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Amy Webb 🤖

@amywebb

Jan 17

Highlights from the Brazil: A New Roadmap session at #wef2023 #davos2023 featuring Fernando Haddad, Minister of Finance and Marina Silva, Minister of Environment and Climate Change 1/ ?

• The aftermath of the January 8th insurrection is still being felt throughout Brazil

• There are notable parallels to the situation in the US: most people who voted for Bolsonaro did not support (or want) the insurrection.

Read 13 tweets

Amy Webb 🤖

@amywebb

Mar 1, 2022

🧵- Yesterday, the USPTO invalidated the patent rights it had granted UC Berkeley -- the home of Nobel winner Jennifer Doudna. I know we're following developments in Russia/ Ukraine right now, but the decision has big implications for the future of health & life itself.

ICYMI: There has been a years-long legal battle over who invented Crispr, pitting researchers at publicly-funded UC Berkeley against those at privately-funded Broad Institute of Harvard/ MIT.

Yesterday, the USPTO decided the revolutionary genome editing tech belongs to Broad.

The decision is a blow to the UC Berkeley and biotech companies that had licensed the technology from the university for use in developing treatments. They will now have to negotiate w/ Broad Institute for the right to use Crispr for human therapies.

Read 17 tweets

Amy Webb 🤖

@amywebb

Jan 21, 2022

My new book—THE GENESIS MACHINE—comes out on Feb 15. It’s a book about how we can reprogram the machinery of living cells, and why that’s both great and also really dangerous. Here’s a short 🧵on the book and why we wrote it. /1

publicaffairsbooks.com/titles/amy-web…

A caveat. This book takes a deep look into evolution and how we currently think about life's origins. We recognize that some of what’s in our book is too radical for a general audience –– possibly too radical even for an audience of scientists. /2

Because in the book, what we’re really asking is: what happens when we remove our current evolutionary constraints? What happens when we explicitly view biology as a technology platform? /3

Read 23 tweets

Amy Webb 🤖

@amywebb

Sep 30, 2021

I'm sitting in the vestibule of a hospital ER. My dad's blood pressure spiked dangerously high and his heart rate dropped to 40. He has a genetic hypertension issue that I'm hopeful synthetic biology will someday solve. But that's not why I'm writing. Please read entire thread.

I have so far seen 8 drivers for Uber or Lyft pull up with patients in various conditions.

A high school kid with what looked like a broken leg--there was blood.

An elderly man, struggling to breathe, who couldn't walk on his own.

A family with a small child--looked bad.

These Uber and Lyft drivers had to come in to the ER, hunt down a wheel chair, and then manouver their patients out of their personal vehicles...a Toyota Corolla, a Honda CR-V...without any help.

Read 13 tweets

Amy Webb 🤖

@amywebb

Sep 29, 2021

Galleys are here! Right now, scientists are rewriting the rules of our reality. They can use computers to gain access to the cells of any living organism and write new, potentially better, biological code. Which means we have critical decisions to make about the future of life.

We must decide to whom we will grant the authority to program life, create new life forms, and even bring former life back from extinction (yes, that’s already in the works). To make these decisions intelligently, we urgently need a deeper understanding of the science.

In The Genesis Machine, we explore the opportunities, risks, and moral dilemmas posed by synthetic biology—and we urge you not to let fear overshadow the benefits that could ensure humanity’s long-term survival...

Read 4 tweets

Amy Webb 🤖

@amywebb

Sep 10, 2021

There is a strong connection between uncertainty and anxiety, certainty and depression, OCD and catastrophizing. Which means there's a link between how we think and what we think about the future. (1/5)

It's very, very difficult to think critically and pragmatically about the future, especially when that thinking triggers anxiety, depression or catastrophic ideation.

A few things happen: we avoid thinking about the future; we idealize it; or we go all in on catastrophe (2/5)

I see the same happening in companies when they do their longer-term visioning work.

They avoid difficult but constructive conversations about their futures or their executives go off and create blue sky (but totally implausible) goals. (3/5)

Read 14 tweets

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