Mackenzie Morehead

Is Attention All You Need?

Given the ease with which Transformers generalize, scale, and their efficiency on existing hardware, they have become the dominant architecture over the last ~7 years, achieving SoTA in most applications. That’s more true now than ever given that most of the researchers and developers are working on them, all

Textiles, Beauty Products, & Home Goods (The Century of Biology: Part II.VI)

A parallel evolution to that changing how the products listed above are made is happening with consumer products. These efforts are also being made to reduce emissions and transition away from oil- and animal-derived products. After all, our current faux leathers called “pleather” are made with plastics. Alongside these reasons,

Circular Plastics: Designing Our Tupperware as Mother Nature Would (The Century of Biology: Part II.V)

Since the invention of plastics a century ago, they’ve become absolutely ubiquitous – you interact with them hundreds of times every day in every component of your life. Why? Well, they’re among the greatest products ever invented. They’re dirt cheap, perfectly uniform, lightweight, can be flexible and / or

Sustainable Fuels & Chemicals (The Century of Biology: Part II.IV)

The nearly $10 trillion chemicals and fuels industries dig up hydrocarbons and then turn them into nearly every physical good we use in our day to day lives from plastic to laundry detergent to running shoes to fertilizers. Efforts to de-carbonize these industries have attracted tens of billions of dollars

Food & Drinks: Soon to be High Tech Goods (The Century of Biology: Part II.III)

Over the next several decades, world food demand is expected to rise by 50%, and demand for animal products by at least 70%. Said another way, every year for decades, we need to feed ~60 million more people. And, as the world becomes wealthier, its citizens demand more meat. Just

Part II.II Addendum: Pharmaceutical Biomanufacturing Scope & Scale

How do you manufacture biological drugs like mRNA vaccines and cell therapies? In big metal vats. The global capacity of such vats is estimated to be over 17 million liters across 1.6 thousand facilities, with two-thirds of that concentrated in America and Europe. Here’s some key trends within

Programmable Medicine: Entire Cells as Therapies (The Century of Biology: Part II.II)

Cells, by nature, are extraordinarily programmable. They can be directed to differentiate from embryonic stem cells into any one of our body’s hundreds of cell types, to recognize and respond to various stimuli, to communicate with one another, among others. Scientists have made tremendous progress towards harnessing cells’ capacity

Programming the Code Your Cells Execute: RNA & Gene Therapies (Century of Biology: Part II.I)

As said in Part I, DNA is like the master file to your body; changes to it are permanent and will affect all cells its host cell divides into. As such, it stays firmly put in the nucleus, safeguarded like the safe in a casino. Every cell in your body

Introduction to Part II: Program, Control, and Create

Read next section: RNA & gene therapies

Artificial Intelligence: The Only Intelligence Capable of Making Sense of the Massive Datasets Generated from the Tools Above (The Century of Biology: Part I.VI)

“At its most fundamental level, I think biology can be thought of as an information processing system, albeit an extraordinarily complex and dynamic one. Taking this perspective implies there may be a common underlying structure between biology and information science - an isomorphic mapping between the two - hence the

Organ-on-a-Chip: Simulating Human Biology at Scale (The Century of Biology: Part I.V)

The rate of progress towards curing a given disease is a function of how quickly scientists can run experiments. Currently, it takes 10+ years to reach a definitive answer on whether or not a drug addresses an issue in human beings. Compare that to a tech startup, which is constantly

Collecting Data from Patients with Advanced Diagnostics Tests and Continuous Health Monitoring (The Century of Biology: Part I.IV)

Continuous health monitoring devices embedded in everything from your watch to bed to toilet will track your heart rate, temperature, exercise level, sleep, microbiome, etc. to get a complete picture of what you look like in a healthy state on a day-to-day basis, while also remaining continually vigilant for the

Visualizing Biology with Microscopy (The Century of Biology: Part I.III)

Since their invention in the late 16th Century, microscopes have been one of the quintessential instruments of the biological sciences. When you imagine a white lab coat biologist, chances are you think of them stooped over a microscope looking at a sample of cells. In fact, the invention of the

Omics: Quantifying Cells' Attributes and Activity (The Century of Biology: Part I.II)

“The desirability of having much deeper knowledge about cells has been well recognized for a long time. However, only in the past few years has it begun to seem feasible to undertake the kind of systematic, high-resolution characterization of human cells necessary to create a systematic cell atlas. The key

I.I Addendum: DNA-based data storage

The amount of data generated each year is already outstripping our ability to store it and that gap will only continue to widen, driving needs to explore higher order storage mechanisms. Global data storage capacity of ~7 zettabytes is one-tenth the 64 ZB[1] of data generated in 2020 alone,

Reading, Writing, and Editing Life’s Code (The Century of Biology: Part I.I)

1. Reading the Code of Life: DNA & RNA sequencing A beautiful aspect of biology is that all life is written in language like a novelist pens a book or a computer scientist codes a program. It has structure not unlike a sentence has syntax or a function has relational

The Century of Biology: Introduction

For starters, what is biology? It’s the study of all living things. Every living being on earth is the triumphant display of biological processes at work. Every man, woman, and child; every bird, bacteria, and leaf; and every cell within. It’s the study of life, growth, and death;

The Pressure Continues

The debt-fueled, deflationary real estate bust ~with Chinese characteristics~ picked up steam once again. As I covered in my last long-form post, China has followed an even more extreme version of the investment-driven growth model employed by many Asian countries in their respective development phases: Much of that investment being

Looking in the Rearview

What a wild moment in the cycle we're at. Going into 2023, most people – including Jay Powell himself – were yet again celebrating the death of inflation, as it stood still for two months consecutively from November to December. However, monstrous January numbers flipped the narrative. The market quickly

The Horse & The House: the Market is Betting on a Slowing Horse to Run a Perfect Race

The market seems to still be pricing in perfection while willfully ignoring risks. The combination of inflation falling MoM in July and the Fed shifting its course from one with clearly defined hiking schedules to one that's "data dependent" proved to be a potent dopamine hit

Cryptonetworks as Sovereign Digital Economies

How should you think about "layer-1" cryptocurrencies like Ethereum, Solana, etc. (i.e. those supporting applications to be built on top of them)? Industry vets have variously claimed that they're nation states or city states. Indeed, in this fascinating Bankless episode, the two hosts discuss the

2021 in Review: What Just Happened?

I believe it’s absolutely vital to think about asset prices the same way that Scott Grannis thinks about inflation, because ultimately they're the exact same phenomena: dollars chasing assets. Think of the situation in terms of supply and demand of each: the demand to deploy dollars relative

Money & Inflation

This was a piece I wrote in the summer of 2021 as I became increasingly concerned about the inflationary nature of the US's fiscal and monetary policies. It explores the empirical relationship between money and inflation. Here's a highlight: While the 20th Century taught the world

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