Cells as Agents and Bacterial Learning

In part two of our conversation with James W. Phillips and Laura Ryan, things get weirder and more ambitious. We move from the structural problems of academia into the actual scientific missions these labs could pursue—from cells-as-agents to neuromorphic AI to using brain organoids as compute. James reveals his plans to spend January investigating whether Zen meditation practices can tap into healing mechanisms through the gut-brain axis, and Laura makes the case for massive automation in biology.

The conversation also gets into the hard questions: Can you really trust taste over metrics? Would philanthropic funding create the same perverse incentives as multiple stakeholders? How worried should we be about engineered pandemics? And is Britain’s ossification just an inevitable consequence of having too many old people?

Tom, Calum, James and Laura discuss:

* The missions Lovelace Labs could tackle: Drugging disordered proteins (proteins without fixed structures that current methods can’t target), bacterial learning and intelligence at the cellular level, neuromorphic AI that actually models the brain properly, and using brain organoids as biological compute,

* Why biology needs massive automation NOW: Laura describes spending a quarter of her PhD time creating gels, running things through gels, analyzing bands—work that should obviously be automated or done by centralized facilities with shared reagent libraries. But academia won’t drive this transition because PhD students are “free labour” to professors,

* Calum’s bacterial learning pitch: He wants to build large automated facilities where biologists can upload scripts, run 1,000x more experiments, and get results same-day instead of doing manual pipetting,

* The AI integration question: Will AI empower scientists to do more creative thinking? Or create a dystopia where humans are “meat robots” moving plates between machines because it’s cheaper than automation, while hypothesis-generating LLMs compound existing replication problems?,

* James’s Zen Buddhist science project: Starting January, he’s investigating whether embodied meditation practices can tap into healing mechanisms through the mind-body connection. He spent time in Zen monasteries and thinks new tools can finally probe these questions scientifically,

* Body waves are the new brain waves: Virginia Rutten engineered zebrafish cells to fluoresce when active, then recorded every cell in the body—revealing waves of coordinated activity we’d never seen before. James thinks mystery conditions might involve deficiencies in these body waves, just like we talk about brain wave disorders,

* The vagus nerve revolution: You can now turn on just the specific vagus nerve branch that innervates one particular organ using tools from neuroscience. Physiology—declared “dead” in 2011—is being rejuvenated the way neuroscience was 20 years ago,

* Tom Forth’s geographic critique: Are you just sloshing money around the Southeast? Laura responds that scientific excellence must guide location, but there are bright spots elsewhere—Lee Cronin’s automated chemistry lab in Glasgow, Liverpool’s work. The problem is London policy bubble can’t see beyond the Golden Triangle,

* ARIA nearly died before it began: Treasury tried rolling back agreements after the misfits left. James Price saved it by ensuring everything went to the Chancellor’s desk—meaning they could write the reply. On Boris’s last day, the official advice was “wait months for a business case.” Nadhim Zahawi: “I’ll take the unprecedented option.”,

* Boris on quantum computing: “James, I’ve still got no idea what a quantum computer is, but I love it.” He’d punch his hands in the air whenever he saw James: “Science superpower, build back better!”,

* The engineered pandemic threat: It’s become “a lot easier to artificially create pandemics and the number of people you would need to do it is trending towards one quite fast.” James was in meetings where officials said it wasn’t possible—”well here’s a paper from 10 years ago where they did it.” The COVID inquiry is “not fit for purpose.”,

* The demographics doom loop: Are Bell Labs and LMB only possible when boomers were the right age? Now we have more old people than ever, listening to the Rolling Stones forever, blocking all institutional change. James: “In my more cynical moments I wonder if we’re pushing against fundamental civilizational trends toward bureaucratization.”,

* Tom’s solution: “We have to shag for science, basically.” Silence from across the table.

Plus: Why methods papers are poorly cited despite being more important than discovery papers, why the Dalai Lama’s one paper will win an instant Nobel Prize, James almost becoming a cave hermit instead of fixing British science, and Stefan Roberts’s vision of “the UK as an R&D lab with an economy attached.”

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