Julian's Polymath Explorations

NOTE:  this entry was inspired by talks I gave at the "Bio-IT World 2025" conference in Boston, and at the "Aging & Gerontology 2025" conference in San Francisco.   A VIDEO VERSION also exists    (slightly shorter and outdated to Apr. 2025)    Life123 is an open-source platform for quantitative interactomics, aiming towards simulations of virtual biological cells or parts thereof – among other things. And it has a slogan:  AI and Big Data aren't enough! We also need Dynamical modeling. What does it mean to say "engine for quantitative reactomics"?  It means that we perform dynamical modeling of biological systems. And the initial focus is towards eventually creating whole-cell simulations. The platform consists of python libraries, which allow us to do in-silico experiments. Early this year, this project left the beta stage, after a few years of development. Motivation There's a practical motiva...

(UPDATED 8/2022) - Are we ready to embark on a next-generation detailed quantitative modeling of complex biological systems , including whole-cell simulations?  An anticipated up-jump in computing power may be imminent from Photonics computers (which I discuss here ), and GPU's are rapidly gaining power as well...  Are we in ready state to put existing - and upcoming - power to good use? This is a manifest, and a call to action What's Life123? It's about detailed quantitative modeling of biological systems in 1-D, 2-D and full 3-D, as well as a multi-faceted software platform for doing so. What's (pseudo-)1D?  For now, let's say it's like the inside of a long, thin tube - with no interactions with the tube.  Likewise, (pseudo-)2D can be thought of as a Petri dish, with no interactions with the lid or the bottom. Website : https://life123.science A purposeful decision to also utilize 1D and 2D But why?  Yes, it's in part about "walk before you run...

"You are incredibly prescient!"   I woke up to those words from a former colleague on Jan. 19, 2022: the bombshell announcement that the Chief Science Officer of pharma giant GSK, where I worked until recently, will become the CEO at the new, $3 BILLION longevity science company Altos (presumably also funded by Amazon's Jeff Bezos.) Big Pharma is at long last embracing Longevity Science. The corollary: longevity science is entering Mainstream (with capital "M") But let me backtrack... The Decade of Longevity Science When Harvard professor David Sinclair declared the 2020's to be the " decade of the paradigm shift about age reversal ", one could perhaps be dismissive of it as just an outburst of enthusiasm... But in the past couple of years, we're seeing strong evidence that his forecast is right on the mark! While I worked at GlaxoSmithKline - a giant, top-10, pharma company - I vigorously advocated forming a Longevity Science dept., and sp...