When I was in elementary school, my mom started going blind. Retinitis pigmentosa. No family history. No treatments. No cure.

I got lucky. She didn’t. It led me to build @OrchidInc so my baby —and everyone else's—gets to win the genetic lottery—avoid blindness— and hundreds of severe genetic diseases.

Today, the New York Times covered the tech we’ve spent years building:
Whole genome embryo screening for *hundreds* of diseases.
Not in theory. Not in mice. In humans. In IVF centers. Right now. If you could prevent your child from going blind — would you? From getting pediatric cancer at 5? From heart defects? Schizophrenia at 22?
From living a life radically altered by pure genetic bad luck?
This is a choice parents are now able to make.

This .gif is from an amazing new study. It shows an oocyte being extracted from an ovarian follicle and being replaced by another oocyte.

This process can have an amazing effect. If you plop an old oocyte into a young follicle, it can reverse its age, making it fertile again! As I covered in an earlier thread (see below), women's fertility loss with age is mostly down to oocyte aging, so if we can reverse oocyte age by changing its environment that might mean older women can have their own kids without needing frozen eggs!

https://x.com/noor_siddiqui_/status/1833219579725942868

Everyone knows fertility is the ability to reproduce, but everyone hasn't heard of fecundability, the potential to reproduce. The difference has to do with reproducing versus being able to reproduce.

Fecundability declines with age🧵 After about age 20, it becomes harder and harder to get pregnant for those who are trying.

The data that shows us this is a 2.8 million person dataset assembled from samples in 62 different countries.

The sample also includes men, and we can see male age matters too:

Pretty absurd that chatGPT has passed the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE).

Today, it takes 4 years of med school and 2+ years of clinical rotations to pass. It tests ambiguous scenarios & closely-related differential diagnoses

medrxiv.org/content/10.110… Step 1 is taken after 2 yrs of med school, covers basic science, pharmacology, and pathophysiology. students study for 300+ hours on average to pass.

Step 2 is taken after 4 yrs of med school + 1.5 to 2 yrs of clinical rotations, covers clinical reasoning & medical management

@paulg's essay "How to Start a Startup" summarized in tweets

To create a successful startup:
1. start with good people
2. make something customers actually want
3. spend as little money as possible THE IDEA

You don't need a brilliant idea.

Startups make money by offering better tech than what people have now. What people have usually sucks, so it's not that hard to do better.

Good people can fix bad ideas, but good ideas can't save bad people.