I'm really sorry that that happened and I hope that we
can make impact in the world um collectively as well as within pressy genetics to ensure that this incident reduces over time with that said regarding epigenetics um I'm going to be saying some things that full disclosure I learned from online from Dr manulis kis who I believe is uh one of the
greatest biologists um living um or dead like he's currently the um head of computational biology at MIT he's a computer scientist and a biologist and here's how he describes it so he's a Greek um and he says um in uh Greek Epi means on top of so you have your genetics and then you have things
sitting on top of your genetics literally as well metaphorically and there's something beautiful actually about how genes work so it back in shinger what is life um shinger predicted uh correctly actually uh to a very great degree that there is this sort of part of your um cell um
that's now known to be your chromosomes and it has something called your AP perodic crystals which are basic basically contain nonrepetitive sequences and um that according to him he believed was the recipe so-called for life or the way I would describe life would be the cell and he himself said
this that it's not just about what you have inside of that Crystal or that chromosome it's also about how it is expressed so interestingly every single cell in your body uh barring you know some cells that don't have genes like uh roughly speaking like red blood cells and then
of course baring your um germine cells like your egg or sperm which have a different makeup they roughly have the same genes and here I am seeing your genes describe how your cell is created but your your cheek cell is very different from your eye cell and the reason for that is the way in which your
jeans are expressed and that is based uh to a great degree on what is sitting on top of your Gene including how your Gene is configured and so epigenetics in short includes anything there's a lot of definitions but the definition I uh ascribed to is anything that is not
explained by just your genes themselves now if I'm telling you that all your genes are the the same roughly speaking but you have completely different cells all across your body then there's a lot that's not explained by your jeans and um I guess the best example I can give
is a switchboard so if you have a switchboard um in your in your house right like where you have all these switches they're on or off well when you're when you have a relatively simple cell um then a lot of those switches are uh tend to be off and then as a cell becomes more and more
complex let's say it becomes a what we call a terminal neuron which is a very complex looking cell it doesn't really look like a blob anymore there's a more and more and more genes that have turned on there and they're specific to that cell and so the idea is that when
something is turned on it is expressed more and then there's also some intermediate states where it's kind of in between being on and off um and and then those are you know much harder to interpret but the biggest issue I guess with uh epigenetics is that right now we entirely rely on sequencing to
understand uh your epigenetics so for for instance we look at um something like methyl groups so C uh ch3 that's sitting on top of like Epi on top of your Gene uh or rather the promoter that comes right before the gene um and the idea is that when you have this methal
group on the uh promoter then that Gene is likely to be off um depending on how many you have and then if you remove them then that Gene is going to be read by your cell and you create the proteins uh you know sort of related to that Gene and it is my belief that the most um
fascinating part about epigenetics is that first of all it gives this level of free will you could say um when I entered College um I didn't know about epigenetics and I did not really I wasn't convinced by biology because I I could just tell that there's a lot of things that you can change
based on different um sort of choices you make in life and then I saw that one slide on epigenetics and introo and my mind was blown because that's exactly what I thought for the longest time is that you can really uh control some things or um at least you have some control That
You Don't See and um the other thing that's uh very exciting about epigenetics is that it is reversible by Nature so the idea is that when you turn on a gene there's no reason from a science perspective why you cannot turn it back off and that adds a level of um
reversibility and um that's something that we were really missing when we were only thinking about crisper because that's something that's hard to reverse so yeah so I love your switchboard uh analogy uh because the first time I came across it and really thought about it I was actually reading
uh it's it's a broadly applicable uh concept because I was reading about um people doing IQ testing or G testing for G and and the author was making the statement that uh like you just said uh it's not that simple right so and then they went into the environment that
someone that had like a what would would be considered a classic high IQ maybe that doesn't get expressed if that person doesn't grow up in a house with lots of books or doesn't have access to a local library or any of that type of thing so it's much more prosaic but I think it's very understandable for Lay
people to understand oh okay I get it right so the environment or what sits on top of uh you're talking about it from a biological sense but it can also include our broader environment yes absolutely so I think when you're thinking about a cell then you're often think you know
biologists use the term environment and people assume that it's just the environment of the individual it can be but it's usually a ular biologist is talking about micro environments right which is all obviously related to each other um I think there is the a place for I guess
there's a little bit of convolution there because people assume that you know if I am around books then that's going to turn on my IQ Gene but then the question I have there is what is an IQ Gene we always like to say that that our genes are affiliated with you know
different uh phenotypes but that's not really how the cell works interestingly um if you think of height maybe onethird of all of your genes are involved in height and that's not the only thing they're involved in it's really uh interesting how people immediately thought as a result of crisper that
we're going to have designer babies and maybe we can change eye color which I personally don't think that that's what crisper should be used for uh at least in the beginning but if you go anywhere further than that you are you know you're Flying Blind you have no idea
what What gene is related to what and um for the most part uh you know a lot of traits are what we call polygenic which means that they are associated with a whole lot of genes and um so it's really hard to say like or measure from a scientific perspective if something is
going only towards intelligence now let's say that I find Gene 100 is actually something that uh is very correlated with intelligence and then I crisper it so that you know the person becomes more intelligent okay well what if that also causes them to lose lung function we have no idea the closest
thing we have is is something called Gene onology which is a project or a Consortium that is uh associated with understanding what every Gene's uh so-called function is and uh the problem of course being that these so-called functions are not about traits they're
about proteins but Gene is just a recipe for one protein um and I think yeah it's it's very important to remember what we don't know and the thing that got me excited about genetics is I realize we don't know most things and um frankly that's a better place to be when you're trying to make
changes in the world that are positive than feeling like we're at the end of biology and we just cannot theoretically speaking uh resolve uh any further things uh in biology so yeah that is very insightful because I've talked to lots of people doing uh genetic studies
and they make the same point uh that you just made and is that one of the reasons why for example there's a lot of work being done around sickle cell anemia about male pattern baldness and and I've had that conveyed to me that the reason I I joke that the the male pattern
boldness one is they're looking for a trillion dollar industry uh yeah but uh but you know despite the joke is it because that th those are not olenic and those are single genes or is that wrong Cel anemia is one of the simplest diseases from the perspective of genetics it is what you would call from
our current understanding almost guaranteed to be your your single Gene and with like the set of genes like Affiliated which is actually why um some of the greatest ideas in biology of this have come as a result of CLE Cel anemia so if you think of crisper highly related to cyle Cel anemia why did
someone pick up that disease and not cancer it's quite simple to meet if you ask me it's because it's simple enough like you you know what to uh what what to sort of Target and you know like a lot more about it than you know about say 30 genes related to one one other
disease and uh the reason why it's like barely clear that cyel anemia is related to this one gene is because if you look at genetic crosses as well um and you you can kind of very perfectly predict you know probabilities of someone having CLE anemia and so on and so forth and uh
with meale pattern bonness though it's very interesting you picked up those two uh examples because male pattern ballus is on the opposite side of of the spectrum it is is you're completely right that it it should be a trillion dollar industry if there's anything in
the world that we should be at least capitalism should be trying to solve it is meal pattern baldness but why is it not solved is a very interesting question it's because we don't know anything about it there's no way that I can go in and I can crisper in a baldness Gene there's no baldness Gene I
can say that with near certainty um in fact one of the studies that I read found 71 uh genetic loai that that was like related to me padn baldness this was done in the UK and then immediately after there were like five papers commenting saying this is wrong about
this study it's not that many genes so um it's really complicated um and it is probably um like epigenetic uh to at least to some degree because it it seems to be associated with stress and so on so forth but um luckily with meale pattern boldness we do have some like transplant
techniques that are just almost starting to work um and also no one's died of meal pattern baldness so yeah yeah when I made the joke I it was uh in in service of the fact that it's often very difficult for lay people who have an interest in all of these fields to
disambiguate I mean like unless they're reading the journals right which tend to be pretty daunting for just your Layman right um the I think the media doesn't do the best job in the world in translating the actual science right over to you know oh what what what kind
of story is going to get a million clicks and that's why I made the joke about male better molds there's also a side right I I if if there was some huge Money Maker then guess who gets interested all the capitalists all of the other thing which then hopefully supports the what I would view as much
more serious work in things like Sickle Cell other genetic disorders what what do you think about that what do you think about the way that sci and and complicated scientific information trying to trying to get it into an understandable format that people let's just say let's
say our target audience is in intelligent humans who have an interest in that right are are there any great popular uh books Andor uh other formats that that people like that could could use to get a reasonably good understanding of this because this is this is all like really complicated
stuff I love that question and a big part of why I started um posting these threads on Twitter is that I realized that at least when it comes I very much stand at the intersection of computer science and biology and um a lot of my friends happen to be Engineers they get
so stressed out when they think about biology and it's funny because that's probably where their skills would be most sort of uh skillable um biology has so many low hanging fruits and every biologist in a lab is looking for engineers who can like you know accelerate their work and I thought that
maybe if I'm able to post some things in a way that's understandable that could make a change and to be honest it really did I've never received any negativity or hatred from any scientist or any lemman about you know those threats that I I've written because it's it's just so
it might seem simple to me what I'm talking about but but for some reason to most people who have not you know been used to that way of thinking it's like this like uh fresh fresh New Perspective I I I like I'll try to I guess um give the most cohesive answer because I
have a very meaningful thing to say here which is that these texts written by biologists and papers they are daunting and they're also not addressed towards someone who is trying to learn um about something they're addressed towards expressing exactly what their method was to to
basically prove or disprove a hypothesis and and they tend to be very like you know verbose a lot more than actually any physics or even chem veper that I can think of and um I don't think that that's the best resource for someone who's trying to learn right I think the most important thing when you're look
like thinking about biology is to start thinking about it from first principles I know that that sounds really scary and you're like no but you're living body is always you know changing I and that's very true but you need to find some structure in the chaos so there's some fundamental
Frameworks that anyone can use to understand any life the first being that life is as far as we know it's cellular and um it has metabolism and the second is that a lot of complex life is actually the brain of the complex life is in the nucleus it's really really hard to find examples um
of I guess like UK carots or more complex organisms where these statements are not true and after that it's I think the best person to read from is actually a physicist and not a biologist and that's herban shinger the reason being that I mean people forget that he predicted
things that ended up winning Nobel prizes decades after right and uh those Nobel laurates gave credit to sheringer so how is that well it's because frankly a physicist can do the best job at expressing biology and analyzing biology because a biologist is more of a person
who is looking at statistics and who's looking at um big amounts of data for example while a physicist is someone who is incredible at looking at something very complex and making like abstracting away and simplifying it so I think um that schinger has probably made
he's probably one of the top five people in terms of contributions made to biology um the other I guess the thing that you would want to keep in mind is never look at your click be news articles I guarantee you if you search is caffeine bad for you the you're G to see it turns out caffeine is very good
for you next article caffeine's going to kill you next article caffeine affects your kidneys next article caffeine solves Bolding the problem with bio is that none of those statements can be true the point of biology is it's complex there anything in a headline that's too
assertive it's not biology because unlike matter which has this um you know kind of repetitive structure your cell is necessarily complex it's necessarily not binary and so yeah I think it's important to remember that that you're not going there are no adults in the
room when it comes to biology like you know there there's no um interview from one expert that's going to tell you everything um and I think that's what I enjoy and that's what frustrates a lot of people so yeah yeah and uh scher's book which he wrote in 1944 he also applied statistical
mechanics to biological systems right and he reasoned that the law of large numbers would in fact hold broadly but that at the molecular level it was still all very probabilistic and and I I love that book for a variety of other things because like you know he came up with the idea
of negative entropy and where where living organisms uh extract free energy from environmental uh sources Etc and he he did you know the a AP AP periodic Crystal predicting DNA uh the uh Crick and watch inite him in their work and and I do find that interesting because
like that was kind of one of my early loves was quantum physics and uh I didn't have the training to go on to the more in-depth books until I kind of learned that you know math is just a language like other languages and if you look at math as a language it it helps quite a bit I'd love your advice on
avoiding any of the clickbait heavy assertions because that's exactly what they are and you're absolutely right and it's just it's such a challenge because one of my main hypotheses is that life is not binary right it deterministic thinking yes though zero 100 black white it life
doesn't work that way life is mostly in the maybe category of many of your uh the things that you cited as well what one of the things that I do that has proven somewhat helpful is I'll take academic journals and I'll put them in a large language model and I'll say
explain this to me at an eighth grade level and that that can be really really helpful because you're right many academic papers oh like they're really really uh chur and often uh using lots of words that uh people have to look up um and you know there's another uh a guy have you read James Summers I should
have Lov biology article I have not actually okay I'll just briefly uh tell you he's like man we don't teach biology right because he's saying you know I I had to memorize chemical formulas but nobody talked about Evolution like from a single cell and he goes finally when I
read go leer Bach which is one of my favorite books as well by Douglas hopstad he said he used this evocative language where he one of the examples was cells are recursively self-modifying programs DNA makes RNA RNA makes proteins proteins regulate the
transcription of DNA to life programs he goes this is like this is like a list program and you know it's and and but but the outcome is kind of the source code of life um what what do you think I think that um that that's a very interesting way of putting it my one analogy that I made on
Twitter just randomly was um about how um if you were to compare you know um let's say protein is your um hardware and um you know your um DME is your software then your already is kind of like your machine code and the IG gentics is kind of like this programmable uh like an fpga um and I
think like thinking about jeames as code is very fascinating but maybe it's about the time when I came into biology being this very precise like late uh 2010s um to be clear I I've been a biologist since I was five like my my my parents are doctors like you know that's
all I care about but more academically when I came into it I I got very frustrated because everyone was talking about genes and genes and genes and I understand that you know genes are important and the code and you know like this idea of thinking of it as a
recursive mechanism across the Dogma it's important information theory is important because it's kind of like your your um even across time across generation that's the transfer of information but nothing about any of that felt convincing because it completely lacks the dynamic aspects
of life and this even goes down to how we measure life uh which is a big part of what pry genetics is about um because when you think about measuring life you want to think about genes you think about sequencing no one ever like just sits down and thinks we have the sequence of
the cell but the cell is gone we just got one time point and the cell is gone you're the only way that you can look at a cell at a subcellular level that's popularized being uh your electron microscopy you Dy the cell up you cannot look at it without drying it up where is the dance that is actual
life we looking at cellular autopsies every single day and um calling it a life science and it just feels uh like there's something fundamental missing there and um I think the same thing applies to you know looking at I guess how research is done right now right so um this kind of like on a tangent but I
think about how every single research paper today is kind of inspired by alumina because Illumina came in early uh well 1998 it started for the first year four years it was doing its scan as a service it was it basically created a way of sequencing that kills the cell
and um it's incredible what they did don't get me wrong but imagine if there was no alumina like no one thinks about wh what would we be doing in biology if there was no Illumina if there was something else that happened instead of Illumina and so I think in general I realized
that we are kind of completely dependent on the people who come up with the hardware we're completely dependent on people who come up with the way we measure things and we never see another version of reality where we have another measurement if we did then all these
Brilliant Minds who are in you know the MIT Brad who at pen who across the world they might have a much better lens into life and we might find that all of our analogies just don't mean anything and so we might actually go back to the theoretical and rethink how we think of
life so yeah I think that you know it's a bit of a tangent but but it's important to remember how many assumptions we make and then forget about because we keep putting ourselves on that same system until we forget that passing thought we might have had in our heads which is oh wait all of this data
like all two pedabytes of this data is it it killed the cell you know I do and and that's what attracted me to you and your company I I I always think I've used the metaphor a lot that most of the things that we make decisions on are in fact snapshots and a much better way to make
decisions broadly not just in biology but in business in a variety of things in life is to look at a movie right and so for example that informs our hiring process at osv everyone starts out uh on a contract as uh you know they'll be there for six months that gives us a
much broader scope of their talents their deficiencies how well they fit in ETC because like what what happens if you to to make the analogy of doing a single cell and killing it what what happens if you found somebody that was absolutely like perfect they're going to make a great teammate they're
going to be ideal they're going to fit in perfectly and you happen to interview them on a bad day and that snapshot guides all of what you think about them and these are in many respects very unconscious processes that we aren't even aware of ourselves and and so this
gets to also what I found really interesting about your research you're you're looking for a way that lets us generate comprehensive data across spatial and temporal Dimensions which I think is obviously uh incredibly important and and you you have you had a quip that I actually liked which is
think about it as like developing a very very good camera talk a little bit about that please some of this is actually inspired by what is life u i I keep coming back to that book but great book by the way it's a Bible to me like it's it's like you know from a scientific like a
scientific Bible to me a lot of the and and I'm not saying it contains everything right like the the mistake we make as we we see a book like that we think oh all of these predictions are already done no there are things there that haven't been predicted yet or we
think this book contains everything there's no more thinking left to do no I might not be any like Stringer but there's things that I know that he did not know so I can reason from that perspective but I will say that one there's this very small like you know paragraph where he talks about how and
this is before sequencing of course right the way that you can interpret jeans there's only two there's the genetic Crossings like mendal did that he talked about and then there's microscopy and then he at some point uh soon after said the chromosomes are they're
definitely not static because um some of the cell they had swollen chromosomes and I'm sure that that leads to like a you know different way in which uh they're red in the body and so on so forth and a lot of uh epigenetics of course uh being kind of also spatial as well as temporal of course I think uh
that led me to realize that um Imaging and uh also like more advanced forms of Imaging are probably the best way in which we're going to be able to reduce the Observer effects and uh actually measure life so if you think about it from the perspective of say your blood
glucose monitors uh they're becoming a thing now and um I I mean both my parents um they're both uh my dad's a cardiac surgeon my mom's a Pediatric Cardiologist and doctors have a lot of stress so they ended up getting type two diabetes and um what they have is a system where if they eat something and
it's increasing their sugar immensely then they know not to eat that specific thing because they have their freestyle Libra that's continuously telling them what's happening in their bodies and that is kind of like a movie as well but it's a movie where you or you know there
are people who have autoimmune disorders they completely avoid food as a whole because they went on a juice diet at some point and they stopped having irritable bowel syndrome and I just wonder maybe it's something very specific in your food but you have no way of knowing at all the best look into
your body you have is your eye we we've not come up with anything better and so I think that the point of calling it a camera is that even cameras are kind of very fit to the way your eye sees things um meanwhile if you have a camera that's more based on your first principles understanding of
matter and of cells and uh uses you know Ai and machine learning then you're able to basically just look at uh it not as red green blue but as uh waves and then when you reach that point then you're able to basically understand things at a chemical specific level and chemistry is
something we understand way better than biology right so I think um the point of having a very very good camera is that a camera does not um you know it doesn't have a knife attached it doesn't like you know the kind of a it affects what's being seen everything affects everything
but it does not uh stop it it doesn't stop the process from happening and um then it being very very good uh comes from the fact that you're looking at uh things from a chemistry perspective and uh then being able to correlate them with biological processes in a way
that's I guess a a more advanced version of a glucose monitor so yeah yeah and what what I like about that idea is uh the idea of like the lens you look through often determines what you see right and for example I'm a big fan of Bucky Fuller and and he said that these things are
often just the difference of being tuned in and not tuned in and he used as an example the microscope and he said before the microscope uh we didn't know anything about microscopic life and then the inventor was like holy there's a whole different world down there and
and it takes us a long time to build in those insights and you know I often think wouldn't it be cool if we could give people glasses that would allow them to see the entire you know electromagnetic spectrum of light rather than uh what we see with just our odds that's why I've been a huge the pit
viper the pit viper can see in thermal uh ir and then the B can see an ultrav Viet and um it's just human beings why do we call invisible light that part of the spectrum because we can see it that's the only reason exactly and and and that is that's a great jumping off
point for all we're missing we we we tend to think that uh the visible light spectrum great example well the visible light spectrum for human beings right and it's very different for other living creatur as you just pointed out and and so one of the reasons why I'm so excited about
the current ERA is I think that we are gaining the tools large language models other AI models the ability to make a better for lack of a better word camera that can interact with all of these other Innovations as well to open our apertures to be able to see much much
more and accomplish much for you made the point earlier that we're really at uh the beginning and not the end I could not emphatically agree with you more I think that this idea that well yeah we know all there is to know about anything is such a crazy crazy thing to say I I I
think that it's saying like super intelligence will solve cancer okay H how will we reach there how how does even you don't know what cancer is how will the superintelligence know what cancer is like it's crazy and it's like the the meme from South Park right start up uh you know get
investors uh you know then there's a blank at number three and then it goes bro down right so like this this idea that I love that example too right it's like all when whenever I hear people going on about super intelligence I know I'm listening to a marketer or somebody
with something to sell because like of course in the human mind well of course super intelligence will solve cancer really yeah how how How's that gonna happen and and and like we do not have a working definition that is testable that's a testable hypothesis for human consciousness right like
there's a lot of competing uh ideas about it but we do not have a generally accepted theory about why human beings are conscious we have like no theories about qualia right qualia is you know the spell of the Rose or when you walk into a cedar closet it brings you right
back to your childhood or the one I love to use because people are familiar with it is the Pixar movie where the critic Ratatouille the the critic is sour and hateful and everything's bad had and then the they serve him the ratou and he's instantly transported back to his childhood so there there are all these
things it's really easy to make these kind of bold huge statements but like and they're appealing to people who are like yeah super intelligent is going to do that yeah that's gonna happen well it there's a lot of steps in between those which brings me back to to your company what are you what are you hoping
the the first things that you're uh going to be able to work on solve and then build on so yeah I think some of that is um you know sort of things that um I guess my lawyer has made it very clear that I should be a little bit more abstract about at this point um but what
like which is why I kind of um like to discuss it from an approach perspective um what I do aim to from a more high level uh thre Express is that the reason why Chad GPT and large language models worked so well and why they were able to work on something like code specifically
really well is very well understood it is because all that information sits in the on the internet if it did not sit on the internet already if code was not something that a computer was so easily able to interpret because that's quite literally how you interact with a
computer then it may not be half as good and understanding code and being able to help with code or solve code and we might find that there's much better Frameworks for coding and AI because it's it's expensive from a comput perspective to use LMS for that
but the reality is that the biggest flaw in the statement that ASI is going to solve science is that we don't have the data to give it for science um the barriers to data collection are so incredibly high that you have to kill the sample to measure it that's where we are this is I mean if
I were an alien and I were told to you know come to Earth and this is what I saw I would just think how did you solve any disease at all how have you done anything whatsoever and it's a great question and I think that the other thing is all of your greatest biologists are fundamentally also constrained to
mice right like uh there's a lot of Regulation that come into the picture and as much as I respect the FDA I will say that the way that uh regulations and thinking in general Works in medicine is very different from biology you might think they're the same thing they're
fundamentally different and I think that if you're able to create non-invasive techniques to be able to uh dynamically measure disase States or what I would like to call is life States then you're finally entering a new era and it's just the beginning like you know there's a
lot to build on top of it where you even have any shot at an ASI you know solving cancer right now I mean as someone who has worked on a lot of cancer data you have one or two time points per patient in the cancer genome Atlas if you have more then they're still not very
continuous and they often um you know are is are not very whole uh you know it because that kind of data is very expensive and so I think that um being able to start seeing biology from a first principal's perspective being able to reduce your barriers to data collection um involves the use of
something that does not need a biopsy it does not need tagging it does not need staining and uh it kind of leaves something unperturbed so I think that's um that that's what we're working on and then the the specifics of it are things that I guess Jim you will know before
anyone else and then of course the world would uh you know find out soon after fuson yeah that leads me to another question which is the intersection of reg ulatory bodies who let's face it are populated by people who basically don't have very deep knowledge of the various
Sciences Etc I have a friend who proposed um the idea of setting up specific uh his idea was for courts uh but I think it's more broadly applicable it could be done for regulatory uh bodies as well the idea he had for courts was like in medicine let's let's have people with deep both theoretical
and practical knowledge in the matters that The Regulators are trying to write regulations around at least that would be an improvement from where we are now what what would you see as uh a a good way for those that regulate the type of research that we are doing to refocus and and understand that maybe
they're doing more harm than good with a lot of their regulations that are prated on Research uh in this particular area as someone who's been speaking with the kind of FCA um you know um as well as people who are involved with it you know of course that's a big part of my job
and um to respect them uh you know even if I want to see reforms uh I'm the kind of person who wants to do things as robustly as possible from what I get uh for you know my interactions and this is just my intuitive sort of sense I think they want our job to be
harder I think they want to increase the complexity as much as possible so that once the clearance occurs like you know everyone is convinced that the high standards are met and I don't think that that's an approach that will stand the test of time one of the reasons why it's hard to
have a biologist be a part of the FDA outside of the wing that you know deals with mice and uh nonhumans is that FCA is not interested in mechanisms of action so this is the biggest thing that really shocks me but FDA is only like you know interested in efficacy and safety the problem is that
safety and efficacy tell you nothing about mechanisms of action it's all statistical so it's all about what results you get from a trial there's very little foundational biology involved if you think about some of the most popular drugs in the market and then just to make clear to anyone
listening this is not to say that you know uh there's not like there's not high standards and I I am not of the belief that everyone should just say no to any medication I mean both my parents are doctors I I definitely don't feel that way but this is just to like you
know try to have a more balanced opinion if you think of ssris that are used for you know depression um medication if you look at even your skin care products um that are prescribed anything that you can think of even Tylenol we don't know how these things act in the
body again you need a very good camera to fix that by the way but um we don't know anything about how any of this works in the body and all they're interested in is in this cohort you show efficacy and this codor you showed safety many times a lot of the medications that we use for one
purpose were actually you know made for another purpose so for example a retinol um was you know made for more acne related concerns and then uh people were I I believe were try were making it their hands started looking a lot younger and that's how they realized that this is an
anti-aging uh sort of medication monoxido which was for hypertension and uh you know cardiac issues suddenly people started growing hair like crazy so um it's really important to remember that the fdaa is more of like a a health thing than a biology thing we don't use most um
medications it's approved by the FDA in our biology Labs on zebra fish because there's just too many factors that we don't understand about how it's going to act inside the zebra fish so um I think that for that uh there's a much more frame shift change needed to even in the
philosophy of the FDA for us to ever get to a point where it is able to I guess be willing to have any changes and so with that said I will thank them for at least ensuring the safety of human beings by not you know approving absolutely anything by you know as someone someone who comes from a
country where there's a lot of corruption in you know other ways I'm grateful that you cannot just bribe the FDA uh to like you know get them to approve something but I think that um it's going to require a lot more than scientists to change how things are structured so
yeah that's the the ever political interaction with the The Sciences is a very difficult thing often to disambiguate and and promulgate better regulations better guidelines Etc because everything you said is true the same is true of aspirin right like I I had a doctor once say to me I
don't know if this is correct or not but I love the I love the uh reference he was like yeah uh if you put aspirin in front of the FDA today they wouldn't approve it and I'm like wow are really and he's like yeah and then I had an anesthesiologists tell me don't even get
me going on anesthesiology in terms of uh the various compounds and and and why they work that's why I'm excited by efforts like yours that understand this and understand that we need to build better processes better cameras to use that met for to not just simply follow along the way it
has been because I think you're absolutely right noninvasive now that we have the tools that we can use non-invasive techniques it just seems to me like what a better way of looking at a lot of things right and what what what would you like if you had a wish list what would be
several non-invasive uh Technologies or Innovations uh that could um profoundly affect the way we understand things like um diabetes like a variety of the diseases uh that um people struggle with on on a daily basis I'm very grateful because I'm probably one of the handful of people in the world who
have deleted my wish list and added all of them into my to-do list and um I think that it is the most incredible thing that's ever happened to me there are some things though that I definitely am not uh you know I guess we are not as a company touching and I can definitely
talk about those um the greatest thing or the greatest sort of challenge that we have for non- invasives um when it comes to cognition and thinking and neurodegenerative disorders of the skull and um there's you know I think Sam Alman is uh someone who got quite interested in
uh like doing something similar to nurlink just without the invasion and that's fantastic uh but there's really unless it's a it's first a measurement company and not like immediately going into trying to change how the brain works it is going to not be able to do that many things at this
very moment the the most important thing that I wish that you know we could understand better is the brain and how it works dynamically it is shocking to me that a person has to go uh to you know a psychiatrist to check for say bipolar disorder or ADHD or and number
of diseases and we're using DSM 5 to figure it out without doing a single pet scan without doing because we don't know how to calibrate how to you know kind of ensure that we I guess um to ensure that we have the right sort of uh you know uh look of things uh everything
is fundamentally limited by the fact that there isn't an Illumina equivalent um that is like a platform that someone's created that's scalable that's manufacturable that every lab has you know to like look at the the brain scan uh without also causing uh mutations or
a possibility for cancer for example which um x-rays re ly have come under Fire because surgeons um are beginning to see some tumors in one side of their um to brain and um that is you decide that that was more exposed to x-rays over time as they did the scans for people so um yeah I think that that that
would be the most important thing that would uh make the most difference but I do think that if neuralink takes that direction because they're already adding something to the brain they might be able to get us a little bit forward um in understanding uh brain
Dynamics just by virtue of having that uh in the brain other than that I think uh the main other thing that I would look for is ways to completely and this is something we are struggling with but are have been able to actually overcome uh which is different skin colors right so if you're looking at
anything non-invasive like the Apple watch has come under Fire for this it doesn't work as well for certain skin colors one of the most important things for our mission has been to ensure that everything works equally well for every skin color because that's the bare minimum like
after that you want to make it work for any organism after that you want to make it work for through the F of a mouse so um yeah I think uh those are the two things that are incredibly important and have really made me realize the importance of physicists and Hardware engineers and uh getting us to the next
stage of uh I guess our future so yeah I was thinking as I was listening to you um this this is your first startup right um that that you're the you're the founder of H how has that experience been where you where you're talking to potential investors who who have varying
levels of understanding in the sciences and in the particular way you want to pursue your goals like how how's that how's that gone for you and and what has surprised you the most about some of the reactions that you pered both positive add negative oh that's that's a great question um
mean I think that I'm the kind of a person who almost was me to start a company I feel like um I remember this one time when I was really concerned about making my next decision for in life I had an offer that was you know very lucrative um in in like uh conversational biology but I uh for for
a job but I just uh I was very kind of confused and um Gary ten who was the coy commentator uh and I've known him through Twitter for a while was gracious enough to get on call with me and he just kept saying you need to start a company uh it's it's like very
obvious uh you you just need an idea and you need a co-founder he he said that three times get an idea get a co-founder get an idea get a co-founder and I just ended the call with I've had an idea for three years um so I I have an idea and I just thought if Gary 10 is telling me to
start a company that I better start a company right so I when I did I was so every day I felt like a gift I finally feel like I'm I'm doing exactly what I needed to be doing everything is culminated in this moment and the most uh rewarding part about it is that from a scientific
and Technical perspective although I haven't talked too much about what our techniques are I have them I have them the minute that I started the com I I had been thinking of them for multiple years and I think that the most the the biggest thing that I felt is gratitude and energy um
and ability to write it's it's almost like getting a better pen uh you know to write the future you had like a pen that was skipping and then you were able to get this like um you know M BL like uh kind of fancy fountain pen that you're using to write the future and autonomy which has
been something that I've I've ended up doing better at than I realized because I didn't I think I'm I'm good at making decisions but also making them in a measured way so that that's been great um in terms of the things that surprised me and how it's been going so I'll start with the
ladder how it's been going has been um a lot of I guess uh overdoing things working a little too hard um yeah I know I sound like you know one of those people who's in a job interview and someone says what is your negative tradeit they just say oh I work too hard
I'm like that's not actually a negative tradeit but no I mean it it's like you I'm a person who's very obsessive and I I have been kind of like you know working a little too hard and learned balance and that's that's been interesting but um it's in terms of the things that shocked me first of all
um people are a lot more open to things even before they're fully made um than I realize I come from a science background where everything cited everything already is done and then you're like citing it but here I I I needed Capital to be able to you know um create
something it's not a science it's an engineering thing and people are very receptive to that people understand that and people are willing to support a mission by its team and by the um rigor of the science involved so that so that's been very fascinating and I I I
did not think that um I guess funding would go so well so quickly I thought there would be a lot of impossible tasks to get to that point and and it's it's really been uh really really uh kind of rewarding experience to um learn to have the confidence to put an idea out there not even having
the citation in in hand yet but but but like explaining how it is obvious that that it's going to happen kind of a thing um the thing that that's been difficult has been how a lot of investors um would ask is there regulation involved and then immediately it's like okay we
can all talk further and it doesn't make any sense to me because when you're thinking about sort of you know venture capital and you're thinking about um ideas that are going to change the future you cannot have a short shortterm thinking because if something easy to make like you know
the next day then someone else is going to make the same thing but if there's you know IP involved there's regulations involved and it becomes a medium-term thing then it's it's more uh it's like you know the idea is protected the company's protected and you're working
in something so essential that no matter what the demand is going to exist so it was it's really shocking to me how even V Capital can be risk averse which um I understand it's because a lot of people have been burned by you know like something not working out or someone being dishonest but for people who are
very honest and very um fired up about an idea I think that regulation should not be you know a sort of uh yes a binary thing where if there's regulation involved we're not interested you know for that very reason we call what we do at oasi ventures ad Venture Capital
which was one of the earlier definitions of venture capital um because I I agree completely with that notion that once something becomes like a big asset class like Venture Capital has become uh risk averse uh things start to kick in and to me it's kind of like that it's losing the whole point right like
from our perspective the reason we're interested in you and your company and and other companies that are quite speculative is because they are quite speculative because how can you tell tell how can you tell until somebody goes on a mission to discover that new
thing and you know another at one of the earliest terms for Venture Capital which I love love was Liberation Capital because it was the idea that there are a lot of people with great ideas who just aren't going to fit into the uh corporate environment to the hedonic treadmill who are you know very very
different than you know the average person who wants to go out and get a great job and and whatnot um and so I I that's the very essence of what you're doing that intrigues us and and why we invested in your company uh knowing full well that if you fail in this okay what will we learn will some
learning come out of it I think absolutely yes and and so this whole idea that um people who shy away or fear failure I think you know failure is a ladder it's it is the only way that you can climb and see further and see further and see further right and I just
don't get this inherent fear of failing like every every successful person I know has had a long series of failures by some included I even wrote a thing about it that I called mistakes were made and yes by me yes I I I was gonna say that you know the minute that you sort of had mentioned that um if I
failed then then like there would be a lot of learning I think that I have the right mindset in this which I try to convey to everyone that I know as someone who I don't know like I had a very sort of perfectionistic mindset uh going into college um moved countries uh you know
um H sort of before I turned 18 I was like in a in a whole new country and got Mis diagnosed with a disease needed a surgery need to take a year off covid happened lots of traumas happened in my life and I the only thing that um kept me going was I'm never going to regret
anything I did not know how to code coming into college I ended up you know teating multiple uh grad level computer science classes the only reason is because I got misdiagnosed needed a year off and I thought people will pity this that I had such a perfect you know like
understanding of what I wanted to do and then you know this sad thing happened but I I'm I don't want to regret a single thing in my life that's the only like ask I have of myself so I ended up learning how to code that that's the only thing that felt right in my heart
and I coded like the entire day that's all I could do from a hospital bed I would cat the entire day and ended up you know making that my whole life in many ways and uh if I go back I would never change anything I I would want to you know go with that path and I think that you
know in many ways the values of a company are not defined by how things are when things are going well what is said on a website they're defined by how the company acts in an impossible situation and I don't think that there will be a failure because for that you would have
to say Okay this is a failure we give up uh meanwhile as you said every single thing has you know a learning involves and there's always a way to create leverage um out of any circumstance that you know or any hand that's dealt to a company to a person and the mission is so broad that if an
engineering concept doesn't work it's not like we're creating a a drug for a specific kind of cancer right that's something where you fail or you don't fail well that's arguable too but you know you can like come up with something else but um when you're really truly every day you wake up and you're
blinded by your mission then you're not married to a technique whatever it works best you go with that uh our advisers are some of the smartest sort of people in the world in our field and if they say you're making a complete mistake and you genuinely care about your company
you're not going to keep going you're never going to go to someone and say hey this is working when you know it's not working because you don't care about where you are you care about where you want to be and as long as we have that going I I cannot come up with any reason
why this company's going to fail personally and that I I don't think that I'm supposed to have any other attitude to it either like you know I do and I like your uh I'm I'm uh because I identify with it I'm a kind of a burn the ships kind of guy uh when I start companies I kind of burn all the other
ships and go all in and get on that boat and and you know that can be seen from outside as being rather Reckless and not having a plan B and whatnot but I definitely think that uh I I love your philosophy around you know what you did with coding when when you were in the
hospital that that resonates with kind of the Nan view of a Mor fat love your fate and the idea that um you know that which does not kill you makes you stronger it's also nii but yeah the the thing that we found as a trait in Founders that we really like and and have succeeded is agility is the ability
to recognize you know what this this idea that we were trying doesn't work but here's what we learn now let's pivot and try it this way right so we have an author because we have a book company too infinite uh books and we have an author uh who has a great line which is perfection is a 100% tax
so I I I was happy to hear you say that you you kind of cured your perfectionist ways I was I was an obsessive perfectionist when I was younger too if you can't get over that you're not going to accomplish much I think uh and so but it's a nice the also the idea
of obsession that's another thing we we do a lot of uh studies on you know what makes an entrepreneur uh very attractive to us and OB obsessiveness is definitely on that list it's very easy to be obsessive when you're trying to approach disease States right
especially and this is something actually at some point I wanted to mention in this podcast which I brought up earlier about um disease and how i' see it as an engineering problem right um I think that I'm an only child and both my parents are um extremely accomplished doctors but my
dad comes from a village he didn't know English um at at the age of five he decided that he's going to be a cardiac surgeon specifically he has seven degrees including three honorary degrees now but no one in their right mind could have seen him out of all people reaching
that level that did come however with me kind of seeing that seeing both my parents be extremely busy all the time and feeling like it's my birthday but someone's dying so I'm not celebrating cuz my my my both my parents are busy and in India I mean the number of patients you see is
unbelievable and a lot of people I guess when I was growing up saw all of that and thought that I was kind of you know someone they should pity because even though I have this sense of monetary security um my my family is super busy I don't I don't agree what I saw every day
was miracles happen my my my grandfather is a 107 and he is one of the healthiest and happiest people I know and he he also lives in our house and having my parents um around has been very helpful because uh if he's ever feeling unwell um my mom is able to you know point that out
before it gets too bad and in total my mom and dad combined have saved 50,000 lives uh my dad has done tens of thousands of cardiac surgeries and gotten people out of circumstances that would basically mean a dead sentence at another time in in history and like there's no question about it
and after seeing that every single day sometimes being in the hospital after going to school and seeing and many times you know um they failures as well and and a p then you're able to see your parents like think through that and why that happened and use that to ensure that you know they
can offer the best care possible and after seeing those kinds of Miracles for so long I I can't sit here and say that death is a given thing I've seen people be saved from the mouth of death since I was born and so I think that um when you're working on something this
meaningful and trying to approach it from a different angle and you look around and you see that everyone's just creating drugs they're creating therape but no one knows what they're treating there is no failure or success at all involved it's just data it's just knowledge and uh yeah I think
that that's been the biggest blessing of my life is being able to see how meaningful biology is being able to see how meaningful medicine is and seeing impossibilities and realizing that they're not impossible because one day they you you didn't even know that a disease existed right
so I think yeah I think it's it's the kind of thing where as long as I believe that I was destined to be working in this and I want everyone to be working in this I I don't think that there's anything that I will ever worry about so yeah that's wonderful to hear and uh the
uh I I just absolutely have such admiration for people like you because the idea that we are even at the beginning right of understanding I I I just think that's one of the most poisonous ideas that can pollute a mind right like that that oh no no we know all there is to know about and fill in
the blank right it it especially in in much more complicated Fields like the one you're tackling but like you know if if if we had a time machine right and we could go back call it let's not even go back too far let's go back 400 years and we could collect like the smartest most
learned people in the world guess what we're gonna find almost everything they spouting and saying was wrong right yeah like and and and it's so weird to me that we can understand it historically but we can't understand it for ourselves right like imagine let's go forward 500
years instead of back 500 years I mean maybe maybe they're going to look at us and think what a bunch of Barbarians how could they have ever done like that like your point about yeah you're killing the cell to study it um and and and so I'm very motivated by uh projects and companies uh and and
missions like yours because I love seeing and helping where I can people who have that attitude about things your attitude which is come on we we we're just starting in our understanding of this you know we're at the starting line here and so I find it incredibly exciting and we are uh
delighted to be part of your adventure here well I'm I'm getting I'm getting the uh I have an electronic you know how they give the hook people on a stage and uh so I I can't believe that we've already been talking for an hour and a half but um before before we go I
just a couple other questions um the other thing that's remarkable about you and I think you did a Twitter threat on this is you moved here from India and like you I I that was another thing by the way when we were deciding that we were going to invest in you what there's a there's a
fun idea that's mostly apocryphal I think but there might be something there which is uh there's a book called The hypomanic Edge why America is the way it is and the book makes the point that hey people who were the original people not not Native Americans but but the people
who came here did they share any characteristics um that maybe weren't typical of people from the country they came from well yeah they were willing to get rid of leave their family and friends leave the world that they were un that they knew well and come to an uncertain future
to having to make a whole new group of acquaintances and friends in other words these people maybe were quite a bit different in the selection sample than the people who stayed at home I what what was your biggest uh and I know you did a thread on this but like when when
you came here to America what was the what were what were the biggest surprises for you in uh in in the country so I was very lucky to be able to come to America by going to pen and even after coming to America I will say that I had the option of comfort which would be frankly like doing what like the
force of nature at like these I universities is go do a consulting job just just go and become a consultant but luckily because I you know also have some I guess like neurod Divergence and um I just couldn't cannot do things that that that aren't exciting to me and uh
so I ended up becoming more and more technical and when I first came here I was worried that I'm going to be treated differently because I'm from another place but what I realized is that when you're involved in sciences and technology and just intellectual things
then the most beautiful part about it is that people forget who they are talking to who they are themselves because you're talking about something a little higher and I frankly have never experienced any albertly kind of dismissive of me uh not even once um the only thing that I think
I experienced a little more was a different way that some peers would look at me as a woman in stem as compared to a man in stem but like um I guess some of that is I'm benefited from the fact that a lot of stem there's a lot of Indian people who are interested in stem
but even at that I think everyone's very objective and interested in you know productive things that that's what I noticed um and um so I think that I I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that there was it's almost like the culture of America to uh not care about your background but care about you know
things like for example part of the Constitution is that religion is not governed by the country right that doesn't mean you cannot be religious that actually means that you can be freely religious and however you want to be religious and that is none of the business of the government so if if you
start out a country with that mindset then you think oh my God the church was everything there was so um what are you going to be thinking about as a country it ends up being ideas it ends up being uh the people themselves that's like absolutely beautiful uh part of America
America and um I think it was hard uh especially um I guess it's just like uh I was very young you know and I I I thought I knew everything as every 18-year-old things and so there were lots of learning experiences uh lots of I guess um traumas like leing a surgery and all these things
and but then most important part of it was that I I was able to come out of them and and in America you're actually very much if you fail in America then that is part of being American or that's part of being in in America and um that that's a unique thing about America is that as a
country it's so open to failure because that's how the greatest you know stories are written um finally I would say that I realize that I can not rely on anything outside of myself um in America but not in a bad way in a way that's like this country is accepting of all the crazy ideas right
it's accepting of the wildest people and you know wildest dreams but at the same time it requires your 100% focus on your mission on your goals in America there's not as much of a Family Focus as there is a focus on say working with people um there's an individualistic mindset but
that's up until you you reach something you're building when you when you want to build something you're you're going to find people who are going to put that above anything else and I think that's what makes America so productive that's what makes America so beautiful and it
is something to preserve is uh the privilege of being able to in a very undistracted way just give everything away and work on exercising your freedom to create the future that's the way I would put it lovely uh and I've always often said to really understand America
is what the words you use you need to understand that America is above all else an idea first and and most of the the countries uh of the rest of the world didn't start out as ideas right they started out as this Monarch or that Monarch and and this church or that church and like the
the aidea of America is really what makes it special in my opinion and it's definitely an idea that is worth preserving and expanding and and and all of the above well this has been a tremendous amount of fun for me I hope it has been for you if you've listened
to the Pod if you listen to the podcast you know that we have a final question which is we are going to make you the Empress of the world you can't kill anyone you can't put anyone in a re-education camp but what you can do is we're going to hand you a magical microphone and you can say two things
into it that the entire population of the world is going to wake up whenever their tomorrow is and they're GNA say you know what I just had two of the best ideas ever and like unlike all those other times I'm gonna actually act on these two ideas today what what are you
going to incept the world with so so I think that the so just a clarifying question that like this would be basically the same idea everyone's shedding and they would basically be working on it so you're kind of controlling um this thought that's put in someone's head and then they're
convinced by it and they're like building acting and acting on it yeah I think that that the first thing that I would tell everyone to do is to oh man um there's too many I have in my head and I and I've seen the section that I wanted to have it like extemporary but the first thing I guess
uh would be to connect with your heart think that you have the mic that I have and tell yourself what you would say into the mic is a change that you want to see in the world and implemented yourself imagine you are the one having the mic because the the fact of the
matter is that I'm as much of a human being as anyone else but being able to give someone the power power to realize that their ideas matter that that like I would tell them that whatever you have in mind is going to come true and and like you know that that that would be the first thing I
would say is like you know it's coming true so what are you going to do now and I guarantee you 100 out of hundred of times it's going to actually come true because intentionality even from a logical perspective is a big thing the second thing I would say is that if there is a war where you
are let's think of the children on the other side of the Border I love both of those um and the first one's very clever because uh what a great concept uh you're you're incepting them incepting themselves I absolutely love that I absolutely love that and yeah thinking
thinking about um that there are people on the other side of any war and we we often try uh to dehumanize them and other them and we're all humans and they probably love their kids too and they probably want their kids to be safe too so I think also the kids did not did not
ever make an aggression towards the other ex yeah exactly I love I love both of those people looking for more uh information on you can find you on Twitter but do does the company have a website or is that it's kind of like a coming soon section um if you're looking
for more kind of official updates um then we have um at pressy genetic P ECI g n TI we're going to be uploading the talk from the World bioe Congress coming up in Singapore um soon and probably going to be you know um kind of finally revealing the website after um and the
website is pressy genetics.com and then I also have a LinkedIn and um yeah we have a we have a Blog we we're going to be adding things to it that's part of the website but I think that you're going to find more than enough things on my Twitter I like Twitter a lot so um you
don't have to worry too much outside of that terrific well we're delighted to be uh collaborating with you on this uh very excited to watch and very excited to watch what you make happen we are along for the ride and and think you're going to do fantastic things I think that I'm going to ensure that
you like are going to be the happiest person yeah so I I I think that yeah I I I have faith and not just Faith like I know the power of a human being to make something happen so I think it's going to happen but all right thank you so much J for this opportunity been incredible e