As part of his work in the public sector, Alexander Titus is one of the Commissioners at the United States National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology. He previously worked at the DoD as the Head of Biotechnology Strategy, and helped launch PPPs BioMADE and armi.

With too many interests to count, Titus was also part of early-stage startups like Colossal Biosciences; he worked at Google’s healthcare and life sciences division, and cofounded Dauntless Ventures and Decycle Bio.

We’ve followed each other since he ran the BioXYZ publication in 2020. Today, he writes about the intersection of science, technology, policy, futures, and fiction through The Connected Ideas Project. His first science fiction novel, Synthetic Eden is now available.

In this Biofounders episode:

0:00-3:53 Introduction

3:55 Public and private sector in biotech innovation

10:11 Questions the Pentagon asking about biotech during the pandemic

13:13 Building credibility as biotechnologists through different storytelling

17:49 Lessons from Bioeconomy.XYZ, The Connected Ideas Project, and Synthetic Eden

21:05 How to think about genetically engineered human embryos

27:11 Increasing our reliance on AI and robotics-powered biotechnology

32:35 US-China biotechnological race

36:20 Metrics to assess the progress of biotech

40:37 Lessons from the last few years of the biotech industry and analogies to the tech industry

46:09 How Titus personally decides what to work on at a given time

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