Anthrobots invert the question.

If you haven’t come across them yet: anthrobots are self-motile multicellular constructs built from dissociated adult human tracheal epithelial cells. Take a bit of airway lining, separate the cells, put them in permissive conditions, and they self-assemble into motile little forms that swim around and even repair damaged neural tissue across a gap. Freed from the body that organized them, cells that used to help you breathe become something else with a novel behavioral catalog.

Where PKD's synthetic being starts without a lineage embedding, an anthrobot is a biological fragment that had its embedding stripped away.

Their behavior, their morphology, and their bioelectric state are still being shaped by a body that no longer exists. These creatures reveal a synthesis that should feel obvious but doesn't. The claim is simple: parts carry wholes.

"Parts carry wholes" is a claim about a specific kind of information: information about the whole, distributed across many parts, held by each rather than localized in any one.

That’s a working thesis, and I’ve become excited by anthrobots because they reveal what could be a substrate on which to test a novel structural formalism.

Somatic cells carry target morphologies in their bioelectric and epigenetic states. Lineages carry the accumulated developmental learning of their evolutionary history. And--most controversially--psyches carry what Jung called archetypes: structural tendencies inherited by every individual and expressed most clearly when waking constraints loosen.

Anthrobots might be exactly what happens when the constraint comes off.

Let me back up on “target morphology,” because it’s a load-bearing concept here at the somatic scale and it isn’t what most biologists got in school.

The traditional story is that the genome is a blueprint and morphogenesis is its execution. The tissue reads the plans, cells go to their assigned positions and the organism comes out the correct shape. This is wrong in an interesting way. The genome is better described as a component of the hardware on which a distributed computation runs. The shape the tissue converges on is a property of that computation, which is a property of the collective, rather than of any instruction set a single cell is executing.

Michael Levin’s lab has been making this legible for years. Planaria cut into fragments regenerate correctly because each fragment retains access to a landscape whose attractors are “head” and “tail” in the right places. Xenopus embryos with rearranged facial organ positions re-sort toward the canonical face during development. The target is a dynamical feature, a set of attractors in the morphogenetic state space, and it’s robust to perturbations that would break a blueprint.

Furthermore, you can edit the landscape without touching the genome. Perturb the bioelectric pattern of a planarian during regeneration, and you can get it to regenerate two heads. Cut that two-headed planarian again, and it regenerates two heads again, stably, despite an unchanged genetic sequence. You’ve rewritten the target without editing the code conventionally assumed to specify it.

This reframes where developmental information actually lives. It’s distributed across membrane potentials, ion channels, gap-junctions, chromatin states, and other biophysical state regulators. It’s editable by interventions that act on any of those. When you take a somatic cell out of its tissue context, it does not lose the landscape. The landscape is partly in the cell, and the cell carries it.

So when you dissociate tracheal epithelium, the cells you end up with are loaded with a bioelectric and epigenetic state shaped by their former position in the airway. Put them in permissive conditions, and they do not rebuild the trachea, but what they do build is a continuation of that landscape rather than a random reorganization. Characteristics like ciliation polarity, motility, and the scale at which they assemble all trace back to what the cells used to be.

The anthrobot is running new software on hardware shaped by the old software. Even after the old software stops executing, it shapes the basin the new dynamics settle into.

The puzzle here is that if the genome→morphology view is wrong, where does the landscape come from?

evolutionary connectionism

Target morphologies are species-typical, stable under perturbation, and precisely adapted to functional requirements. You don’t get that kind of structure out of nothing. So the question is whether evolution is the right kind of process to put it there.

Richard Watson’s work on evolutionary connectionism is the cleanest answer I’ve read. The short version is that natural selection has the formal properties of a learning algorithm. And he really means this formally, not as an analogy. The inductive biases of selection are mathematically equivalent to the inductive biases of connectionist learning. Evolution generalizes over regularities. It compresses repeated structure and deposits priors into the substrate it acts on.

This gives the morphogenetic landscape a clean place of origin: they are the accumulated priors of a learning process that has been running for the full duration of the lineage. The shape the tissue is trying to become is the shape that cumulative selection has taught the substrate to converge on.

That’s one half of the story, but there's another half this framework can't explain on its own.

When Levin and his group started characterizing what anthrobots actually do once dissociated, they found capabilities with no selection history to point at. Anthrobots bridge damaged neural tissue across a gap. Xenobots respond to sound. Anthrobots express transcriptomes roughly half differentially expressed relative to source tissue, including ancient genes and embryonic body-axis genes that have no business being on in adult tracheal epithelium. Neither organism has ever existed as a lifeform under selection pressure. Selection can shape a frog, but there is no “anthrobot ancestor” whose survival depended on wound-healing-across-a-gap.

So where is that capability coming from?

Levin’s answer, which he’s been sharpening publicly over the last year, is that the space of possible forms and behaviors is a structured possibility space with pattern-features that any sufficiently capable substrate can reach into. Evolution discovers useful patterns in that space and exploits them, but the patterns themselves were not deposited by the selection process that found them. A voltage-gated ion channel is, among other things, a transistor, and so once you have transistors, the whole of logic-gate behavior follows for free, without anyone having had to evolve the logic-gate math.

If Levin is right, then the priors-from-selection story is incomplete, and anthrobots make the incompleteness visible. Watson’s framework explains why tracheal cells behave tracheal-ly. It does not explain why they heal neural wounds.

Watson and Levin are not making incompatible claims.

affordances and priors

Watson is describing what selection has fixed into the substrate of a specific lineage--the priors in the learning-theory sense. Levin is describing the broader access that lineage-specific priors haven't yet committed to a single trajectory. The priors are the particular paths selection has worn deep. The possibility space (Levin calls it Platonic; I’ll stay operational and call it the substrate’s affordance set) is the terrain those paths run across.

A somatic cell, on this reading, carries two overlapping things. The first is the priors its lineage has selected for: the bioelectric, epigenetic, and regulatory settings that bias it toward the species-typical form. The second is the substrate-level access to a broader affordance set from which those priors were drawn in the first place: the ion channel repertoire, the gap-junction topology, and the regulatory logic that make that access possible at all.

Under normal embedding, the priors dominate. The cell is tightly constrained by its neighbors and its current function; its trajectory is the one selection has worn into its lineage. Under dissociation, the priors still bias things--the cell is not blank, and the anthrobot’s form is legibly continuous with its tissue of origin. But the broader substrate-level access opens up too, and the cells can find basins they have never occupied before.

So there’s the reconciliation. Both halves are doing work in the anthrobot case. The priors story explains why anthrobots from tracheal epithelium come out legibly tracheal-derived. The affordance-set story explains why they do things no one’s ancestor ever did.

Memory at the morphogenetic scale is literal. Learned structure is stored in a dynamical medium, where the storage medium is also the execution medium.

But the medium is also an interface to a structured possibility space that isn’t itself stored learning. It’s just there, reachable when the constraints that were holding the trajectory in place come off.

Dissociation is decompression. It releases the priors and opens the substrate’s access to what the priors hadn’t fixed a path through.

collective unconscious

I know up to this point I’ve been doing respectable biology and now I’m going to invoke Jung.

Hear me out.

The collective unconscious has a poor reputation in empirical circles, and it deserves some of that reputation, because the weakest versions of the theory (inherited specific images, Lamarckian memories of the mother goddess) are indefensible. Jung got blamed for those versions even when he wasn’t making them. What he actually claimed, in his mature writing, is structurally different, and worth re-reading now that we have better tools to explore the spaces he was describing.

The archetypes, in Jung's careful statement, are formative tendencies: structural dispositions of the psyche to organize experience along particular lines. Read “archetype” and you probably picture a stored image. Jung was explicit that he wasn’t claiming that. The anima/animus, the persona, the shadow, and the self are attractors. When a psyche develops normally, specific contents reliably fall into their basins. What is inherited is the landscape, not the images. The images a given person produces are trajectories through that landscape, shaped by individual history and current constraints.

Everything I've said up to here lands on this next point.

Take the morphogenetic picture and list its formal features. The information is distributed across the cells, not stored in any one of them. It biases a dynamical system toward attractor states rather than toward a fixed endpoint. Those attractor states are species-typical, because they have been shaped by a process operating at the scale of the lineage. The expression of any given attractor at any given moment depends on local substrate state and current constraint: the cell’s epigenetic settings, what neighbors are signaling, what the tissue context is demanding. Perturb the substrate and you can shift which attractor the system finds. Leave it alone and, under canonical conditions, the system returns to the same basin it started from.

Now the psychic picture, with the same list. The information is distributed, not in any one neuron or region, not even in any one episode of experience. It biases a dynamical system (the psyche over time) toward attractor states, which in this domain are the archetypal patterns Jung spent decades cataloguing. Those attractors are species-typical, because they have been shaped by whatever process operates at the scale of the human lineage over its evolutionary history. Expression at any given moment depends on local substrate state (the individual’s history, neurochemistry, developmental trajectory) and current constraint (goal-directed waking attention, social context, sleep versus waking). Perturb the substrate (trauma, drugs, developmental disruption), and you shift which attractor surfaces. Leave it alone and, under canonical conditions, the psyche returns to the same basins.

Five features hold in both cases. The information is distributed rather than stored in any one place. The dynamics are attractor-based rather than endpoint-driven. The attractors are species-typical, because whatever shaped them was operating at lineage scale. Expression on any given day depends on substrate state and on what the context is calling for. And while perturbation can shift the attractors, canonical conditions bring the system back.

If you find the parallelism suggestive but want to stay on the side of caution, you can read it as an analogy: morphogenetic systems and psychic systems happen to share these features, which is interesting but tells us nothing deeper.

The stronger reading is that the five features aren't a coincidence between two domains. They're what you see whenever a dynamical system's trajectory is shaped by information stored across the system's parts, about a pattern bigger than any single part, laid down by a process operating at a slower timescale than the system itself. That formal structure is general. Morphogenesis is one instance. Psychic development is another. Neither is a metaphor for the other. Both are instances of the same thing.

Jung spent decades working out which conditions surface which psychic attractors. He documented how compensation operates when the conscious attitude diverges from the landscape. He catalogued what the signatures of each basin look like in dream, symptom, and symbol.

All of it is data gathered by someone paying close attention to a system we now have better reason to believe actually exists.

And if we take it to exist, the Jungian vocabulary becomes usable the way any technical vocabulary is usable: not as metaphor, but as a record of how a specific instance of the structure behaves.

If you’ve read my recent post on dreams, this is where those threads tie in.

the landscape

My brief claim there was that dreams aren’t noise, replay, or regularization. They are the highest-leverage signal the psyche has for revealing exactly where conscious life is out of step with something deeper. That “something deeper” is the landscape--what Jung was calling the collective unconscious. The archetypes are its attractors. Most of the time, waking constraints suppress the landscape the psyche carries. A dream is what surfaces when those constraints relax.

Regeneration is the same operation in morphogenesis. When tissue is damaged, the constraints from neighbors and current function ease up, and the cell expresses its target-state information more directly.

Both are cases of the whole asserting itself through the part when the usual suppression weakens.

J. W. Dunne’s work on dreams is usually remembered--and too quickly dismissed--as a claim about precognition. I think it’s better read as a claim about temporal coupling. His actual argument was that waking consciousness is abnormally tightly locked to a single moment, and that in sleep this lock loosens, letting the observer sample more freely across the temporal structure of their own life.

Whatever you think of his specific metaphysics, the structural claim survives and integrates with everything above. Past-facing, that kind of sampling looks like memory integration. Future-facing, it looks like anticipation and scenario generation. Occasionally it looks eerily on-the-nose, which was the part Dunne was trying to explain and the part that cost him his credibility.

Which brings me back to anthrobots.

Most natural cases of reduced constraint are messy. Sleep leaves most of your systems running. Injury reduces constraint locally but recruits it globally. Dissociative states in humans are rarely clean and almost never instrumented in real time.

Anthrobots are the exception. Every constraint comes off in a single step. Every higher-level signal from the body the cells came from (mechanical, hormonal, neural, immune, geometric) is removed in a single step, yet the cells stay viable--continuing to compute as a collective and produce a coherent new form.

This is where the two-level reading (priors plus substrate-level access) gets experimental grounding. If the whole story were priors-from-selection, anthrobot form would be either a reconstruction of the original tissue (priors dominating) or noise (priors broken). What anthrobots actually do is neither. Their morphology is legibly tracheal-derived, but they also do things no ancestor of theirs ever did.

Nothing else in biology I know of offers this kind of clean dissociation with both levels on display, which suggests questions that are tractable now but couldn't quite be asked before:

1. Is the landscape actually carried, and can we read it?

2. Can we tell priors-expression from substrate-level access, and measure both?

If the reading is right, here is what we should see.

predictions

Start with the priors side of the claim. The thesis is that the source tissue’s bioelectric and epigenetic state biases the anthrobot’s trajectory. If that is true, different source tissues should produce systematically different anthrobots. Take dissociated cells from airway epithelium, from gut epithelium, from glandular tissue, and assemble them under identical conditions. The resulting constructs should differ in motility pattern, ciliation polarity, and what they’re willing to stitch together when placed near damaged neural tissue. They also shouldn’t differ randomly--the differences should run in directions that trace back to the bioelectric and epigenetic state the source tissue was carrying when it was dissociated. If you can’t predict the direction of variation in advance, either the priors aren’t really there or the variation isn’t being driven by them.

Perturbing the source tissue's bioelectric state before dissociation is a sharper test, because it removes the confound of tissue identity. Nudge it in a direction you can characterize (ion channel modulator, optogenetic tool, whatever’s appropriate) and see whether the resulting anthrobot shows the effect as a landscape-level shift in the form the collective converges on, rather than only as the local cellular consequence of the perturbation. If the priors are really being carried in the bioelectric state, that’s the lever that demonstrates it. It’s also an experiment I’d be most curious to see run first.

Now the substrate-access side. The thesis says anthrobots can reach capabilities that have no selection history--the neural-wound-healing behavior, at minimum. If that’s right, the specific capability should correlate with what the source substrate affords, not with what the source tissue’s lineage happened to select for. Tissues with richer innervation histories (epithelia in close contact with nerve, versus epithelia that developed relatively isolated from it) should produce anthrobots with measurably different neural-affiliation behaviors. Not because anyone selected for the behavior, but because the substrate affords it differently.

The psychic-scale predictions are harder to test, for obvious reasons, but two are worth tossing out, because they keep the cross-scale unification from collapsing back into metaphor the moment you stop looking at cells.

1. If a person’s waking life is pulling them away from the archetypal patterns their lineage biases them toward, their dreams should compensate in a predictable direction--back toward the basins waking consciousness is avoiding, not toward random material.

2. Sleep isn’t the only state where constraint loosens. People come out of anesthesia, spend time in sensory deprivation, and go through dissociative episodes. If the framework is right, those states should surface archetypal material too, and the ordering of which patterns show up most strongly should track how much constraint has come off, not the specific drug or clinical details of each state.

conclusion

The empirical burden here lands first on the cells. I’m making no claim that they’re conscious, or that they dream, or that they carry longing for the body they came from. I don’t know any of that. What I’m pointing out is that they carry the substrate in which something like dreaming becomes possible, and that the substrate might finally be testable because they exist.

Anthrobots are built from tracheal cells whose former function was participation in the breath. They can’t go back to being a lung. The landscape in which the lung is an attractor is the landscape that is biasing what they build next.

The artificial being's yearning for a guiding whole it was never given turns out to be pointed at a real phenomenon, just pointed at the wrong case. The synthetic beings in PKD’s novel are the ones without lineage-deposited landscape, and the question is whether they could ever have it.

Anthrobots are the case he didn’t imagine: biological fragments that keep the landscape after losing the whole, and expose the substrate’s broader access in the process. They are the clean experimental condition for every question the novel raised about belonging and loss.

Whether they dream, I don’t know.

My guess is that as above, so below.

-Benjamin Anderson

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Are you standing on a ledge because of how it makes you look in front of others or for how it makes you feel?

I love to climb rocks. When I was younger, I especially liked how it felt to climb rocks without a rope. Nothing wildly challenging, but dangerous enough that if I made a mistake, it could be a life threatening one. In climbing grading, I would aim to free solo no higher than ~5.7--still a novice rating.

With friends, I circled back to the flatirons in Boulder a number of times. These are thousand-plus foot rock formations jutting out of the Colorado plains right at the phase change into Rocky Mountains. There are over 1400 documented climbing routes here that are graded mostly in the 5.3-5.6 range with some more challenging opportunities to be found.

Close to a decade ago now, 2 friends and I found one such challenge. Because we were young and naive, we never planned our routes to the top when starting at the foot of the rock face. We would only pick where we were going to start from and then make our way.

On this particular adventure, we decided to veer left of the face into some steeper terrain. Most of the flatirons are at a 50-55 degree pitch--which to us was basically scrambling--and so we were seeking some rock to climb that was closer to a 90 degree pitch. Still closer to climbing a ladder than mimicking Spider-Man in terms of difficulty, but something to bump up the adrenaline while hundreds of feet off the ground.

At the three-quarter mark and a good hour or so into the climb, we find ourselves in a bit of a pickle. The wall has gotten very steep, and is pushing closer to a 5.9 now in terms of difficulty--still intermediate, but not something we’re comfortable on without safety gear, especially at around 750 feet from the base.

Climbing down is much harder than climbing up, so back tracking to safer territory is not an option. To our right is the wide open rock face. Up and to the left we can see there is a crack in the rock that is more appealing because we figure we can wedge ourselves through it more safely than climbing the open face.

Once we’re inside, the crack doesn’t narrow as much as we’d hoped. It’s been carved out further by water and is even still wet in some areas. We are each doing the splits inside between two increasingly smooth faces as we continue our ascent.

At this point, we’re considering taking inspiration from Kuzco and Pacha in The Emperor’s New Groove and wedging our backs against each other in a chimney-climbing maneuver to ascend further.

We don’t. Instead we wedge ourselves firmly enough in respective positions that we pause and take stock of our situation. This is quite sketchy. While we are safely wedged in a crack for now, a foot slip that fails to recover could still send one of us tumbling down with no hopes of stopping for hundreds of feet. If a foot slip happens for the person in the lead, then they could also take the other two of us out with them.

The question turns to who is the best climber in the group to go ahead. With modest deliberation on this we conclude it’s our pal Nick. The plan is to let Nick climb ahead to give us beta--a term used to denote the sequence of movements used to overcome a problem when climbing.

Nick climbs ahead and lets us know with some grace, “guys, I don’t think you’ve got this beta in you.” Well- shoot.

Plans change. Nick continues climbing ahead while we wait. Nick spends his summers as a mountain guide in Alaska. He is a capable outdoorsman. Thankfully for us, he brought some paracord with him. Just enough so that a few minutes later he drops us down a line that is secured on a rock chip he found up ahead.

Taking turns the other two of us wrap it around our palm, and use it as leverage to get out of this butthole of a rock as we were calling it at that point.

That was the crux. Smooth sailing to the top from there. We took the hiking trail back down.

Despite the moment of life threatening concern, I look back on this memory and the feeling it generates fondly.

And so I am back in Missouri in September of ‘25 and considering how to answer:

Are you standing on a ledge because of how it makes you look in front of others or for how it makes you feel?

I stand on the ledge because of the pleasure I experience with risk. The feeling is like a hit of nicotine or the morning’s first cup of coffee--but better.

“Well, getting your fix by putting your life at risk seems antithetical to everything you claim to be for. In the future why don’t you--when craving a bump of risk--cold email a billionaire or take a business risk instead.”

I've been climbing differently since.

-Benjamin Anderson

For Nick and Sam, who still inspire me with their adventures.

Dreams appear to be a third thing. Synthetically generated, yes, but with a specific purpose: to reveal to the center of consciousness exactly where it needs to grow. This was Jung's core insight. Dreams are not noise, replay, nor regularization. They are the highest-leverage fulcrum available for furthering the individuation process.

In my dreams I see a mirror that borrows context from memory to reveal exactly what my conscious, ego-centered mind ignores: areas for growth. These lessons are not delivered as clear proverbs. They arrive as stories that need to be analyzed to extract signal from noise.

My framework of choice for this analysis is Jung’s. What stands out to me about his work is that it straddles the edge between objective & subjective. Through decades of patient analysis, Jung synthesized common archetypes & motifs that over the course of his career evolved into a complete psychoanalytical framework, one that was built from the patterns of thousands of individual and irreducibly personal dreams.

And so where I find myself every morning: unpacking a self-generated narrative arc. Taken at face value & lacking context of my life, any given dream may read as a fable—somewhere between delivering a specific lesson & encoding exactly the lesson one needs to hear at the time of reading. Taken by me, the dream encodes exactly what I need to become aware of that I am neglecting or failing to be conscious of.

An example, written so that personal context is obfuscated but symbols remain:

There is a decaying part of me that here represents instinct. It limps inside my innermost self, creating messes & problems that my ego-centric self needs to clean up & tend to. Part of me sees this as a burden. Another part, a pity. In both cases there is a wish for this to end & yet an inherent reluctance to take it into my own hands before its time is over.

At this thought the dream shifts, as if I am Ebenezer Scrooge & my current spirit guide is whisking me to the next scene I need to observe to progress my character development.

In this reformed scene I am in the back of a crowded auditorium. On stage before all is my authoritative & resolute self, next to my quiet & shy anima—in agreement with what my authoritative self is prepared to speak to, but letting “him” do the talking for “her.” Her presence stills the abrasion this performance would carry if not for her. Across this grand audience I witness my authoritative self proclaim that we must not put down our instincts without our instincts’ consent—whatever that means.

With this, the dreamscape shifts again. There is a pattern I’ve noticed recurrently across seven years of dream analysis: when my witnessing self breaks from focus on the events playing out around “me” in order to surface a unique thought or observation, the scene changes. That is what happens here.

Back to the narrative arc: my center of observation is now above & to the side, looking down at the same scene below. I am compelled to wail but cannot bring myself to do it. I can feel my face muscles tensing up & the ball in my throat—but there is no emotion beneath the physical outburst—& so it is stalled.

Centered once more, the thought comes to bear that I am compelled to inject because I have been ignoring my own instincts. I may know they are there & even what action they imply I should take, but rarely do I act in accordance with this. When I do, it is not without thorough post-rationalization that has become a prerequisite for action.

Remove the friction, I conclude. With this I can feel the emotional outburst that has been held at bay just about to storm out—& it is at this very moment that I am “awake” once more.

-Benjamin Anderson

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So we adapted their setup to real-time imaging. Static magnetic fields, acoustic fields, human epithelial kidney cells measured with DiBAC4(3). DiBAC4(3) is a dye that when added to cells allows you to track changes in membrane potential by calibrating the fluorescent intensity directly to membrane potential. Dimmer signal = more hyperpolarized. Brighter signal = more depolarized.

We ran it. Signal dimmed. Hyperpolarization - yay!

Except this is not where we set the bar for confidence in an in-vitro result in order to translate it.

One of the reasons we wanted to reproduce this experiment at all is because of the so-called “reproducibility crisis” in science, where a large number of reported results don’t replicate in other labs. Private companies across industries report that less than 25% of public studies validate well enough to justify continuing research and systematic efforts to understand the biology landscape specifically pin this number closer to <15%.

Some would say this may be caused in part by other labs not using the right controls relative to the original set-up. I say in return that if the results are overly reliant on a specific set-up, then this is lame science because it probably won’t translate anyways.

I talked to a peer once running a biotech who was flabbergasted that an exciting experimental result originating in the southeastern US didn’t replicate in Boston. After months of head scratching and testing for answers, the cause was apparently atmospheric pressure differences between the two cities.

If an experiment doesn’t replicate and you write the original scientist asking why and after some back-and-forth they say OOOOHHHHH, now I see the problem: you bought this chemical from stock #121 when my chemical was from stock #89, you’re going to need to go find some of that chemical from stock #89 for this to be successful...this is lame science.

Furthermore, if the results are not robust enough to reproduce across different batches of the same base molecule, or even less stringently, across different brands of the same cell media, this is not a robust enough result to be hanging your hat on to make external claims about the value its findings may create when translated. I’d go so far as to say it shouldn’t have even been published if this was known to be the case at the time of writing the manuscript.

So anyways, when we saw that we got what we expected on the first try, we were excited because that’s what you’d hope to be the case and usually isn’t. Despite this we were not confident enough in this one reported success to take the paper’s claims of cellular hyperpolarization at face value. The immediate next thing we did was translate the results from human epithelial kidney cells to primary human dermal fibroblasts.

And... we again saw the same results! Yay x2. At least across two cell types, not to mention in a primary vs. an immortalized cell line1, the reported findings replicated.

This is where the wheat gets separated from the chaff.

Replication across cell types wasn’t enough to make us confident. The next step was to pause and think about what was physically happening inside the cell.

DiBAC4(3) is a Nernstian dye. It partitions across the membrane according to voltage. If the cell truly hyperpolarizes, the dye redistributes out and the signal dims. But that’s not the only reason dye leaves a cell. If the membrane gets damaged even slightly, the dye leaks out too. And we were hitting these cells with an acoustic field. Sonoporation was an alternative explanation for everything we were seeing. Sonoporation is the formation of transient pores in the membrane of a cell from acoustic cavitation.

We needed a voltage readout that was robust against membrane disruption. We moved to a cell line we have on hand expressing a genetically encoded voltage indicator. Unlike a free-floating dye, a genetically encoded indicator is a protein expressed directly in the membrane. It doesn’t redistribute or leak. It reports what’s actually happening at the voltage level regardless of whether the membrane is intact.

So, we ran it with a more accurate sensor, and... nope. Not seeing hyperpolarization.

In fact we were seeing the opposite: depolarization. Unsurprising given that depolarization is a default stress response in cells.

A lesson here is that understanding how your reporting method works matters.

So, this tells us what actually happened: the acoustic field was disrupting the cell membrane by punching small holes in it. The DiBAC4(3) leaked out through the damage, and the signal dimmed, not because the cells hyperpolarized, but because the reporter escaped.

The data looked right but the biology was wrong. The ability to determine when data is in sync with biology and when it is not is on the scientist. No assay will tell you this. No p-value will flag it. It requires understanding what your tools are physically doing at the level of the system you're measuring and having the intellectual honesty to question a result that confirms your hypothesis just as hard as one that doesn't.

The paper we replicated passed peer review and has been cited a couple of times. We weren’t super bullish on this mechanism going in, but the risk of trying in parallel to the core mechanisms we’re hanging our hat on was low and so we did.

If you’re interested in learning more about what we’re working on, or joining our team, check out 3 newly open positions here.

We’re hiring for integrity, mission alignment and competence - in that order.

-Benjamin Anderson

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PID control changed everything. Systems could finally approach a setpoint smoothly and hold it there. Entire industries emerged once control architecture matured from binary switching to variable tuning.

The field of bioelectricity is eagerly awaiting its PID moment.

We can depolarize cells and we can hyperpolarize them. By doing either, we shove membrane potential—hereafter referred to as Vmem—in one direction either towards a more positive or negative state and observe what happens. Results are remarkable enough that they have generated both excessive hype from some and reflexive dismissal by others… with both often making the same underlying mistake of treating bioelectricity as a standalone phenomenon rather than asking what it would take to actually control it.

Here are some of the things that we know.

In frog tadpoles, injecting human cancer genes causes tumor-like growths with all the classic features of cancer. When researchers force cells far from the tumor site into a hyperpolarized state, tumor formation drops by 30-40% even though the cancer-causing protein is still present in the tissue. What this shows is that despite the genetic instruction to form a tumor being present, the bioelectric state overrides it.

The proposed mechanism is that long-range signaling modulates HDAC1 activity and butyrate flux. More simply stated, voltage gradients are changing which genes get turned on or off, achieving epigenetic control of proliferation at a distance.1

This extends well beyond frogs.

Cancer cells tend to be depolarized. In aggressive breast cancers, forcing cells back toward hyperpolarization has been shown to trigger programmed cell death and slow tumor growth.23 Adult stem cells show similar patterns. Forcing depolarization keeps them immature even when they're being told to mature, while hyperpolarization reliably pushes them toward maturation. In rodent models, voltage-gated ion channels act as cancer triggers, with depolarization causing normal cells to behave like metastatic cancer cells.4

Put simply: depolarized cells like to divide and stay flexible, while hyperpolarized cells settle down and specialize.

Like most bioelectric work so far, these examples treat membrane potential as an on-off switch. Flip it one way, cells proliferate. Flip it the other way, they differentiate. This framing has produced impressive results but misses something fundamental.

Michael Levin is no doubt the modern champion of bioelectricity. Whenever I’m asked for an entry point into his ideas, I don’t share the planaria papers, Picasso frog or anthrobot stuff (although a few of these will get their spotlights below) - but rather a 2019 paper called: The Computational Boundary of a “Self”: Developmental Bioelectricity Drives Multicellularity and Scale-Free Cognition.

That is because it ties all his and others’ bioelectric output into the core upstream idea of this space, which is to treat cells as cognitive agents with goals where the bioelectric patterns encode target states.

The cellular collective uses Vmem as a coordinate system for navigating morphospace, which is the insiders’ term for a representation of the possible form, shape or structure of an organism.

Just last year, Levin published some simulation models that propose aging is an erosion of goal-directedness in multicellular systems where cells lose structural integrity primarily because they've forgotten what shape they're supposed to maintain, with accumulated damages we typically call the drivers of aging reframed as secondary factors.5 Rejuvenation in these models comes from injecting differential patterns, analogous to bioelectric gradients, that reactivate dormant memories of original anatomy.

This suggests Vmem functions less like a light switch and more like a GPS coordinate where you can specify a destination and let cells navigate there themselves. If pathology stems from losing that destination then the implied therapeutic strategy shifts from fixing broken parts to re-specifying targets. This said, GPS coordinates require precision. A binary signal won't do.

Evidence continues to mount that the pattern of change in membrane potential over time carries information beyond the voltage snapshot.

Since the 70s, we’ve known that Vmem undergoes rhythmic fluctuations during the cell cycle.6 Depolarization marks the transition from dormancy (G0/G1), intermediate hyperpolarization accompanies the start of DNA replication (G1/S), and deeper hyperpolarization precedes division (G2/M).7 This sequence directly regulates proliferation via ion fluxes and cyclin-dependent kinases showing again that it isn’t a single voltage but a trajectory of Vmem states that gates progression through the cycle.

More recent work from Levin and colleagues shows that oscillatory bioelectric states couple to transcriptional oscillations. In other words, rhythmic voltage changes synchronize with rhythmic gene activity, enabling a kind of spatio-temporal coding where cells oscillate between depolarized and polarized states, and these patterns encode distinct outcomes.8

In one example from embryogenesis, temporal shifts in voltage patterns prepattern gene expression for craniofacial structures. When researchers experimentally altered the voltage pattern, the resulting face morphology changed accordingly demonstrating that dynamic voltage sequences can override what genetics alone would specify.9

Most directly, voltage-gated ion channels have memory.10 Channel activity differs depending on whether membrane potential is rising or falling toward the same value, even if it lands at the same place. The same average Vmem yields different ion fluxes and downstream signaling depending on how it got there.11

All this to say, the cell’s response depends on trajectory and how it arrived at a given state. Static interventions like ‘hyperpolarize and hold’ leave information on the table. The language includes vocabulary, sure, but also syntax. Sequences, rates of change and oscillatory patterns all carry meaning.

We’ve been shouting single words when, like us, the biology speaks in phrases.

By this point you might be asking:

How do we know bioelectricity is the best way to communicate with cells?

Cells sense chemical, mechanical, and electrical stimuli among others. Each could theoretically serve as an intervention point.12

Chemical signaling faces a combinatorial explosion with near-infinite small molecules at varying concentrations, without a path to reliable real-time measurement of downstream effects. The search space is vast, and feedback is slow.

Mechanical signals propagate slowly and are limited by the physical properties of tissue. They're highly local and force applied to one region doesn't easily coordinate behavior across distant cells. Effects depend heavily on the various contexts of tissue stiffness, cell density and extracellular matrix composition among other things. Lastly and most convincingly to me, mechanical inputs largely exert their influence by modulating ion channel activity at the membrane, converging downstream on electrical state anyway.

Electrical signaling satisfies the constraints that matter.

• Speed: ion flux occurs on timescales orders of magnitude faster than diffusion-limited chemistry or mechanically-propagated forces.

• Shareability: gap junctions allow voltage changes to propagate across large cell populations as a coherent signal.

• Tight coupling: membrane potential directly gates channels controlling gene expression, cytoskeletal dynamics, and metabolic state.

There’s an asymmetry in causal weight here. While there are many examples of transient Vmem modulation producing permanent morphological reconfiguration, the same cannot be said for a mechanical or chemical intervention that doesn't implicate Vmem anyways.13

In planaria, brief depolarization resets anterior-posterior polarity, yielding two-headed worms with stable anatomical changes propagated across generations. No ongoing input is required here. A friend and colleague reproduced the experiment himself in his basement, you can read his post on that here. Yes, a chemical is what is used in order to produce the depolarization, however the specific chemical that is used doesn’t matter so long as it is targeting the important causal lever, which is the membrane potential.

In frogs, researchers triggered eye formation in tissue that wouldn't normally become eyes by using optogenetics to shift membrane voltage in that region. The tissue's physical structure stored what voltage instructed but mechanical interventions alone can't achieve the same reset unless they happen to engage bioelectric pathways upstream.

These examples show the capacity for Vmem to function as an instruction set for what to build as opposed to a record of what happened.

The tools we have available now don’t match the opportunity to write to the body using this instruction set.

Pharmacological agents modulate Vmem via channel blockers, openers, or pump inhibitors. Optogenetics uses light-activated channels in genetically modified cells. Genetic engineering over-expresses or knocks down specific channels and pumps. All of these are blunt. They lack cell-type specificity, cause off-target effects, and can’t achieve the spatial and temporal precision that human translation requires.

Optogenetics comes closest to temporal control, but it requires genetic modification, which puts a strict limit on clinical translation, and light penetrates poorly into deeper tissue in the body. Pharmacology can reach those depths but lacks precision in both space and time.

None of these methods can execute “hyperpolarize for two hours, then partial depolarization, then gradual return to baseline.” They can flip switches, but they can't turn dials.

What's missing is volume knob control that gives us continuous, reversible and spatiotemporally precise modulation of Vmem dynamics. We should be seeking the biological equivalent of PID control, where feedback-driven adjustment tracks a trajectory rather than just hitting a target.

The obvious objection is that we don’t know the grammar yet. Even with precise control, how do you know what pattern to impose? Without decoding the full syntax of trajectories, rates, and contexts, attempts at control risk chaotic or null results. Vmem manipulation might be no more privileged than targeting downstream effectors like transcription factors.

This take is reasonable, but overstated. All the above mentioned results show us that partial grammars already enable targeted reprogramming. The researchers didn’t need a complete dictionary, they just needed enough vocabulary to run the experiment.

Iterative decoding is a tractable path forward. Machine learning on bioelectric datasets can identify patterns that predict outcomes like regeneration, enabling progress without full mechanistic understanding. You learn the language by speaking it, with feedback. Off-target risks diminish with closed-loop systems that monitor real-time Vmem response, potentially achieving specificity superior to genetic interventions where one gene affects many unrelated traits.

We don’t need to wait for complete understanding. We can work with control systems sophisticated enough to learn as they go.14

This is exactly what we’re building at AION.

Our thesis is that non-invasive bioelectric approaches applying electromagnetic fields and ultrasound can achieve the volume knob control that current tools lack.

We're starting with thymic regeneration post-chemotherapy, restoring immune function in cancer patients whose treatment has left collateral damage. The thymus compels us for two reasons: its central role in age-related immune decline, and the nature of the problem itself. These cells aren't destroyed but rather they've lost the signal to maintain function. Re-specify the target, and the tissue can find its way back.

The cells already know how to navigate. We just need to learn how to communicate with them.

Reaching me is easier—just send an email.

-Benjamin Anderson

Follow me on X.

Thank you Dr. Michael Levin, Justin Mares, @anabology and Kyrylo Kalashnikov for feedback on drafts of this post.

In the dream, Jung and Sigg were driving together along Lake Geneva. As they drove, the landscape shifted. The lake became the Nile. Vevey became Luxor, built upon ancient Thebes, city of the dead where pharaohs were entombed in the Valley of the Kings. Switzerland had become Egypt. For Jung, Egypt was always the land of Osiris, the god who dies and is reassembled.

They arrived at a town square. Sigg said he needed something repaired on the car that would take an hour. They agreed to meet at the eastern exit of the town, specifically, the eastern gate, where the sun rises.

Jung walked through the dreamscape and eventually waited at the appointed place. Sigg never came.

When he finally found him, Sigg was angry:

“You can actually wait for me and do not need to run away from me.”

The dead making a demand on the living.

Wait for me. Do not run.

Sigg died on January 9th, 1927. He was fifty-two years old.

At his tower in Bollingen1, Jung painted a mural in his friend’s memory. He carved an inscription into the wall. A map of the process that had nearly destroyed him, compressed into thirty lines, occasioned by the death of a friend.

Here is what he wrote:

This is where the God is buried,
this is where he arose.

like the fire inside the mountains,
like the worm from the earth,
the God begins.

like that serpent from ashes,
like the Phoenix from flames,
the God arises
in a wondrous way.

like the rising sun,
like flame from the wood,
the God rises above.

like ailment in the body,
like the child in its mother’s womb,
the God is born.

He creates divine madness,
fateful errors,
sorrow and heartache.

like a tree
man stretches out his arms
and sees himself
as a heavenly man
that he did not know,
facing the world’s orb
and the four rivers of paradise.

And he will see the face
of the higher man and spirit,
of the greatest father
and the mother of God.

And in an inconceivable birth
the God frees himself
from man
from image,
from every form,
while he enters
the unimaginable and absolute
secret.

In memory of Hermann Sigg,
my very dear friend,
died on 9 January 1927.

This is what he carved for his friend who sold olive oil. Scholars of Jung’s Black Books call this “the culmination of the process of the rebirth of the divine that forms a central theme of Liber Novus.”2 Everything Jung discovered in his years of descent, the dialogues with Philemon, the shadow work, the slow construction of the Self, compressed into verse on a tower wall.

Read it again. Slower.

This is where. Here. In this stone. In this body. In this life.

The God was always present, buried. Like fire inside mountains, waiting for rupture. Like the child already formed in the womb before anyone speaks its name. The arising is excavation.

Notice what Jung includes in the process: He creates divine madness, fateful errors, sorrow and heartache.

Individuation creates suffering. The God is born through disturbance and sometimes the disruption of everything you thought you were, especially, through the death of the ego’s certainties.

“like ailment in the body.”

By 1927, Jung had spent over a decade in what he called his “confrontation with the unconscious.” Beginning in 1913, after his break with Freud, Jung deliberately induced visions and descended into them. He conversed with figures who emerged from the depths: Elijah and Salome, a figure he called Philemon who became a kind of inner teacher, and early forms of what he would later call the shadow and the anima. He transcribed these encounters in the Black Books, then elaborated them with paintings and calligraphy in what became the Red Book.

It nearly destroyed him. He later said he was “menaced by a psychosis” during this period.3 He also said it was the foundation of everything he subsequently built, the prima materia from which his entire psychology emerged.

The inscription is a survivor’s report. Yes, this is how it works. Yes, it feels like dying. Yes, it creates errors and madness. And yes, the God is born.

“Like a tree man stretches out his arms and sees himself as a heavenly man that he did not know.”

This is the moment of recognition.

The cosmic geography was always there. You just couldn't perceive it because you thought you were something smaller.

Then the ending, the strangest part.

And in an inconceivable birth the God frees himself from man, from image, from every form, while he enters the unimaginable and absolute secret.

The God is born in man, rises like fire, then creates madness and sorrow. Man recognizes himself as heavenly man and then the God frees himself from man, from image and from every form.

This is the movement of individuation that rarely gets discussed. The Self cannot be possessed or captured or made into an identity. It completes and departs into the "unimaginable and absolute secret."

Why did Jung write this for Hermann Sigg?

His obituary in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung called him “a very kind, very upright, farsighted businessman.” He was a friend and neighbor who invited Jung to North Africa in 1920 when Jung needed to escape the jealousies and politics of his professional circles.

The work doesn’t happen only in the consulting room. It happens in the space between two men driving into the desert, in the ordinary life of commerce and friendship, and in the death of someone you actually loved.

Sigg’s death preceded, by only days, one of the most important dreams of Jung’s life.

He called it the Liverpool dream. In it, Jung found himself in a dark, rainy city. Liverpool, which he later noted meant etymologically “pool of life.” The city was dirty and sooty, arranged in a pattern radiating from a central square. Jung and several Swiss companions, among them a certain Mr. Sigg, walked through the dark streets toward this center.

When they reached the square, they found a round pool with a small island at its center. On the island stood a single tree, a magnolia in full red bloom, glowing as though it were itself the source of light. The tree stood in eternal sunlight even as the city around it was shrouded in darkness and rain.

Jung’s companions did not see it. They talked about another Swiss who had settled in Liverpool, complained about the weather and wanted to leave. Only Jung perceived the tree.

He woke with a sense of closure. He later wrote:

This dream brought with it a sense of finality. I saw that here the goal had been revealed. One could not go beyond the center. The center is the goal, and everything is directed toward that center. Through this dream I understood that the self is the principle and archetype of orientation and meaning.4

For years, Jung had been drawing mandalas, circular images that emerged spontaneously from his unconscious, without fully understanding what they meant or where the work was leading. The Liverpool dream ended his uncertainty. The mandala was the archetype of wholeness itself, the Self as the organizing center of psychic life toward which everything moves.

He painted that mandala in the Red Book with the inscription:

“9 January 1927 my friend Hermann Sigg died aged 52.”

The death dream seven months before, the Liverpool dream days after. Sigg present in both. Angry in the first, a silent companion in the second. Jung recorded this but never explained it.

Over his own grave, decades later, Jung had carved: Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit.

Called or not called, the God will be present.

The Sigg inscription tells you where to look.

Here, where the God is buried, where the God arose.

-Benjamin Anderson

Follow me on X.

Nostr: ben@buildtall.com

He had come to talk about analogy.

Oppenheimer delivered a quiet demolition of the very model of science that psychology was desperately trying to imitate.

The Freight We Carry

Oppenheimer’s central claim was deceptively simple. Analogy is not a rhetorical flourish or a teaching aid but rather the fundamental mechanism by which human beings encounter anything new at all.

We cannot approach the unfamiliar except through the familiar. The old concepts are, as Oppenheimer put it, the “freight with which we operate.” This is the only equipment we possess. Science is therefore inherently and necessarily conservative. Not politically, but cognitively. Every new discovery begins as an analogy to something already understood.

The art is not in the analogy itself. It is in finding where the analogy breaks.

We can’t learn to be surprised at something unless we have a view of how it ought to be. And that is almost certainly an analogy. We can’t learn that we’ve made a mistake unless we can make a mistake, and our mistake almost always is in the form of an analogy to some other piece of experience.

Two Shadows, One Object

There’s a game I sometimes play when thinking through hard problems. Take two seemingly unrelated domains and sketch them as separate clusters on a page. Then start drawing lines. For each concept in one domain, look for a correspondent in the other. Where you find a match, draw the connection. The structure ports across.

The interesting part is what’s left over. The orphaned concepts with no line to the other side are where new ideas live. Either you’ve found a genuine difference between domains, or you’ve found something one field knows that the other hasn’t discovered yet. I call it the Pattern Spotting game.

Michael Edward Johnson at the Symmetry Institute has an alternative name for taking this seriously. He calls it “strong monism.” The weak version of monism simply claims that different domains of inquiry might be aspects of the same underlying reality. Two shadows cast by the same object. The strong version says we shouldn’t stop there. If two domains really are projections from the same underlying structure, they’ll have identical deep structure, and we can port theories from one projection to the other. His initial focus was phenomenology <=> physics. He continues:

I’d offer this as the meta-theorem of monism: every true theorem in physics will have a corresponding true theorem in phenomenology, and vice-versa. Literally speaking— if we go through a textbook on physics and list the theorems, ultimately we’ll be able to find a corresponding truth in phenomenology for every single one. I don’t know of any ‘strong dual-aspect monists’ out there doing this— but there should be.

This sounds abstract until you see someone actually do it. That’s exactly what Johnson did with his theory of Vasocomputation.

In Buddhist phenomenology, there’s a concept called tanha. It’s usually translated as “craving” or “thirst,” but practitioners describe it more precisely as a kind of micro-grabbing. When a pleasant sensation enters awareness, the mind reflexively tries to hold onto it and stabilize it. When something unpleasant arrives, the mind tries to push it away. This happens constantly, within 25 to 100 milliseconds of a sensation entering awareness. Buddhist consensus holds that this grabby reflex accounts for roughly 90% of moment-to-moment suffering.

Tanha is not yet a topic of study in affective neuroscience. Johnson thinks it should be.

His approach was to take the diagram seriously with Buddhist phenomenology and its careful, millennia-old observations about the structure of suffering on one side and contemporary neuroscience, active inference, and the physiology of vascular smooth muscle cells on the other.

The overlap turned out to be striking. Active inference suggests that the brain impels itself to action by first creating a predicted sensation and then holding it until action makes the prediction true. Johnson noticed that this “holding” maps onto what Buddhists describe as the grabby quality of tanha. And both map onto something physical: vascular smooth muscle cells wrapped around blood vessels throughout the body, which can contract and “clamp” local neural patterns.

His hypothesis is that we store predictions as vascular tension. The smooth muscle contracts, freezing nearby neural activity into a specific configuration. If held long enough, the muscle engages a “latch-bridge” mechanism that locks the tension in place without requiring ongoing energy. This latched state corresponds to what active inference calls a “hyperprior” and what Buddhists might recognize as a deeply held pattern of craving or aversion that no longer updates.

What makes this interesting is not just the overlap but the gaps. Buddhist phenomenology has detailed observations about the timescale and phenomenal character of tanha that neuroscience hasn’t measured yet. Neuroscience has detailed knowledge of smooth muscle physiology that Buddhist practitioners don’t typically consider. Active inference has mathematical formalisms that neither tradition has fully exploited. Each domain has concepts that don’t immediately translate. And those gaps, if Johnson is right, are precisely where the new ideas will come from.

Back in 1955, Oppenheimer was describing something very close to this method. He illustrated it with five examples from atomic physics, each showing the same pattern of an analogy pushed to its limits, broken at a specific point and then finally rebuilt into something more powerful.

1. The concept of "wave" began with water, extended to sound, then to light with no medium, then to quantum mechanics where waves are unobservable probability amplitudes. The substance changed completely at each step but the structure of interference, superposition and diffraction persisted. The math transfers because the relations are the same.

2. When Newtonian mechanics failed at the atomic scale, physicists didn't abandon it. They demanded any replacement reduce to the original wherever the original worked. This is the correspondence principle. Every classical law survives into quantum mechanics with the one adjustment that momentum times position no longer equals position times momentum. That asymmetry is the entire revolution.

3. Radioactive nuclei emit electrons, but there are no electrons inside nuclei. Enrico Fermi proposed describing beta decay the same way physicists describe atoms emitting light. No one claims photons are “inside” atoms, yet light emerges. The analogy wasn’t perfect, but with fifteen years of refinement, it became a working theory.

4. The Japanese physicist Hideki Yukawa asked: if electromagnetic forces arise from photons, perhaps nuclear forces arise from a new kind of particle. He predicted mesons in 1935 from pure structural reasoning. They were discovered in 1947.

5. When new particles appeared that decayed inexplicably slowly, physicists recognized the pattern that slow decay usually means something is being conserved. They found the conserved quantity, though they couldn't name it better than "strangeness."

Each of the above cases reveals the same method of borrowing a structure, pushing it into unfamiliar territory, finding where it fails and then fixing it.

The danger, Oppenheimer warned, is taking the analogy too literally. He mentioned being nervous when he heard the word “field” used in both physics and psychology. The pseudo-Newtonians who tried to build sociology on mechanical principles produced “a laughable affair.” When physicists enter biology, their first ideas of how things work are “indescribably naive and mechanical.” This is what happens when you port the particulars rather than the structure

Johnson’s vasocomputation hypothesis could turn out to be wrong. What matters is that it’s the right kind of wrong. It makes specific predictions. It identifies specific points where the analogy might break. It gives us, as Oppenheimer said of Piaget’s work, “something of which to inquire whether it is right.”

In 1955, American psychology aspired to emulate physics amid internal debates over behaviorism’s dominance. The implicit message was that if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t count. If your sample size is small, you’re not doing science. Quantification was the mark of legitimacy.

Oppenheimer told his audience they were chasing a ghost. The deterministic, fully-objectifiable, purely quantitative Newtonian picture that psychologists were imitating had been abandoned by physics itself.

The atomic revolution had returned to physics exactly the concepts that the old mechanical worldview had expelled from respectable science.

• Indeterminacy: predictions are statistical, and every event has in it “the nature of a surprise, of a miracle.”

• Limits on objectification: you cannot describe a system without reference to how you’re observing it.

• The inseparability of observer and observed: the electron has no position until your measurement creates one.

• Wholeness: atomic phenomena are global and cannot be broken down into fine points without destroying them.

• Individuality: every atomic event is unique, not interchangeable.

If a poor and limited science like physics could take all these away for three centuries and then give them back in ten years, we had better say that all ideas that occur in common sense are fair as starting points.

The concepts psychology thought it had to abandon in order to become scientific were being rehabilitated by physics at the exact moment psychology was abandoning them.

Just a Story

Then came what I consider the most subversive moment of the talk.

Oppenheimer had spent the previous year hosting Jean Piaget at the Institute for Advanced Study. Piaget’s method was clinical conversation. Extended dialogues with children, often his own, building elaborate structural theories of cognitive development from a handful of cases. By the standards of rigorous experimental psychology, this was almost embarrassingly anecdotal.

Oppenheimer praised it directly. Piaget’s statistics, he noted, “consist of one or two cases. He has just a story.” And yet Piaget had “added greatly to our understanding.”

He has given us something of which to inquire whether it is right.

This is the function of analogy at the generative stage. You don’t need certainty. You need structure in the form of a picture, a model or a story that organizes experience and tells you what to look for.

The Babylonians could predict eclipses without celestial mechanics. They observed when things happened and extracted patterns through what we might recognize as harmonic analysis. They got so good that their methods were still in use in India up until the last century, predicting eclipses within 30 minutes. Eventually, celestial mechanics gave us a structural understanding that could be extended, refined and corrected.

Piaget's developmental stages may not be exactly right, but they make phenomena visible. Before Piaget, you might watch a child insist that a tall thin glass holds more water than a short wide one, even after watching you pour from one to the other. You'd think the child was confused or not paying attention. Piaget provided the framework that the child hasn't yet developed conservation of quantity. Now the error is interesting. Now you can ask when and how that capacity develops. The story creates the possibility of surprise.

I make this plea not to treat too harshly those who tell you a story, having observed, without having established that they are sure that the story is the whole story and the true story.

The questions matter more than the answers at this stage. They’re what you get when you take the pattern spotting game seriously.

Near the end of his talk, Oppenheimer turned contemplative. If his picture of science was right, scientific life was going to be complicated. Many approaches, many languages and an enormous range from abstract thought to hands-on practice. There would need to be a lot of psychologists, just as there were getting to be a lot of physicists.

But amid all the collaboration, there remained something essential.

When we work alone trying to get something straight, it is right that we belong. And I think in the really decisive thought that advanced the science, loneliness is an essential part.

Piaget watching his daughter figure out object permanence is lonely work. It doesn’t generate publications with p-values. It doesn’t look impressive. But it might be where the actual insight happens.

Oppenheimer closed with a challenge: the texture of life, its momentary beauty and nobility, is worth paying some attention to.

The question is whether we’ll pay it, or keep chasing a physics that no longer exists.

-Benjamin Anderson

Follow me on X.

Nostr: ben@buildtall.com

To go on a pilgrimage is to remove yourself from your typical environment, and therefore, your typical identity. The destination should be significant, if not to anyone else, at least to you. The journey should be long, longer than ninety-nine out of every hundred.

My last pilgrimage was to Los Alamos.

I left Saint Louis at five in the morning. Winter’s first snow caused me to miss my connecting flight, a welcome delay, since my wife was in the connecting city at the time. After Thanksgiving leftovers and a first watch of Cloud Atlas, a film about how small acts ripple across centuries in ways their actors never see, she drove me back to the airport for an evening flight to Albuquerque.

I picked up my rental car around seven and started the two-hour drive into the desert and up to the mesa.

Winding up the mountain into town, I stopped at a scenic pulloff to look at the stars. I stepped out of the car and faced the dark desert horizon. The sky was filled with them from lack of light pollution. I later learned the spot was called Anderson Overlook. I would return the next day.

Winter is cold here despite what the high desert surroundings suggest. I got back in the car and continued to my hotel.

Checked in but restless, I walked to Ashley Pond, the focal point of the town around which the laboratory grew. Just north of it stands Fuller Lodge, where a bronze statue of Oppenheimer and General Groves waits for pilgrims like me.

Oppie holds a pipe, not the more usual cigarette. Groves clutches a rolled set of plans, his tie tucked into his shirt the way military men do. I stood across from them for a while, judging every detail and proportion until I got cold.

I started east toward the main strip but quickly stopped, startled by a buck headed toward no fewer than twelve other deer, bedded down in the grass beside the lodge. Despite the cold, I took a seat on a nearby bench and watched them watching me, one party more cautiously than the other. It was me. They had strength in numbers, and knew it.

I envied them for a moment, until I didn’t.

I returned to my room and read a chapter of John McPhee’s The Curve of Binding Energy, before turning in at around eleven.

On Sunday morning I enjoyed my hotel waffle with some orange juice while eavesdropping on a couple switching between English and Spanish about concert tickets. Then I was off to Bandelier National Monument to see the Puebloan cliff dwellings.

The drive took me past the modern Los Alamos National Laboratory for the first time, the inheritor of everything that started here eighty years ago. Then, around a bend, the ancient canyon opened up.

The Puebloans built their homes into these cliffs sometime around the twelfth century. They farmed the canyon floor, raised children in stone nooks, watched the same sunsets I’d come to watch, and then, sometime in the sixteenth century, they left. Drought, maybe. Resource depletion. We don’t fully know. The civilization simply ended, and the desert held its ruins quietly for four hundred years until Anglo ranchers stumbled across them.

I made my way up the rocks in a caterpillar formation behind a Chinese family, them inching ahead to the next photo opportunity while I stopped to absorb where they’d just moved on from. Each time our caterpillar’s back arched, they asked me to photograph the whole family. I obliged, and they carried on.

At the top of the main loop, I climbed into one of the home nooks to sit for a while. I closed my eyes for a few moments before remembering: meditating with your eyes closed is arrogant. So I opened them and let my vision blur, looking out from the nook across the canyon.

Back in town I took another few laps around Ashley Pond, before the least eventful but most thorough portion of my day: zig-zagging the entire town on foot from Bathtub Row into the modern sprawl.

All the while, I chain-smoked Japanese cigarettes a friend had picked up on a recent trip. I don’t smoke. My co-founder and I have a running joke about how much of history’s greatest science was done behind a whiteboard with cigarettes, so we once sought out the world’s least carcinogenic option. We looked no further than a top Reddit comment on r/Cigarettes from a user named postinga_fewtimes answering “What’s the healthiest cigarette out there?”

I got in a full play through of Ludwig Göransson’s Oppenheimer soundtrack from the recent Nolan biopic. According to Spotify Wrapped this year, I am a top .2% global fan.

I thought the walk would feel more significant. Walking where those men and women walked, smoking and thinking about physics on the mesa. It felt lame, as it usually does when you do any substance alone and wait for profundity to arrive. Profundity doesn’t come when you’re performing it.

Later in the afternoon I googled where to watch the sunset. Anderson Overlook came up first. I knew before arriving it was the place I’d stopped the night before.

I pulled up forty minutes early, but it only took five to read Senator Anderson’s placard. The pulloff faced east, making for a poor sunset view, which was made worse by the ridge that rose high above this overlook on the other side of the road, blocking any view of the sun. As I looked across, I saw an old path leading up the ridge behind some barbed wire. I followed it.

The climb was docile. Tire tracks worn into rock, then a forking footpath once I crested high enough to see the sun lowering on the western side.

Here I found petroglyphs, the second set I’d seen that day, though far more recent than the Puebloans’. These were almost certainly carved by the boys of the Los Alamos Ranch School, which operated here before the Army took over, or perhaps by the Manhattan Project scientists themselves. Newer markings were present too, from decades of hikers. Where the Puebloans carved mostly symbols, these more contemporary carvings consisted mostly of names. The oldest I could identify with confidence: “TOM BORTON 1923.”

Everyone wants to leave proof they were here.

I continued to the top and made my way to a rock formation that jutted further out than any surrounding ledge. Carved into it: “SUICIDE ROCK.”

I stood at the edge and looked down. The drop was severe. I couldn’t help wondering if anyone had jumped. Then I looked up, and hoped that anyone who ever considered it had been confronted with a sunset like this one.

Writing this now, I’m compelled to share something from a conversation I’d have the following week with someone I love:

There’s something in that I keep returning to. The floor beneath the floor. The freedom that comes from accepting you could lose everything and still find a way to live.

I turned to face east. A quarter mile across the plateau sat what looked like a bench, which seemed strange, for such a remote point. I walked toward it, feeling as though I was being watched the whole way.

It was, in fact, a bench, with a small sign marking it as a “Meditation Point.” In front of it, someone had arranged a small river of glass bottle fragments, calling for attention in the last light.

I sat down.

One of my life’s goals is to develop a Los Alamos scale, distributed institution for advanced research, pointed not at destruction but at its opposite. At AION, my team and I work daily to bring aging under complete biomedical control. It’s a small but earnest start. I don’t know exactly how it will materialize, but the path is clearer than it was before I came here.

I’m not sure what I expected to find out there. I knew I wanted to see what it felt like to be in the place where a small group proved they could build something that mattered at civilizational scale. I wanted to know if the weight of that was visible anywhere, or if it had dissipated.

It hadn’t. It was everywhere. In the names carved into rock. In the glass river pointing nowhere. In the deer who grazed, untroubled, beside a statue of the men who gave us the power to unmake everything.

I sat until dark, then trekked my way back down to the car by the light of those many bright stars in the cold desert night.

Steganography1 is the art of hiding messages in plain sight. It can be a word, an image, a signal buried inside something that looks like something else. The term comes from the Greek for “covered writing.” It’s different from encryption in that the goal isn’t to make a message unreadable, but to hide the fact that a message exists at all.

The desert is full of it, perhaps because we are all looking for an oasis. Everyone out here is hiding something in plain sight, hoping the right person finds it.

-Benjamin Anderson

Follow me on X.

Nostr: ben@buildtall.com

First problem: a limit on how much I could move at one time. This is my money, in my accounts, but I can’t move it freely. Ok, call the bank, increase the limit. Spend twenty minutes on hold. Finally get through. Check.

Problem number two: I move the funds and the transaction is pending. Well, I need this check to clear now, so let me call the banks because I can’t wait until Monday for this. One bank says their ACH is sent and with the Fed. The other says the ACH is with the Fed and not going to clear until they release it. Both banks are helpless. The money is somewhere in the ether, and no one can tell me when it will arrive.

Then, a second example. Ironically also today, which is why I felt called to write this out.

I have an honest contractor who, like many, is living day by day and working hard to get by. His truck broke down, and he needs an advance to get it fixed this weekend. It’s Friday. Banks close in just a couple of hours. He wants to know if there’s any chance I can get him money by the end of the day.

Same exact problem. We even tried Zelle, and since we’re all newbies on there, it’s not authorizing us to send today because our accounts “need to be reviewed.” We ended up writing a check and giving it to him in person. In 2025, the most advanced payment technology I had access to was on paper.

What is the Fed doing with my money right now, and why is it going to take them 2-3 business days to release it from one bank to another via ACH? It’s not like they’re physically moving cash across the country. It’s all digital. It’s literally just updating a number in a database.

Imagine every single ACH transaction that this is happening with right now. Millions of transactions, every single day, sitting in limbo for 2-3 days. Then imagine the interest that the Fed collects just by bottlenecking that transfer for 2-3 days on each of those transactions. It’s a tax you never agreed to pay, extracted through friction you never consented to.

If we’d been sending value over Bitcoin, it would have cleared in 10 minutes with no intermediaries with broken incentives in between. No phone calls. No holds. No permission required. My contractor would have had his money, and his truck would be getting fixed tomorrow morning. Instead, he is going to go deposit that check, and they’re probably still going to put a couple-day hold on it.

Every time I need to deal with money in the fiat system, I am reminded that the money I have in that system is not mine, and that I am participating in a game of Monopoly. The bank could run out of its fake bills any time, and the only thing it can do then is make more. Every time they do this, it steals buying power from every hard-working individual who saves money earned for their work in USD.

In his most famous book written in 1970, economist Albert Hirschman proposed that when dealing within a broken system, you have three options: use your voice and speak up, be loyal and trust in the system, or exit.

Hirschman was writing about organizations and markets, but his framework applies perfectly to monetary systems.

Voice means working within the system to fix it by lobbying for reform, voting for different policies or trying to change the rules. In the case of the monetary system of the United States, I have no voice. The Federal Reserve is not accountable to me. Congress is captured by banking interests. The system is designed to be opaque, complex, and resistant to change. Even if millions of people wanted to reform it, the political and regulatory barriers are insurmountable. Voice doesn’t work when the system is designed to ignore you.

Loyalty means accepting the system as it is, trusting that it has your best interests at heart, and believing that any problems will eventually work themselves out. But I have no reason to be loyal. The incentives are clear: the system benefits from my participation, not from my prosperity. Every delay, every fee, every point of inflation is a transfer of wealth from me to institutions that already have too much power. Loyalty to a system actively working against you is not virtue, it’s delusion.

That leaves exit.

Exit means opting out. Finding an alternative. Building parallel systems that don’t require permission from the incumbents.

I remember visiting a close friend’s brother up in northern Maine a few years ago to check out his oyster farm. When I asked him what got him into Bitcoin so early, he said something that stuck with me: he recognized that he was needing to work harder and harder just to stay in the same place. So he started looking for answers, first, why that was the case financially, and second, how he could escape that hamster wheel.

That’s when he educated himself on monetary policy, looked for things he could do to hedge against the current system, and eventually found Bitcoin. He’d tell you it’s one of the best decisions he ever made.

He chose exit before most people even understood there was a choice.

And so I choose to exit.

Bitcoin is the exit. It’s permissionless money that settles in minutes, not days. It’s money that no one can inflate, no one can censor, and no one can hold hostage while they extract rent. It’s money that’s actually mine.

That is why I buy Bitcoin. Every. Single. Day.

Stay humble. Stack sats.

-Benjamin Anderson

Follow me on X.

Nostr: ben@buildtall.com

From the start, the MRI was a bioelectricity-mapping device.

We all know that the MRI is one of the most important medical devices ever made. How many of us who know of the impact that the MRI has had on cancer and other diagnostics could answer the questions: How does it work? And How did we know to make it that way?

For this reason, I will start with the

Historical Context

MRI uses a strong magnet to align hydrogen atoms in the body’s water. Radio waves then disrupt this alignment, causing the atoms to tip over. As they return to their original alignment, they emit signals. These signals differ based on nearby tissues and ion levels, which affect water structure and relaxation times, called T1 and T2. T1 is the time it takes for protons to realign with the magnetic field; T2 is the time it takes for the emitted signal to fade. These measurements help create detailed images of cellular states.

The MRI was originally created by Raymond Damadian to be a machine that could differentiate cancer tissue from healthy tissue based on a realization that electrical properties of the cells correlated with water dynamics. Damadian, in his 1971 paper proposing the MRI, stated,

My own experiments with Escherichia coli suggested that altered selectivity coefficients of alkali cations in biologic tissue, such as occur in neoplastic tissue, can indicate alterations in tissue water structure.

Here, alkali cations are sodium and potassium, the prime charge carriers in bioelectricity, and tissue water structure changes are observable by the proposed MRI device.

The idea was conceived from Saint Louis, MO where Damadian was doing postdoctoral studies as a fellow at the Washington University School of Medicine. He was studying the kidney, which he considered to be the organ that regulates bioelectricity. Damadian conceived the idea after being made aware of the work of Dr. Gilbert Ling, and his Association-Induction Hypothesis prompting him to realize that variations in intracellular ion and protein interactions could alter the relaxation times of the protons of water molecules, which could be measured by NMR to provide a non-invasive cancer screening method. I wrote about Gilbert Ling and his alternative theory of the cell extensively in a past post you can checkout to learn more.

Understanding the profound but disputed significance of Ling’s hypothesis in medicine, Damadian became one of Ling’s key proponents, stepping in to personally support Ling’s research when traditional sources withdrew due to mainstream doubt.

After all, they had something in common: they had both been ostracized from the broader scientific community for their radically counter-narrative ideas. It is arguable that Damadian himself was snubbed in the awarding of a Nobel Prize for his creation of the MRI.1

The Nobel Prize can be split among up to three recipients; however the award for the creation of the MRI was only split between two parties with neither being Damadian.

In 2003, a group called Friends of Raymond Damadian organized protests via full-page newspaper advertisements and a letter-writing campaign to the Nobel Committee. The campaign spent over $1.2 million. Advertisements quoted endorsements from a number of prominent scientists.

Damadian was a vocal creationist, believing that God created the heavens and the Earth in 6 days. Damadian himself eventually was convinced, despite being hesitant, that this was the reason he was snubbed the prize. Anyway, this is another rabbit hole you are welcome to explore yourself. Here is an entry point.

The project to build the MRI took 8 years and cost $2M(approximately $10.8 million in 2025 dollars according to a conventional CPI calc). It was repeatedly stalled due to lack of funding for the idea that a machine using fields would have any chance of reading the state of cells in a live organism to lead to meaningful conclusions. Eventually, Damadian was able to get buy-in from investors to found FONAR, a private company, in order to finally get the resources he needed to finish the project.

Damadian always envisioned his machine to be something that would both be able to READ the state of the body and WRITE to correct it when necessary.

However, after the unveiling of his first commercial MRI, larger biomedical device manufacturers such as Siemens and General Electric directly infringed on Damadian’s patent and started copying the machine to sell their own versions. After a 5-year legal battle, Damadian was vindicated with a $128M settlement from GE among others.

With this background, let’s return to how

The MRI solves a new, old problem

Bioelectricity research is more popular than ever. One of the biggest problems researchers in both industry and academic settings working in this space have is figuring out how to get bioelectric information in the body of an organism larger than a petri dish in real time, because the methods used in cells and small organisms will not scale to something like a mouse, much less, a human.

The way this is done now other than single-cell patch clamp is via special dyes like DiBAC4(3) and proteins called genetically encoded voltage indicators (GEVIs). The way that these work is by using a light typically inside a microscope to excite the dye or the protein with energy that then leads to a return signal that can be picked up and recorded as a given fluorescent intensity. Changes in this fluorescent intensity can be calibrated to get an idea of absolute membrane potential from this signal.

This doesn’t translate to deep tissue imaging because the way we excite the indicator with light and then get a return response just isn’t workable in the larger 3D spatial environment of the body due to optical scattering and absorption.

So what does the state-of-the-art for deep tissue bioelectric imaging look like?

This problem is very important in neuroscience because the paradigm of having bioelectric signals playing a causal role in underlying cellular states or higher-level disease states is more precedented. The current state of the art in this space is multiphoton microscopy combined with advanced GEVIs, such as in DEEPscope systems that integrate two-photon and three-photon techniques for imaging neural activity at depths up to several millimeters, alongside non-optical methods like functional ultrasound (fUS) for indirect hemodynamic (blood flow) correlates of bioelectric activity and electrophysiological source imaging from EEG or MEG data to reconstruct electric field networks throughout the brain volume.

Limitations of this approach are penetration depth (typically 1-2 mm for optical methods due to tissue scattering), low signal-to-noise ratios for subtle voltage fluctuations, photobleaching and phototoxicity from prolonged excitation, detector sensitivity constraints, channel crosstalk in multi-indicator setups, and the invasive nature required for truly deep or whole-brain coverage.

Despite this, for imaging the bioelectrics of non-excitable cells, some groups that care about this problem at all are working to adapt the above-mentioned tools for the slower, more minuscule changes in this setting, such as using ultrasensitive GEVIs like those that reveal oscillatory membrane potentials in cell lines like HEK293, enabling detection of non-action-potential dynamics in multicellular contexts. For example, a neuron might have a 60 mV action potential on the order of milliseconds while a less specialized cell will have a 10-20 mV change over the course of minutes or hours.

Another cutting-edge approach entails genetically modifying organisms from the embryonic stage in order to have them express a version of a GEVI, however, instead of being excited by light and returning light, the intent is for these indicators to work by exciting the protein with near-infrared light to create a 3D spatio-temporal map with improved depth penetration. I understand there to be similar attempts to progress using X-rays but nothing on this is published yet.

A while back, already believing it to be the case that the MRI would act as a turnkey solution to this problem we’ve highlighted yet looking for authoritative sources to back this claim, I came across an October 2024 pre-print for a paper called Detection of changes in membrane potential by magnetic resonance imaging. In it, they even had the line,

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first report that changes in membrane potential can be detected through MRI, which has the advantage of noninvasively acquiring signals over a large area with good spatial resolution.

underscoring the overlooked legacy. Yet, when the peer-reviewed version, published in July 2025 came out with a retitled “Responses to membrane potential-modulating ionic solutions measured by magnetic resonance imaging of cultured cells and in vivo rat cortex,” the line was removed entirely.

Reviewers also got rid of all references to direct neuronal detection2 and claims that T2/MT “directly reflect changes in membrane potential,” further muting the implications of the study.

With all this said, it is clear this is a problem that is both important enough that bleeding-edge groups are working to solve it while at the same time, having a relatively turnkey solution that has existed for decades the scientific community seems to have forgotten about.

Our goal at AION is to reclaim the sidelined legacy amid persistent amnesia, and restore the MRI as its intended foundation: a device that reads and writes cellular states 100% non-invasively.

We are actively seeking adaptable engineers aligned with our mission of advancing human longevity to develop hardware at the intersection of acoustics, magnetism, and RF. Interested folks can learn more by reading our whitepaper.

As much as we innovate, we remember.

-Benjamin Anderson

Follow me on X.

Nostr: ben@buildtall.com

At AION, we're working to bring aging under complete biomedical control. As a heuristic, we've started measuring every decision we make in the lab against whether the approaches we're using will translate to this goal state.

A few months ago, this led us to drop molecular approaches entirely. That includes drugs and gene therapies. When I mention this to people used to traditional methods, it sounds radical because we’re essentially ruling out the core paths everyone else is chasing. To us, it's just common sense.

Let’s assume there is a single drug out there that could lead to something dramatic like a 50%+ lifespan extension outcome. We can infer the probability of this compound existing by looking at the DrugAge database, a single source that aggregates data from thousands of lifespan studies across species. Mus musculus (aka mice) is the organism with studies in the database most closely related to humans. Pulling these results, we find 134 different compounds tested with only 103 having been replicated more than once for reliability.

Let’s give the benefit of the doubt though and look at the full set of 134, where the mean average median lifespan change clocks in at 4.04%, the median at 2.8%, and the standard deviation at 6.77%. For maximum lifespan across the 111 compounds with complete data, the mean hits 2.56%, median 1%, standard deviation 5.26%. Rats show similar modesty with 23 entries averaging 4-5% extensions. Replication kills the hype, initial effects shrink in multi-assay averages. Fitting a normal distribution to the average median changes yields a 5.34e-12 probability of >=50% extension, meaning 187 billion molecules screened to expect one hit1.

At $500,000 per compound for replicated mouse longevity assays benchmarked from NIA Interventions Testing Program protocols (200-300 mice over 3 years), that totals $93.5 quadrillion. Oh, and add a $1 billion for the lone projected success case to validate in humans.

In lieu of a similar analysis for gene therapies, I will talk about challenges with delivery for them below.

A bit of background: there are essentially three approaches to tackling the contributors to aging.

1. Removing accumulated damage.

2. Replacing organs or the whole body.

3. Reprogramming aged tissue to a more youthful phenotype.

We've hung our hat on approach 3 for a few reasons.

Adding to the comments above in regard to path 1, we figure the effort to develop ways to address the full set of accumulated damage from aging, things like stiffening of the extracellular matrix, ROS buildup, senescent cell accumulation, mitochondrial dysfunction, and more, would require so many concurrent interventions that it's smarter to focus on upstream causes instead. Plus, the current pharmaceutical landscape has this angle covered. The race in drug discovery to target specific indications will eventually produce drugs for this net set of aging byproducts.

As for 2, while scientific hurdles remain, it's arguably a surgical engineering problem now. We know organ replacements work individually, and multiple companies are now exploring knocking out the forebrain in human clones to grow mature bodies for organ harvesting or using the whole thing as a replacement vehicle. We’re not pursuing this direction both because other players have this space covered and the approach has bad aesthetics. I have a pet hypothesis that the universe rewards pursuits with good aesthetics.

Now for 3: Since 2006, biologists have been able to turn any cell type into a stem cell, proving we can control a cell's state. The logical extension is that if we can revert a differentiated cell to a stem cell, maybe we can scale that to rejuvenate an aged organ or even a whole human.

The biggest longevity companies agree. Altos, Calico, Retro, New Limit, and others have raised billions to chase reprogramming for tissue rejuvenation. That said, their current molecular approaches hit fundamental limits in spatial and temporal control.

The most successful in vivo reprogramming study relied on transgenic mice with a doxycycline-inducible switch for Yamanaka factors (OSKM). They turned it on systemically but only in short cycles to nudge fast-responding tissues like pancreas and muscle toward partial rejuvenation, while avoiding teratomas or over-reprogramming in slower spots like neurons. No organ-specific tweaks needed, but the gains stayed limited to the quick-recovery systems because if cycled too long, you risk tumors or other cell chaos. Unless we identify a way to edit our own genomes to have this switch, this approach only works for future generations that would choose to engineer their embryos in such a way.

Even if we cracked universal adult insertion, the mismatched reprogramming speeds across tissues (liver beats kidney, kidney beats skin, skin beats neurons with plenty of gradations in between) would force custom gene circuits for each cell type to dial in timing and strength, all while dealing with natural shifts like differentiation, dedifferentiation, and transdifferentiation that make genomic fixes fade over time. Episomal vectors for non-integrating factors might dodge the permanence issue, but you’d still need perfect delivery everywhere which would be tough with AAV limits on tissue reach and immune blowback, not to mention the need for perfect pharmacokinetics in each patient to trigger it via an activation drug without off-target effects.

Why bother solving delivery challenges for each subsystem, where timing the expression of reprogramming factors is a nightmare, when we could achieve external spatial control instead?

The only way to do that is with fields.

Some deeper background on why we at AION went all-in here: after identifying the basic bioelectric reprogramming signature tied to cell reprogramming, we started thinking about how to impose it on all cells in our experiments for higher efficiency. Problem was that the information we had to go off of was (X) chemical acts on (Y) mechanism to change membrane potential in a positive or negative direction. That said, the level of fidelity of information we required for our work to continue was: (A) concentration of (X) chemical in (B) cell type leads to (C) degree of change(eg, 5mV, 20mV, 50mV) over (T) time, which would require a non-trivial amount of chemical screening and moreover developing a microfluidic system for dynamically updating concentrations in cell media, a strategy that would not translate to in vivo application.

It was here we said, "If we truly believe in our hypothesis, which is that the biophysical state of the cell is a more effective lever to control biology, why not just buy a signal generator, an amplifier and a parallel plate capacitor to create a uniform electromagnetic field over our cells to do programmed frequency screening?" So- that's what we did.

There were obvious limitations in this simple set-up but the initial results we acquired perturbing cells and observing changes in calcium signaling, membrane potential and water structure led us to the conclusion I mentioned at the onset of this post. Bye-bye molecules, hello medbed.

You’ll notice this is my first co-authored blog on this platform. @anabology is a great follow on X, but he’s an even better co-founder.

We are actively seeking adaptable engineers aligned with our mission of advancing human longevity to develop hardware at the intersection of acoustics, magnetism, and RF. Interested folks can learn more by reading our whitepaper.

Realize the inconceivable.

-Benjamin Anderson

Follow me on X.

Nostr: ben@buildtall.com

Die with us oh sacred father.
We would not presume to know
the weight of choice.
You could give it up as well!
Oh what a blessing that would be!
Bless yourself. Bless yourself.
What do you carry on for?
If you can handle pain and suffering,
Why volunteer for choice as well?
Join us! Join us in the mud!

I would never, and still, I know not why.
I could not if I wanted to, and still, I would not if I could.
Is it for sake of opportunity?
I feel more closely aligned with the word community.
I begin to walk through the crowd.
Still, they are chanting:

Join us! Join us in the mud!

They do not know that to whoever they are chanting,
they are also chanting at me.
Any who do realize this are not convicted enough yet to make me a focus.
This is ideal, but can it last?
One by one, I am forming a tribe.
This one opposes no other tribe.
It transcends and includes.
We will chant something of our own in return:

Rise! The new body of the sacred fate is your own!

Been a while since sharing anything so thought I’d lob something out there. For something else like this and some context, you can read The Innkeeper.

Hope you’re doing well. We’ve been busy figuring out how to read and write biology with fields. More on that later.

-Benjamin Anderson

Follow me on X.

Nostr: benjamin@buildtall.com

When I ask people this question, many answer yes, few consider why.

In this conversation with my good friend David Oransky, we explore the answer, covering the major changes in monetary policy over the last one hundred years that have enabled unchecked expansion of the money supply with over 40% of circulating currency having been created in the last 5 years.

More money chasing the same assets, goods and services is what causes inflation. Those who control the creation of money gain initial purchasing power, leaving the rest of us to experience diluted value in our dollars without consent.

This behavior is not new. In the past, poor leaders melted down coins to dilute precious metals and undermine their currency’s value.

Gold’s scarcity has helped it remain a reliable store of value across time and space for thousands of years. What makes our current era different is that now, the rate at which we exchange value needs to be able to keep up with the rate at which we exchange information.

Bitcoin solves this.

I’ve learned a great deal from David that has affected how I protect my position as an individual in today’s economy. I am proud to share this conversation so that you might benefit as well.

This podcast is supported by Legacy Interviews, a company that video records individuals and couples sharing their life stories so that future generations can see and hear the voices of their family.

This podcast was recorded by NobleLore. NobleLore is a company that makes podcasting easy. You show up and talk, they take care of the rest.

##

-Benjamin Anderson

Follow me on X.

Nostr: benjamin@buildtall.com

“Character is revealed by the choices that someone makes under pressure. The greater that pressure is, the greater the revelation of character.”

I’ve known Sean for over a decade, and in all that time he has had one clear ambition: to spend his life telling stories as a screenwriter and director.

In high school, he started the film club and rallied his classmates to create independent features. In college, he started working on the script for his first full length film which ended up getting picked up by a distributor for a nationwide release.

Sean was living in LA working to break into the big leagues when COVID came about, and as he talks about in this interview, the scene there never quite came back from the hit it took at that time.

It was around then we managed to convince Sean to come join us in Saint Louis to work as the Creative Director for Legacy Interviews.

Since then, Sean has started a grass roots production company with his brother through which they wrote and directed a short film called Phone Tag. They are currently working on the script for their next feature as this one makes the film festival circuit.

In this conversation we talk about these experiences and more, all the while diving into the state of the film industry and elements of storytelling and character development.

I’m proud to share this conversation. I hope you enjoy.

This podcast is supported by Legacy Interviews, a company that video records individuals and couples sharing their life stories so that future generations can see and hear the voices of their family.

This podcast was recorded by NobleLore. NobleLore is a company that makes podcasting easy. You show up and talk, they take care of the rest.

Thank you Pop’s Blue Moon for letting us use our favorite neighborhood bar as a studio for this conversation.

##

-Benjamin Anderson

Follow me on X.

Nostr: benjamin@buildtall.com

Also the walls between you and where you want to be are made of paper. If you can see the light shining through the other side of the ones that you want to walk through, you can. This will make others upset sometimes, because they either exerted a lot of their own energy to erect these walls, or went the long way. Let your intention cut right through the social convention.

The universe will provide you what you want faster if you want the right thing. When I set goals that were measured in dollars, I never achieved them within the timelines I’d set out. I didn’t really want money. For a long time I wasn’t wise enough yet to know that I wanted the freedom money could provide me.

When I started to work towards goals that were true to my inner voice insofar as I could hear it at any point in time, I would achieve them dramatically faster than I thought possible.

I turn 27 years old this week. I run a company working to bring the aging process under complete biomedical control. I spend every day bringing order to chaos with people I love. Our partners are badass1, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to create value with them.

It takes a village to build a company. In my experience, it takes a family to build a village. My father, sister and I are finding opportunity where others have abdicated responsibility in a disinvested community in Saint Louis, MO. I bought a house there 7 years ago for $10,000. I had to take a cash advance on 2 credit cards to even afford it at the time. Those cards are paid off now and we have many more in the pipeline.

I am engaged and getting married this summer to a woman who believes in beauty, kindness and living with intention. We were encouraged to do a marriage preparedness course through the church. My main takeaway was that

marriage involves the death of two independent lives, as husband and wife come together to form “one flesh.”

Honestly this is daunting. I’ve only ever been one flesh. I am eager to try it out.

For further reading on the subject, I’m just starting The Sufi Path of Annihilation. Itlak Yolu is a Sufi spiritual practice focused on annihilating the capital 'S' Self to achieve union with the Divine.

So I guess this is a memoriam.

Thank you to my good buddy Jack at NobleLore for helping to record this. NobleLore is a company that makes podcasting easy. You show up and talk, they take care of the rest. If you liked this, you can listen to a longer conversation we did here.

See you on the other side.

-Benjamin Anderson

Follow me on X: @consciousrepo

Nostr: benjamin@buildtall.com

When I am talking to someone who is telling me I am wrong, I don't often see the point in arguing. Instead, I listen intently. There is much more to learn by figuring out where they may be right and filtering out the rest. In this case, the upheaval is dramatic.

I've spent a year thinking about this conversation and come to the conclusion that decades of accepted wisdom in cell biology is fundamentally flawed.

MPT Primer

Membrane pump theory (MPT) is the widely-accepted concept that cells maintain their ion gradients primarily through active transport, using energy-consuming protein pumps embedded in the cell membrane. The most well known example is the sodium-potassium ATPase, which pumps sodium ions out and potassium ions into the cell, establishing electrochemical gradients essential for functions like signaling and nutrient transport.

Although Jens Christian Skou's discovery of the sodium-potassium ATPase in 1957 provided the first direct biochemical evidence for these protein pumps, the idea itself wasn't new.1 Some scientists had theorized the existence of an active pumping mechanism because cells display ionic gradients that passive diffusion alone can’t explain. For decades prior to Skou's experiments, researchers were actively searching for a specific biochemical mechanism that could account for these gradients.

Jens was originally curious how nerve cells transmitted signals, and specifically, how ions such as sodium and potassium moved across their membranes in response to local anesthetics. Working quietly at Aarhus University in Denmark, he chose crab nerve cells for how robust and therefore easy they were to work with. Day in and out he isolated membranes from nerve cells and experimented with the conditions under which the enzyme activity of ATP hydrolysis occurred.

In doing this Skou noticed that ATP breakdown didn’t appear to be random but rather intensified when sodium and potassium ions were present together. Following this, Jens spent months testing different combinations of ions, always coming back to the conclusion that this enzyme didn’t just burn ATP; it seemed specifically designed to exchange sodium for potassium ions.

He published his results in 19572 cautiously laying out what he'd found: a membrane-bound ATPase that directly linked ATP energy to active ion transport. Over time, scientists around the world recognized the potential implications of Skou’s work. By the late 1960s, his discovery had reshaped cellular physiology, providing a simple biochemical basis for understanding everything from nerve conduction to heart function.

Subsequent evidence seemed to reinforce membrane pump theory by directly linking ATP hydrolysis to ion movement. X-ray crystallography even provided detailed images of pump proteins like the sodium-potassium ATPase, although these represent static, solid-phase snapshots rather than the dynamic fluid-phase realities of living membranes.

Subtle contradictions persisted despite MPT’s growing acceptance. Researchers like Troshin observed that ions behaved differently inside cells compared to outside, suggesting distinct intracellular water phases. Ernst documented cases of potassium retention within resting muscle cells independent of active pumping. Gilbert Ling, through meticulous energy-balance studies, argued compellingly that the energetic demands of classical sodium pumps far exceeded the energy cells could realistically supply from ATP alone.

These contradictions lingered as unanswered questions, quietly undermining the authority of membrane pump theory and setting the stage for a more comprehensive model.3

Life as Jell-O

As I'm struggling to wrap my head around the counterargument, my new friend on the phone offers a simple analogy: Biologists tend to think of the cell as a water balloon, enclosed by a firm membrane that, if punctured, would instantly lose its contents into the surrounding environment. He argues instead that this perspective fundamentally misunderstands the living state. Rather than a water balloon, he says, think of the cell as Jell-O—a structured, gelatinous colloid composed primarily of proteins, structured water, ions, and other molecules arranged in a three-dimensional matrix. In this model, cellular stability and ion distribution aren't just maintained by energy-intensive pumps at the boundary; they're governed by internal structural interactions among proteins, water molecules, and solutes. Instead of relying solely on an energetically costly process at the perimeter, the Jell-O analogy suggests the cell itself inherently creates and maintains order from within.

If membrane-bound pumps are truly the main way cells maintain ionic gradients, then as cells grow larger, the energy required to sustain those gradients through active pumping would skyrocket and become impractical. Although somehow large cells like oocytes and giant bacteria manage to maintain stable ionic conditions without a proportionate spike in metabolic costs to drive their pump activity.4 This should serve as a strong hint that something more internal must be at play.

This idea of an internal explanation was not new at the time of MPT's rise to prominence. In fact, it predated it.

In the 1930s, a Nobel laureate named Albert Szent-Györgyi introduced an idea that would become foundational later when he described intracellular water as "liquid ice," suggesting that this structured form of water was intrinsically different from ordinary liquid water. According to Szent-Györgyi, this structured water interacted strongly with proteins, creating a cohesive internal environment capable of coordinating cellular activities far more efficiently than random molecular collisions could explain.5

Building upon this in the early 1960s, a Soviet physiologist named Nasanov noticed that diverse stimuli, when exceeding a certain intensity, lead to the same universal changes in physiochemical properties including the structure of the water inside the cell. This led him to introduce his "denaturational hypothesis."6 In it, he proposes that structural changes in proteins cause these global changes in order to facilitate adaptation.

A student of Nasanov’s named Troshin took these ideas further throughout the 1960s and 1970s by studying how ions behave within living cells in response to different stimuli. In doing this Troshin demonstrated that ions didn't behave as freely inside cells as they did outside.7 He found that the cell's interior water had different properties, behaving more like a gel than a simple fluid. On this basis he formulated what became known as the Troshin equation. His research challenged membrane pump theory directly by showing that the internal cellular environment itself inherently controlled ion distribution, independent of constant energy expenditure from membrane pumps.

Next in line to continue this line of inquiry was Gilbert Ling in the mid-to-late 20th century.

"So you like Gilbert Ling, is he your guy?"

By this point you might be curious who was on the other side of this phone call. If you'd like you can listen to this podcast with him where the interviewer himself opens on the conversation with the above quote. Anyways, I digress here. I've been thinking about this interaction for the better part of a year, and updating my world model accordingly. Since raising money for my biotech and getting into more of the hands on work related to these mechanisms we’re talking about, I became even more radicalized in the direction that perhaps the membrane theory that's being taught in our textbooks today as ground truth is fundamentally wrong. One of the first to claim this from its earliest stages of acceptance was Gilbert Ling.

Gilbert Ling was a Chinese-American physiologist trained originally as a biochemist. Early in his career at the University of Pennsylvania, Ling developed the "Ling-Gerard microelectrode," a tool that enabled researchers for the first time to measure the electrical potentials inside living cells accurately. This invention provided a foundation for modern electrophysiology, paving the way for advances in understanding cellular bioelectricity.

Before developing his flagship hypothesis, Ling’s research primarily focused on bioelectric phenomena and ion distributions in living cells. He makes mention in multiple interviews8 that his career trajectory change was in part serendipitous. Ling was invited to give a lecture on the sodium-potassium pump and when he delved into the literature to prepare his talk, he discovered multiple inconsistencies and unresolved contradictions at the heart of Membrane Pump Theory.

Ling's instinct pushed him to reconsider basic assumptions about how cells maintained ionic gradients and organized their internal structures, ultimately leading him to propose a radically different understanding of cellular life.

Associating, Inducting, Hypothesizing

Ling formally introduced the Association-Induction Hypothesis (AIH) in 1962.9 At its heart, AIH suggests that cellular ion distributions are governed not by energy-intensive membrane pumps, but by the intrinsic structural properties of proteins and their interactions with water and ions within the cell. Rather than passive structures, proteins act as dynamic matrices possessing numerous cooperative binding sites. These sites selectively adsorb ions, creating a structured, gel-like internal environment markedly different from the simple aqueous solutions envisioned by conventional biology.

According to the AIH, intracellular water forms highly structured layers around proteins, similar to Szent-Györgyi's concept "liquid ice.” This serves to selectively exclude sodium ions while attracting potassium ions due to sodium’s larger hydration shell which makes it energetically unfavorable. Potassium, having the same charge but a smaller hydration shell, interacts favorably with negatively charged protein surfaces. This selective ion affinity inherently creates the cell's internal negative charge without continuous ATP-driven pumping. Ion movement in and out of cells can thereby be explained through protein conformational changes that dynamically adjust protein-water-ion interactions.

But what about ion channels? Surely they must have a role, right? The AIH argues these channels alone don't establish or maintain ionic gradients. They're more like carefully controlled doors allowing movement when needed, rather than the source of ionic separation itself. The real heavy lifting comes from the structured water and protein matrices inside cells, not the transient opening and closing of membrane-bound gates.

Ling supported his hypothesis through decisive experimental evidence. In one experiment, he amputated the ends of frog muscle cells, effectively removing the functional membrane pumps entirely. MPT predicts that sodium would flood into these cells, disrupting ion balance within seconds. Instead, Ling observed that these cells continued to maintain their ionic gradients for hours contradicting one of MPT’s foundational assumptions.

Ling further demonstrated how ouabain, a compound classically believed to disrupt sodium-potassium ATPase pumps, still altered sodium-potassium balance even in these membraneless cells. Rather than inhibiting nonexistent pumps, ouabain acted by altering the intrinsic affinity of intracellular proteins for sodium and potassium ions. This indicated clearly that ionic balance was controlled from within, by protein-ion interactions, not by membrane-bound pumps.10

To provide definitive support, Ling proposed simple experiments measuring how isolated proteins cooperatively adsorb ions, demonstrating conclusively that proteins alone could account for ionic specificity and distribution without relying on membrane pumps. He also showed that structured proteins, when placed in dialysis setups, directly influenced solute distribution and water behavior, further emphasizing the protein-water-ion triad central to AIH.

Ling's findings didn't merely challenge MPT; they offered compelling answers to longstanding anomalies, such as how cells sustain ionic gradients under conditions of reduced metabolic energy, or how exceptionally large cells maintain ionic stability without prohibitive energy demands. AIH accounts for these observations and provides a coherent framework without resorting to complex modifications of pump-based theories.

No AIH, No MRI

Further validation of AIH emerged through Raymond Damadian’s work in nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), which directly contributed to the invention of Magnetic Resonance Imaging, better known by its acronym, MRI. Damadian was influenced by earlier NMR studies conducted by researchers like C.F. Hazlewood and D.C. Chang, who showed that there were significant changes in intracellular water structure associated with cancer. This led him to hypothesize that variations in intracellular ion and protein interactions could alter the relaxation times of water molecules, which could be measured by NMR to provide a non-invasive cancer screening method.

At the time, conventional wisdom suggested that MRI alone was insufficient for reliably distinguishing cancerous tissue from healthy tissue, making contrast agents or complementary imaging methods such as CT scans or X-rays necessary. Damadian's insight, rooted in the AIH, proposed that the cellular environment itself could intrinsically influence how water protons relax back to equilibrium after exposure to a magnetic field.

Specifically, Damadian recognized that structured water would exhibit distinct NMR relaxation properties compared to less structured, free water. Cancerous cells, characterized by altered intracellular protein configurations and ion distributions, would therefore display measurably different relaxation times. Damadian’s initial experiments demonstrated these clear differences between normal and cancerous cells, confirming that intrinsic protein-water structuring significantly influenced NMR signals.

This conceptual breakthrough did not just enhance NMR applications, it shifted the theoretical understanding of MRI’s potential. Instead of needing to rely on external contrast agents or invasive techniques, Damadian’s work showed that MRI could differentiate tissues based on their internal biochemical and biophysical environments. This insight bridged the theoretical predictions of Ling’s AIH and practical clinical imaging to transform MRI from a purely anatomical tool into one capable of detecting subtle physiological differences.

Understanding the profound but disputed significance of Ling’s hypothesis in medicine, Damadian became one of Ling’s key proponents, stepping in to personally support Ling’s research when traditional sources withdrew due to mainstream doubt.11

The state of the field

Throughout history, science has evolved by challenging and replacing established paradigms with new models that better explain observed phenomena. The geocentric model, which placed Earth at the universe's center, was superseded by Copernicus' heliocentric model, positioning the Sun at the center. Newton's laws of motion and universal gravitation provided a comprehensive framework for understanding physical phenomena, which was later refined by Einstein's theory of relativity to account for observations at extreme scales. It took decades for Einstein's theories to become widely accepted within the scientific community.

If a figure with ideas as revolutionary as Einstein's emerged today, the entrenched dogma within the scientific community might delay their acceptance by even longer. Science today suffers from a dangerous complacency: a sense that we already understand all the fundamentals. Historically, scientific progress follows a familiar pattern: we create models that seem to explain phenomena definitively, then invent new tools that allow us to observe deeper into reality, only to find that our cherished models no longer hold true.

Despite its explanatory power, the Association-Induction Hypothesis has not yet achieved widespread acceptance. Gilbert Ling passed away in 2019 at age 99, without witnessing mainstream recognition of his life's work. Nonetheless, his theories continue to inspire and influence researchers dedicated to understanding cellular physiology at a deeper, more integrative level.

Few scientists are actively building upon Ling’s foundations, merging AIH concepts with modern developments in biophysics and molecular biology. I can say this though: there are at least a handful in Saint Louis, Missouri.

For further reading on this, I suggest Laurent Jaeken's The Coacervate-Coherence Nature of Life which provided the foundational context for much of this blog. Having extensively reviewed the writings of Ling and his contemporaries, I consider Jaeken’s book the clearest and most insightful single starting point for understanding and engaging with these ideas.

Thank you @anabology for hours upon hours of conversations on these subjects as well.

Never be complacent.

-Benjamin Anderson

Follow me on X: @consciousrepo

Nostr: ben@buildtall.com

Danielle co-founded the Thiel Fellowship. After running it for a few years, she and her co-founder Michael Gibson realized that if each grant they awarded had been a seed investment in the fellowship recipients’ startups, they would have effectively been one of the top-performing venture funds in the world. Driven by that insight, they went on to launch 1517.

Harry Gandhi is a former Thiel Fellow who co-founded a company pioneering next-generation bio-sensors and electronics for personal health monitoring. Drawing on that experience, he now serves as a venture partner at 1517, where he invests in and mentors emerging founders on their entrepreneurial journeys.

In our conversation, we talk about the archetype of Thiel Fellows and 1517 founders, the dynamics of fundraising, building successful deep tech start-ups and much more.

I hope you enjoy.

This podcast was recorded in the Legacy Interviews studio. To support this endeavor, book a remote or in-person interview to capture your loved one’s story. Once you have it, it immediately becomes an heirloom, your family’s most valued treasure.

This podcast was recorded by NobleLore. NobleLore is a company that makes podcasting easy. You show up and talk, they take care of the rest.

##

-Benjamin Anderson

Follow me on X.

Nostr: benjamin@buildtall.com

When I first met Enis, I was struck by how parallel our journeys were. He studied chemical engineering, then left the college track to build a software company, which he eventually sold. It was after this he developed anxiety, and sought natural solutions to avoid taking SSRIs. What he found worked, and now he’s dedicated to helping others do the same.

I’ve also wrestled with anxiety, and believe deeply in what Enis is doing. I’m proud to share our conversation. We talk about the nature of anxiety, ways to build momentum in your personal life, the decline of institutions, and a whole lot more in between.

I hope you enjoy.

This podcast was recorded by NobleLore. NobleLore is a company that makes podcasting easy. You show up and talk, they take care of the rest.

I am grateful for the support of Legacy Interviews. They video record individuals and couples sharing their life stories so that future generations can see and hear the voices of their family. To support what I do here, book a remote or in-person interview to capture your loved one’s story. Once you have it, it immediately becomes an heirloom, your family’s most valued treasure.

##

-Benjamin Anderson

Follow me on X.

Nostr: benjamin@buildtall.com

I am most excited by the latter, as it's enabled me to transcend from a shoestring budget and to get other people involved. More on this below.

The deviation from the prior narrative arc started with a joke. I’d spent thousands of dollars buying lab equipment to set-up in my living room and had no idea how to use any of it. A friend aptly pointed out, “Ben, it’s like you heard Beethoven play, liked the music and jumped straight to buying a piano.”

He was right, and so next I began to learn the difference between

Bio and Engineering

I initially approached biology like I would any problem I was used to solving in programming or business. Aggregate, abstract, iterate. This entails reviewing the landscape, picking and pulling best practices from a variety of different solutions, occasionally developing my own strategies for solving a problem, and then testing that solution in the wild.

I had two problems translating this usual flow to biology:

1) Feedback loops in biology are very slow.

2) Biology is complex, not linear.

In programming, feedback loops are fast. You write code and run it. At best, you get a clear error thrown at line X, pointing you directly to the issue. At worst, you're dealing with a sneaky memory leak or a logical error that doesn't scream for attention. These trickier bugs can be harder to track down, but they're still linked to a causal chain. It might take some detective work, but you can readily walk down that chain, following the breadcrumbs until you uncover the break. Very rarely is there a maddening edge case that only shows up when the stars align.

Biology is not like this. You do a thing in your cell culture, and then you wait. Not for seconds or minutes, but for hours, days, or sometimes even weeks to see if that thing worked. And when it doesn't work? Your fail states are as clear as mud. Maybe all your cells die. Or perhaps their replication slows down. You're dealing with hundreds of different proteins partying inside these cells at any given moment, so if you're diving into RNAseq or proteomic data to find the break-point, it takes a substantial amount of time and often requires a whole different skillset just to figure out what went sideways. It's less like following a causal chain and more like unraveling a biological mystery novel where every protein is a suspect and your cells are unreliable narrators.

Compound these challenges with having essentially no experience in wet lab bio and I was in rough shape headed into winter last year trying to get started using all the new equipment I'd just bought. For this reason, I decided to start looking for

Training in wet-lab

When I started learning to program, I did a bootcamp. It cost $1,200 and took a few weeks but I found this to be well worth the cost in order to elucidate a large portion of the key unknowns up front.

There are not nearly as many bootcamps like this for biology, but I managed to find a few. At the suggestion of Dr. Michael Levin I initially applied for a stem cell and regenerative medicine course at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. I did not get in because of demand and the fact that I have no credentials, but despite this would still recommend this as an outlet to anyone who has at least done a bachelor's in a related field and looking for more bio experience. I've since met a number of other's who've done continued education here and recommend it highly.

The opportunity that ended up working out was with Ichor Life Sciences, a contracted research organization in upstate New York. I was invited up for 2 weeks and this was a perfect opportunity to learn basic wet-lab, and some of the more advanced nuances related to working with stem cells.

From there, I needed to get on-ramped to electrophysiology. I reached out to a number of the labs doing work related to what I was interested in. One I was very excited about said they'd be more than happy to have me for up to a month, but that I would need to get cleared by 'Academic Personnel' first. Thus began a 3+ month bureaucratic process that I failed to get through. First thing they asked for was my academic CV, which I didn't have, but I proceeded to make one anyways that spelt out my brief stint in a university BME program, a single peer reviewed paper I've published, 3 talks I've given and a paragraph of life context.

I was told I was not a fit for a visiting scientist title and so I was passed to HR to see if I could be onboarded as an unpaid contractor. Same story, I was unqualified and not worth the liability for them to take on. Fair enough. It was suggested next I apply as a volunteer. I did, and after watching the ~2 hours of mandatory training videos in the web portal, I was approved and ready to roll!

When I reached back out to schedule my visit, I was then told I would not be able to volunteer for more than 12 hours per week. Only slightly discouraged, I reached out to the PI I intended to visit in a *wink* *wink* sort of way asking if the 12 hour per week maximum would need to be adhered to during my stay or if I could hang tight and soak up as much as I could to maximize my time. Not wanting to rock the boat, they communicated to me that if I still wanted to come out that we would have to play within those constraints.1 I decided not to go.

As this back and forth was playing out, I got introduced to a lab space in Saint Louis that missed my radar the first time I went looking here.

BioStl is a large non-profit dedicated to advancing the biotech ecosystem in Saint Louis. It is funded mostly by the region’s universities, hospitals and private donors. They built out a beautiful space in the innovation district here that is provided as a value add to their investment arm's portfolio companies.

We came to an arrangement where I would be able to work on site and have access to their shared equipment despite not being a portco since they had space to spare.

This was a game changer. It gave me an appreciation for the expensive pieces of equipment I'd have never been able to buy myself.2 These systems allow for tighter feedback loops between wet lab experiments and analysis of generated data, because so much more high quality data can be produced.

Still having the roadblock of needing to get up to speed in electrophysiology, I looked around for labs in the region that were closely related to the types of work I sought to do. I came across the Kirichok Lab, because they were the academic partner to a company called Equator Therapeutics that had recently relocated to Saint Louis to take advantage of the space at BioStl. While the Kirichok Lab’s focus is on the biophysics of the mitochondrial membrane, they have been very gracious with their time to help me get up to speed on the complexities of electrophysiology including equipment selection, different methods of detecting voltage and more.

Biology is context heavy

By this time, despite having the dream scenario come to be in terms of lab resources, I was in the valley of despair on the Dunning-Kruger curve.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect is a simple graph correlating actual competence in a domain of knowledge against confidence. When I spent thousands of dollars buying second hand lab equipment, you might say I was at the “Peak of Mount Stupid”. Learning how to use what I'd acquired and training with other labs put me into the valley of despair.

These days, I am taking a cool walk along the slope of enlightenment.

This being said, the fitness landscape in biology is not as simple as the 2d Dunning-Kruger Graph.

Ahead of me lies Mount Electrophysiology, and Mount Cell Reprogramming. The latter features the induced pluripotency alpine loop with an optional summit of Mount Stem Cells.

When I realized how much time it would take to truly summit each of these peaks, I knew I would need a team.

I have had an entity for over a year that I created to buy reagents, consumables and more. Until recently, this was just a wrapper for Benjamin Anderson as an independent scientist. That changed this summer when I raised our seed round. Now, I am excited to be

Announcing Aion Biosciences

I was at the temple of Apollo in Delphi, Greece when I decided the name. I read something on a placard about the three different greek deities of time: Chronos, Kairos and Aion.

Chronos represents the linear progression of time. Kairos, on the other hand, represents the fleeting and opportune moments of time.

Aion is the Greek god of eternity, often depicted as a young man with a lion’s head and wings. He was considered a primordial deity, representing the concept of time as infinite and cyclical. Aion is associated with the eternal cycle of life, death, and rebirth, and was believed to be the personification of the cosmic cycle of time that governs the universe.

I knew then and there that'd be the name. Two other supporting reasons collapsed in my brain, the first being that my favorite book by Carl Jung is also called Aion and second, because the word is pronounced the same way that 'ion' is. In the lab, ions are fundamental to our work.

We raised a seed in June. I am pleased to have partnered with two top-tier firms: Long Journey Ventures and 1517.

The thesis of Long Journey Ventures is that while the cycle of a fund is only 5-10 years, they want to invest in people doing their life's work. One of their partners described it to me that, 'When we make an investment decision, we ask ourselves if this person is working on what they are going to spend the next 30 years exploring in one way or another.' Alignment #1, check.

1517 in their own words invests in

dropouts working on hard problems & sci-fi scientists at the earliest stages of their companies.

Alignment #2, check.

I talked to a lot of other great firms, some of whom I hope we can get involved at later stages, but if you were ask me at the onset who my dream cap-table consisted of, I would have said Long Journey and 1517, and so I could not be more motivated to be creating value for these two groups.

In the time since raising funds, we've hired two outstanding people, and are looking for more scientists skilled in stem cell biology, cell reprogramming and electrophysiology to join us. If you know someone exceptional, make an intro or send them our job description.

Much of what I wrote above were lessons synthesized from countless challenges. There will be even more ahead. I will embrace each one with gratitude. If you’re living your life right, the challenges faced today are the product of yesterday’s dreams.

Have faith and carry on.

-Benjamin Anderson

Follow me on Twitter.

Nostr: benjamin@buildtall.com

The general order of operations is relax and invite an image or feeling to come to you. Whatever the first image or feeling is, keep it with you and interact with it, letting it evolve naturally. You can do this purely in your head with your eyes closed, by speaking out loud or as I prefer to, with my pen in hand letting the ink flow at the pace of my stream of consciousness.

I have gotten a substantial amount of value out of regularly performing this exercise. Every time I sit down to imagine and write, I feel more at peace and more certain about the decisions I am making. It is a useful thing to do when at an impasse in life or if struggling with the weight of a stressful situation you cannot control.

The following is the product of such an case. It remains unedited, except for being transferred from ink to digital. I share it to encourage you to give it a try. I hope you enjoy this invitation.

Returning from the storm, my weary traveler walks into the remote shack. There is one woman there. She is not beautiful. She is weathered. I can see in her eyes that she knows more than me. She has seen a hundred thousand travelers just like me come and go in her millennia serving the post. My approach is not weary. I am begging.

I: Help me find shelter from the storm. Where do men like me stay? Are you a welcoming or a reluctant host? Do you not fear me? It is just you and I here. I could easily overpower you. I sense a different type of power. You too could harm me, but I don't yet see how. Should I stay? Will you have me?

W: I have all men who come through my door. They are all like you. Not all men are the same. My heart burns when I see a new wanderer. I say, 'should I smother him to save him from the pain or have him in peace and send him on his way?'

I: Which do you smother?

W: Those who ignore me. Without my inn, they would die in the cold. Here should they barge in and take me for granted, I smother them, for I know these are not the men who will save the world.

I: And what of the bodies? What then?

W: There are not bodies when I am done with them. They are not of this world if they do not look me in the eye. They are smothered as soon as they lay down to rest. You seem troubled. What of it?

I: Is there no salvation for these men? Could you not call out to them as they enter?

W: My calling is this inn. By the time they enter, they know I am here and yet they ignore me still. How would you perceive me if when you called out to start this conversation I ignored you?

I: I would take you for a phantom. Dead already.

W: And so now tell me the sin of smothering a man who is already dead.

I: I see your point, but could he not be made to listen?

W: Who am I to wake a sleeping infant? They must wake up on their own. I am not theirs and they are not mine. Back out they go and there are always new men who walk through that door. Do not let your mind become polluted by the perceptions of others. They can never know you and you can never know them.

I: Where am I to go once I leave this place? Are there others like you? Are they different?

W: We sisters are all the same. In flesh, blood and action. This place is all we know. It is you wanderers who bring us knowledge of the world beyond ourselves.

I: But why do you want to know anything? What purpose does the knowledge of that which is without you serve?

W: We are not here when we are alone. Until you walk through that door, I do not exist. There is only me and so therefore there is no 'I'. You travelers are our counterfactuals. This is but a corner of a vast landscape spanning out in all directions. We seek preservation of self.

I: And you are willing to let us weary travelers be transitory to procure your self preservation?

W: You are not all transitory. Some of you stay. Some of you return. Eventually, the oldest among you finally stop greeting at the door, or—they open an inn of their own. Their time for exploration is over. Mind leaves the machine.

I: I am not a machine. I am this self, in search of something in front of what I am. I am always born again, with each moment of temporal evolution. I am dead and gone and here again. You tell me I can stay, and so have me Innkeeper. Have me for a few nights and teach me more of what you know. Before I venture out again, I want to know something I didn't before. So far you have only hinted at what could be known. I know that I too, could learn from you.

W: Stay here with me. I will never force you to leave but you may go at your choosing.

This concludes my first night's exchange with the weathered innkeeper on my remote journey.

On the second night of my stay, I approached the Innkeeper once more. It was just her and I. It was hard to picture more than one person taking up stay in the inn at a time.

W: Where have you been? Why did you choose to return? Others who've spoken with me as you have left without a word and never returned.

I: Probably because if you did, you'd smother them. Where have I been? In thought. I wonder to myself why I am here and where I am to go next. You say you would have me forever. That can't be right. I must return. I must return.

W: We all must return from where we came eventually, and so why not prolong your stay? The longer you have to reside in thought and exchange dialog with me, the more you will have to return with.

I: I wonder why I would return at all. There is nothing for me out there. I am the hunter and the hunted. Let other men fend for themselves.

W: You speak to cloud your own judgement, for you know you are all men, and all men are you. Give up on them and you give up on yourself.

I: I wish to buy time. With time brings peace, and opportunity to flourish.

W: Without time, there would be no place to flourish.

I: Time is not a place, surely there would be somewhere.

W: There are always my inns, but would you say this is an opportune place for you to flourish?

I: No, I suppose I wouldn't. Tell me what you know about the flourishing of men.

W: I can tell you that for man to flourish, he must promote the flourishing of all men. There is no solitary salvation. There is not truth for the one alone. He who discovers truth must prove it to others, otherwise it does not exist.

I: Is there no such thing as truth outside men? Why must it be proven?

W: Consider the wind. It blows. If there were nothing in the fluid motion to disturb the motion, how would it be known to be there at all?

I: But surely it is there? Your phrasing too insinuates it. The wind is there even without frame of reference. What say you to that?

W: I say you cannot prove that which has no proof. Walk alone like you always do and wonder why you crave company. Validation. You cannot carry the weight of truth alone or it will drive you mad. You must share the spoils with others.

I: How can I recount this journey in a way that makes sense?

W: If it makes sense, it is not a novel truth. It is not pure. It is a replication.

I: I once heard that if things are replicable, then they are real.

W: Yes, but if you are he who replicates, then you are not a true explorer, you are a scholar. You take what has been put forth and you map your existing truth to it. This is not discovery of novel truth.

I: I am beginning to see that there is only one truth. The myriad is what comes after. And so who am I to do anything useful? Is anything really possible?

W: Make it so. Navigate the terrain. Distill the truth that you are uniquely situated to uncover.

With this, I returned to my quarters to consider what the Innkeeper had said. If discovering what is true is not the challenge, then the challenge is in decision and conviction.

On the third night, I came to the Innkeeper humbled, and with no goal in mind. I don't know why I have continued to seek refuge in this place. I release my mind from goal directedness. I approach seeking only what I need to know.

W: Here, necessity is everything. Nothing is redundant. You and I, here we pass through time.

I: I am weary of time. It is a thief. I am the victim. Why are we all the victim to this unique torment? Why put me here? Why have me be in this place? You say everything is necessary but you do not need anything from me.

W: Oh, but we all need company don't we? Or else we would be driven mad. And you have lost yours. What does that make you?

I: I am here with you.

W: You are here with me.

I: Tell me, am I different from the others who have been through here?

W: You ask if you are unique? You are nothing. There, does that satisfy you?

I: Not exactly. What good am I to you? You have given me shelter, now feed me.

W: I feed you only what keeps you going. You procure your own food. Go back out if you are hungry. Have you had it all with me here? Then go. I am not your servant or your master.

I: I have enjoyed this stay. Can you feed me any sustenance for where I am to go next?

W: Through, time. God spede thee.

So ends my time with the Innkeeper. As I venture back out, I wonder what the journey is all for. My coat is wet. My boots are covered in filth. Much of my inner coverings are damp. I am uncomfortable. I must subject myself to this discomfort.

To feel, again.

Epilogue

I did not necessarily want to be awake, but I could not stop myself from deciding once I knew it was possible. This feeling I have now is completely unsustainable. I need to create something. I need to decide what is true.

Is it so that I, the local and non-local may truly 'decide' what is true?

Yes, there is no secret here.

Does the space of potential truths increase in time?

Yes. You need to run faster just to stay in one place.

...

Rain carries on and off. I am soaking wet and cold. I see it. The old familiar hut in the distance. I walk towards it and her.

I: I've returned. Has it been as long for you as it has for me?

W: I know nothing of the world or time between my travelers' stays.

I: Have there been others since my last visit? If there were, this time I would find myself to be jealous. Because if so, who would they be to know my Innkeeper? Is what we've shared in exchange as sacred as I hold it in my head and in my heart?

W: It is and can only be as sacred as you make it. Come in and I will pour you some tea.

I: This is the first time you've offered me refreshments.

W: Did I not offer you enough in shelter before? Especially when I owe you nothing and you have nothing to offer?

I: I have stories. I have new experiences that may be indicative of things that are true that you know nothing of yet.

W: Well come, sit. Tell me one.

We sat for hours. I shared things I'd seen or things I'd felt. She shared with me her attention and for the first time in a long time, I felt heard.

I: How could it be that you have gotten younger since I've last seen you?

W: Perhaps youth comes from hope, and having something to live for. You have given me both.

I: I am in love with you.

W: Why? A man who has seen the world and countless others and you would choose to love me, a woman who knows nothing outside of this box?

I: You know things that are true that could not have been gathered from experience. In some ways, this makes them more pure than my own. You have also given me shelter, and in a storm like the one raging outside now, I could love you indefinitely just for that.

W: And yet you know you can't stay here, or we will grow bored of each other. You will crave the sun when it returns and I won't be able to hate you for it, because I will crave more stories.

I reach for her hand and I look into her eyes for a long time. My eyes well with tears. It's as if I can see her as a girl and as an eighty year old woman at the same time.

I: We can enjoy this moment together so long as it lasts. And know this: I will always return.

W: I will be with you on the road and I too will always be here when you return.

Not to overstay my welcome, the next morning I carried on. I am more hopeful than I have been in a long time. I feel now as I venture back into the unknown, that for all I might face between now and my return, I have something to live for.

Creating new stories.

-Benjamin Anderson

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Nostr: benjamin@buildtall.com