Nose to the Grindstone, Shoulder to the Wheel

One impetus for starting this blog was the end of my career at a biotech company -- I thought I might have a lot of time on my hands, which represented both an opportunity to do something new and a threat to my professional sanity. That hiatus ended up being significantly compressed due to an extension of my term of service, but the blog was out there and required feeding.

Because my former employer, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, had grown so huge and shrunk so much, plus with my lengthy service there, I know a lot of alumni and a large number of them are still in the Boston area. Thanks to many of them, I had rapid success with obtaining screening interviews & as a result tomorrow I get to embark on the next stage of my career as I begin a new position. I will be joining the startup synthetic biology company Codon Devices, one of whose founders is my graduate advisor George Church. It's an unbelievable opportunity to try to explore amazing technologies & apply them to interesting biological problems.

So what to do about the blog? I hope to continue it, but we'll see what the reality is. Time, particularly mental cycle time, may become a rare commodity -- one of the first blogs I got hooked on dried up when the author joined a startup. Some distillations of topics of interest may need to be reserved for my new organization. But, there's still plenty out there. I also don't intend for this to become some sort of propaganda site for Codon; I may comment on synthetic biology sometimes, but perhaps this will largely be an outlet for my musings on topics at best only distantly connected to their business plans.

In any case, I do thank all of you who have read this pages & commented or emailed me or otherwise noted this daily attempt to go beyond PowerPoint bullets (it was gratifying, but novel, to have my blog cited in the intro at one job talk!). It is gratifying, and I hope you will continue to find reading these blurbs worth your while.