Only a Constellation of Stars - by Jeffrey G. Reid
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Only a Constellation of Stars<br>We have been promising to cure all disease for decades. The latest promise comes with $2.1 billion and a Nobel prize.
Jeffrey G. Reid<br>May 27, 2026
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TL;DR — Demis Hassabis says his startup Isomorphic Labs will “solve all disease” — an overly optimistic claim from a Nobel laureate who raised $2.1 billion based in part on the strength of that promise. Unfortunately, the claim is the latest in a 55-year pattern of cure-all promises from credentialed institutions, none of which has delivered, most of which produced real, albeit mundane progress. There is no public evidence that this is going to change.
A collection of stars named cancer.<br>“Everything is Gonna Burn / We’ll All Take Turns / I’ll Get Mine Too” - Pixies<br>Tears in Rain is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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Co(n)founding
I’ve co-founded three things worth laying claim to in my life (so far). The Houston Equal Rights Alliance (HERA), a gay rights marriage advocacy non-profit. The Regeneron Genetics Center (RGC). And, in the early 1990s with two college friends (Simon Taylor and Derek Stanford), a record label called Isomorphic Records. We were nerds in college bonding over topology puns and experimental music. The label name is a reference to an old math joke about a topologist who can’t tell the difference between his coffee cup and his donut. Because two shapes are isomorphic if one can be continuously deformed into the other, the coffee cup and the donut are topologically identical. Records and CDs are similarly isomorphic (to each other and to coffee cups and donuts) hence, Isomorphic Records.<br>Two weeks ago the same topology reference — in the form of Isomorphic Labs — raised $2.1 billion. The implicit claim embedded in that name is that AI drug design and biological reality are the same shape, deformed by different forces; solve one and you’ve solved the other. “AlphaFold solves protein structure” is a problem in chemistry and geometry. “Isomorphic Labs solves all disease” is a problem in physiology, immunology, pharmacology, trial design, and at least four other disciplines that do not yield to abstract mathematics. The function from the first to the second is not continuous. It is not even well-defined.<br>Back to Isomorphic (Labs, not Records) in a minute — but first, the RGC. We announced the RGC to the world on January 13, 2014, the day before Illumina launched the HiSeq X. There was even a New York Times article about the launch1, and fun fact: George had to borrow Len’s shirt for the photo shoot. The RGC was set up to do roughly what Demis Hassabis is now saying his startup Isomorphic Labs will do: use large-scale data and computational biology to inform drug discovery. We started with a hundred-thousand-person sequencing partnership with the Geisinger Health System.2 We hit a million exomes sequenced in early 2020, the first organization in the world to reach that number; we crossed two million in early 2023 and are approaching three million as of this writing.<br>It has been, in my estimation, an unqualified success. The RGC has delivered more than forty novel drug targets and therapeutic programs into Regeneron’s pipeline, across chronic liver disease, obesity, cancer, and neurodegenerative conditions.3 Among the most prominent: ANGPTL3, which inspired a drug approved by the FDA in 2021 for an inherited form of high cholesterol;4 GPR75 for obesity; HSD17B13 and CIDEB for chronic liver disease; INHBE for favorable fat distribution and protection from diabetes. We published the genetic and clinical work in peer-reviewed journals over the course of a decade, and we contributed a number of open-source tools to the field including REGENIE, a whole-genome regression method widely used for biobank-scale GWAS.5 I’m retiring next month, extremely proud of what we’ve accomplished by bringing together a collaborative team of scientists and staying focused on the data.<br>We never said we would cure or solve all disease. Not in the founding press release. Not in any subsequent press release. Not in any of the numerous peer-reviewed papers the RGC has published over the past decade in Science, Nature, Nature Genetics, NEJM, and Nature Communications. The 2014 announcement said the new center’s objective was “to expand the use of human genetics for defining disease targets and improving the drug development process.”6 Verbs you can audit. Define. Improve. This essay is about why some ventures in this space speak the way the RGC spoke at its founding and others speak the way Isomorphic speaks. The answer, from a decade inside one of them, is not primarily a question of character.<br>I think for the most part everyone is honestly trying to do their best to help humanity. The question isn’t character. It’s incentive architecture — and I’m not letting myself off...