SCIENCE

Modeling the behavior of proteins is probably the hardest computational problem I've ever worked on. Markets are complicated, but biology is genuinely terrifying in its complexity.

If there is other intelligent life in the universe, and we don't look, we will never know. That seems like a strange choice for a species that calls itself curious.

The more data we have, the more we can understand about disease. It's that simple.

We are going to make drug development faster and cheaper. The genetics will tell us which drugs to build.

People ask if I'm a CEO or a scientist. I say: what is a CEO of a science company if not a scientist? The lab coat is the leadership.

We had been working on mRNA for twenty years. The world just didn't care until it needed a vaccine in nine months.

We designed the COVID vaccine in two days. Two days. January 11, China published the genome. January 13, we had the sequence locked. Everything after that was testing and manufacturing.

We have clinical trials published in peer-reviewed journals. Actual science. Most health apps have testimonials and before-after photos. We have data. That distinction matters when you're charging $59 a month.

Heme is what makes meat taste like meat. We produce it through fermentation. One molecule changed everything about what a plant burger can be.

I was a Stanford biochemist. I did not start a food company because I love cooking. I started it because the data on animal agriculture is terrifying.

Our coating is invisible, tasteless, odorless, and made from plant materials. It is not weird science. It is extremely simple science applied to the right problem.

Scientific progress is slowing down. That scares me more than any business problem. Stripe funds research because the future depends on it.

Too few people in computer science are aware of some of the informational challenges in biology.

Philanthropy should be structured like venture capital — high-risk, high-reward bets on breakthrough science.

Science can cure disease. We just need to invest in it at the right scale and with the right time horizons.

The Human Cell Atlas will map every cell type in the human body. That's the foundation for curing everything.

Long-term scientific research is the highest-leverage investment humanity can make.

AlphaFold predicted the structure of 200 million proteins. That's more than all biologists in history combined.

Tom Knight wrote the foundational paper on synthetic biology at MIT. We're his commercial legacy.

Norman Rostoker spent his life on field-reversed configuration physics. TAE is his life's work commercialized.

My PhD thesis in 1999 proved mRNA could trigger an immune response. That discovery launched an industry.

Real chicken, grown from cells, no animal slaughter. The science works. The economics are next.

We tested thousands of plants before finding that mung beans could replicate eggs. Science is patience.

Longevity is not science fiction. The science is real. The question is whether we have the courage to fund it.

I hire physicists, not traders. Markets are a natural phenomenon. You study them with science, not gut feelings.

Financial markets contain real, exploitable patterns. But finding them requires rigor, not narratives and opinions.

I donated £100 million to Cambridge because the future depends on science, not on making hedge fund managers richer.

I fund brain science because I plan to be around long enough to see whether my investments paid off. That is not a joke. It is a business decision.

Stemcentrx was rejected by every other VC. We wrote the check because we read the science. That’s the job.

AlphaFold is a proof point that AI can accelerate scientific discovery by orders of magnitude.

Coffee has over a thousand aromatic compounds — more than wine, more than any other beverage. It is the most chemically complex thing most people consume every day.

A PhD in chemistry taught me one thing above all: be rigorous about what you actually know versus what you assume. I try to apply that every day.

The thing that's going to save humanity is science, not politics.

I believe that genuine scientific discovery flourishes only in an atmosphere of dispassionate, open-minded inquiry, with research evaluated according to neutral, evidence-based criteria.

Regardless of what we find in this initial major two-year experiment, there will be tremendous accomplishments. We'll learn how these systems work, how to build them, and how to operate them.