A thread about the unreasonable effectiveness of writing on the internet, or how I got 8.6 million dollars from a blog post About two years ago, I left my job in biotech consulting on a whim. GPT-3 and 4 had got me excited about LLMs; I knew they would be important, but I didn't yet know how best to apply them to the problems I was familiar with. I wanted some space to experiment

In 1953, aged 27, Paul Janssen set up a pharma company that would grow into one of the world's largest. Over his career, Janssen and his team brought >70 drugs to market.

Yet, today's drug hunters are likely to retire before discovering even one new medicine. What changed?🧵 For one, Janssen had good timing. Since Janssen started his career, biopharma R&D efficiency has followed a long-term declining trajectory (@JackScannell13 called the trend "Eroom's law"). But what's behind the decline?

Many of the drugs discovered by Paul Janssen and his team at Janssen Pharmaceutica have a piperidine ring at the centre. The reason why is a good lesson about how effective innovation happens in practice🧵 When Janssen was starting out he had limited resources and needed a way to make compounds quickly, simply, and cheaply. Rapidly swapping out "heads" and "tails" on either side of a central piperidine was one way his team figured out how to do this