60: Patrick Hsu - Speedrunning the Infinite Game

About this episode

Patrick Hsu (X, Website, Arc lab) is co-founder and core investigator of Arc Institute, assistant professor of pathology at Stanford, and venture partner at Thrive Capital. Patrick has always been precocious: he began college as a young teenager and contributed to early CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing breakthroughs as part of Feng Zhang’s lab at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Today, the Hsu Lab at Arc works where genome engineering meets AI, from bridge recombinases that can rearrange up to a million bases of DNA at once to Arc's Evo biological foundation models. We discuss Patrick’s pace and ambition, infinite games, and why he was drawn to biology. Then, we traverse power laws in biotech and the reach of GLP-1s, research taste and success, Arc’s multidisciplinary model, data limits in AI-enabled bio, and cell and bio foundation models. We also discuss how AI and new science will help us solve diseases, design life, and push the boundaries of sci-fi when it comes to human health. I hope you are inspired to raise your bar, commit to reinvention, and hold a lightness that makes the long and challenging journey fun. --- Dialectic is presented by Notion. Notion is a collaborativ