Welcome!

Owl Posting is a Substack over the intersection of biology and machine learning, colloquially known as bio-ML. It started in April 2024, and an article is released around every 1-2 weeks.

As for who I am specifically, I go by Abhi, and I am an ML engineer at Dyno Therapeutics working on using ML to create better viral vectors for gene therapy. Here is my X and LinkedIn. If you’d like to contact me, send me a message at abhishaike@gmail.com or DM me.

Readers of this blog include…

1. Undergraduate and graduate students throughout the United States, Europe, India, and China, many of whom work at incredible academic labs and are some of the most talented people I’ve ever met.

2. Scientists/engineers at virtually every established R&D company in this emerging space: D. E. Shaw Research, Isomorphic Labs, Orbital Materials, and the like.

3. Founders across the spectrum in biotech, people working on everything from long-range DNA sequencing to autonomous labs to biology foundation models.

4. Finally, plenty of excellent investors: Dimension Capital, Union Square Ventures, Zetta Ventures, Pillar VC, and a16z partners are all represented in my subscriber list.

Why does this blog exist?

I’m of the mindset that bio-ML is going to be one of the most important fields of our time, and that there is extraordinarily little coverage of it. Specifically, very little coverage that is specifically meant to be consumed by practitioners. There is no shortage of surface level articles published by Bloomberg or Scientific American, primarily meant for the eyes of curious laymen. The purpose of Owl Posting is to create writing, podcasts, and art that is meant for people with the highest levels of influence in the field — scientists, students, founders, and investors. We’ll see how successful this ends up being, but there are early signs of having found product-market-fit!

Primers

These are intended to be long, extensively researched deep-dives into specific scientific topics. I stick to the facts as much as possible, but also offer my own opinion pretty frequently. Some examples:

1. A primer on machine learning in antibody engineering

2. A primer on why microbiome research is hard

3. A primer on machine learning in cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM)

Arguments

These are intended to have a reasonably strong opinion, with mildly more conviction than my actual opinion. Think of it closer to a persuasive essay than a review on the topic, which my ‘primers’ are more-so meant for. Do Your Own Research applies for all my posts, but especially so with these. Some examples:

1. There aren't enough smart people in biology doing something boring

2. Wet-lab innovations will lead the AI revolution in biology

Startups

These are posts that each will focus on a single startup that I think is interesting, and deeply examine their scientific foundations, product, and risks. These will typically be biotech startups, but I may also include deep-tech startups in general. Some examples:

1. Better antibodies by engineering targets, not engineering antibodies (Nabla Bio)

2. The unreasonable effectiveness of plasmid sequencing as a service (Plasmidsaurus)

3. Creating the largest protein-protein interaction dataset in the world (A-Alpha Bio)

Misc

These are just posts that are neither arguments nor primers nor startups. Just stuff I was thinking about and wanted to write something about. Every two weeks, I also release a ‘roundup’ article here. Here are some examples:

1. Opinionated advice for writing about science

2. Why Recursion Pharmaceuticals abandoned cell painting for brightfield imaging

3. Things I learned talking to the new breed of scientific institution

Podcast

For many would-be biology articles, I get halfway through them and realize that it’d be hard to do the topic justice, even with Claude/Gemini/ChatGPT assistance. In those cases, I go out and find the most talented person in the field, and have a long-form conversation with them, all filmed in a studio here in NYC. If you’d be interested in coming on, you should apply to be a podcast guest!

Here are two examples:

1. Can AI improve the current state of molecular simulation? (Corin & Ari Wagen, Ep #1)

2. How do you make a 250x better vaccine at 1/10 the cost? Develop it in India. (Soham Sankaran, Ep #2)

Art

This is more for fun than anything else, but I think biology as a field could do with better aesthetics. So, every now and then, I’ll do some design work and throw it up to be sold. Much of the art here is broadly nice to look at (in my opinion!), but often contain little details only understandable to people who are in the field, which is a balance I quite like.

The entirety of my posts (including podcasts) can be accessed via the ‘Archive’ section.