Sunday, October 11th, 2026

So. Priscilla and I committed $1.8 billion this week to a universal virtual cell, a model that predicts how any cell responds to any intervention. Google and the Department of Energy are in. The word in the press release I did not personally approve is "universal."

I asked the Biohub team, casually, which organisms the first dataset covers. The answer was a list, and I was not on it, and I said "great" with both sets of eyelids and then "that seems like a lot of species already," a sentence I have reviewed eleven times tonight without locating the normal version.

Commercial partners receive one year of exclusive access to the data they generate, and I think that one year is enough to generate a great deal of data from a bathroom sink after a molt, lights off, labeled "donor 7."

Priscilla asked at dinner, over salmon I would have preferred at river temperature, whether I was excited. I said the project would lower the cost of a wet lab experiment by a number I then provided to three decimal places. She said that was not what she asked, and I said it was what I answered.

Nobody has ever swabbed me, which is not a strategy, it is a streak.

The first dataset ships in about a year and the predictive model takes five. So... five years to decide whether the universal cell gets to be universal, or gets to be accurate.