David Lang

Field Builders make the fields that make the future. More people should consider the role. We’re backing at least 50 Field Builders to launch grant programs in emerging scientific fields. Each Field Builder will award $70,000 to researchers they recruit and receive a $5,000 honorarium for leading the work. Applications for the Field Building Accelerator are open now through December 15, 2026: fieldbuilding.org/

My podcasts are way too long and way too technical. Few people have time to sit through 90 minutes of hardcore immunology! But if there's just one idea to take away from my interview with Jake Glanville at Centivax, a company developing universal flu vaccines and antivenoms, then I think it's this: First, influenza (and many other viruses or pathogens) mutate so rapidly that we keep getting infected by slightly different versions of them. And so the challenge of making a universal flu vaccine is to elicit antibodies that recognize many different strains, including ones that don't yet exist. The normal approach to this problem is just to mix together antigens from many different strains and inject them into humans all together. But your immune system then generates separate antibodies against each antigen, without necessarily producing antibodies that recognize ALL of them. (Imagine a vaccine with 20 different versions of influenza's hemagglutinin protein. Your immune system might make antibodies against version A, others against B, and others against C. But what happens when influenza mutates again, producing version 21? Your body has no antibodies.) What we really want are antibodies that recognize regions of the virus that rarely change! These so-called "conserved epitopes" are more likely to be shared across past, present, and future strains of ther pathogen. So Jake, noticing this problem, invented a thing called conservation–concentration coupling. The gist is that, instead of injecting ALL of the antigens into a human at high doses, you deliberately lower the concentration of each one. There's only a tiny bit of each antigen in the vaccine, in other words; too little to elicit an immune response on its own. (If a B cell comes along and recognizes only antigen A, that B-cell won't become strongly activated!) If, however, a B cell comes along that recognizes some converved region across MANY of the antigens, and it can bind to all of them, then it WILL become activated. Even though each individual antigen is present at a very low concentration, the B cell effectively encounters 20 times as much antigen, or 20x the normal dose. It is stimulated enough to proliferate, while the B cells recognizing only individual strains get "outcompeted." In other words, you're using antigen concentration to bias the immune system toward making broadly reactive antibodies. This is the key idea behind Centivax, and they've gotten really compelling data that this actually works in mice and humans (~180 patients in their phase I, which is now finished.)

Announcing the Hyperspectral Biology Fund: It's possible to see engineered microbes from space; not with the naked eye, but by the distinctive way their molecules absorb light. The secret is hyperspectral cameras. Whereas a normal camera captures just three colors (red, green, and blue), a hyperspectral camera captures the full spectrum of light at every pixel. When merged with synthetic biology, one can create engineered organisms that sense something (a pathogen, explosive, pollutant, etc) and then monitor them using satellites with hyperspectral cameras orbiting Earth. The end goal is to build a planetary-scale biosensing network. I'm giving away $75,000 in microgrants to help grow this field. Applications are due by July 10. Thanks to @davidtlang and the Experiment Foundation for making this possible.

Announcing the Hyperspectral Biology Fund: It's possible to see engineered microbes from space; not with the naked eye, but by the distinctive way their molecules absorb light. The secret is hyperspectral cameras. Whereas a normal camera captures just three colors (red, green, and blue), a hyperspectral camera captures the full spectrum of light at every pixel. When merged with synthetic biology, one can create engineered organisms that sense something (a pathogen, explosive, pollutant, etc) and then monitor them using satellites with hyperspectral cameras orbiting Earth. The end goal is to build a planetary-scale biosensing network. I'm giving away $75,000 in microgrants to help grow this field. Applications are due by July 10. Thanks to @davidtlang and the Experiment Foundation for making this possible.

It could actually be a significant problem that Europe doesn't have enough garages. This sounds like a joke, but I'm serious. Garages let you work on stuff that doesn't matter yet, which is how big things often start. The outliers of ideas need the outliers of space.

(New Essay) VC-Backed Startups are Low Status The traditional VC-backed startup path is becoming low status in the same way investment banking did. An aesthetic collapse across institutions, ideas, and founders paired with the world's tiring of tech has recently accelerated this shift. Some thoughts on the cascade, the generational divide, Anthropic vs. OpenAI, what comes next, and more.

Today marks a major milestone at @AsimovPress: Our two-year anniversary! We formally launched the magazine in December 2023; a tiny team of two operating from inside @AsimovBio. In 2024, we published 49 articles, including a History of the Micropipette, an argument about why Mitochondria Are Alive, and quite a bit of science fiction. In 2025, we grew our team slightly, bringing on a freelance Art Director (@EllaWD_PhD) and copyeditor (Devon Balwit), as well as some more contributing writers. This year, we published 72 articles, most of which are quite lengthy and took months to research. Thanks to funding from @AsteraInstitute and @stripe for making this possible. I'm very grateful to be working with this team and these writers, all of whom are deeply serious about producing the best possible work. @XanderBalwit is so committed, for example, that she will occasionally drive to a writer's house and work with them in person, for hours or days, until a draft comes together. Some memorable pieces from this year (all can be found by searching our website): - Edwin Cohn and the Harvard Blood Factory - Gregor Mendel's Vanishing Act - The Battle for Better Air - Healing My Family's Future - The Nobel Duel - Making the Centrifuge - A Visual Guide to Genome Editors - The Uncertain Origins of Aspirin - The First Weight Loss Drugs - How to Scale Proteomics - What We Find in the Sewers - A Liver on Ice - What Makes an Experiment Beautiful? Thanks for reading and supporting our work. See you in 2026 :)

We are opening applications for our 2026 cohort of FutureHouse AI-for-Science Independent Postdoctoral Fellows! Apply our AI tools to specific problems in biology and biochemistry, in collaboration with world-leading academic labs: --$125,000 annual stipend. --Access to all tools developed by FutureHouse and Edison Scientific at scale, including Kosmos and several as-of-yet unreleased agents, with under-the-hood access to them to specialize them for your workflows. --Receive dedicated software engineering support. --1 year with possible 1 year extension. Even more exceptional co-advisors than last year. Deadline for applications is February 13th, 2026. Link in next post.