Phase
Phase is a technology company controlling biology to transform and expand sentient existence.
We build hardware interfaces to communicate with cells to radically regenerate and enhance the human body. Our aim is to repair organs after failure, regrow limbs after amputation, and eventually improve the function of the body for everyone, not just patients.
Cells collectively create our bodies during morphogenesis by communicating via bioelectric, molecular and mechanical signals. The same communication that self-assemble us, could also repair and transform our bodies.
One of the beautiful consequences of this fact is that all the cells in your body, not just neurons:
1) Use bioelectric and molecular signals in the form of membrane voltages and ion flows to control their behavior.
2) Compute, store memories and process external information akin to neural networks, just at slower scales.
We are working hard to unveil a series of devices within the next decade that we hope will help patients and improve the experience of life for everyone.
We are neither building a company to be acquired nor aiming for a small outcome. We are building this to endure over the decades ahead.
Questions
The self-assembly of organisms with metacognition is one of the most breathtaking questions humanity has ever posed since we became scientifically aware thousands of years ago. It is, fundamentally, the journey the universe takes from matter to mind; the way it knows itself and how it becomes. Qualia, meaning, beauty, curiosity, and everything that matters in life are downstream of this.
There are two parts to this question:
matter to living matter: what are the critical phase transitions that scale complexity up to self-reproducing and competent living systems?
living matter to mind: how are these systems able to scale cognition by collaborating toward bigger goals in different problem spaces, from single-cell goals to multicellular intelligence (like us humans and beyond)?
Institutions for science
One of my main drivers in life is to build the scientific, technical, economic, and institutional infrastructure to understand these questions... and perhaps black hole singularities if there's some spare time :)
Insight is only as good and frequent as the place it comes from. Science never happens in a vacuum; it is shaped by large-scale forces like the incentives driving our economy and culture.
Making money with science to get more capital to do more science is a craft I'm honing and humanity needs to become better at.
Bell Labs, before AT&T's breakup in '84, is an incredible inspiration for this goal. It certainly has been for Phase's culture and ambitions, we are building such a sustainable infrastructure at scale.
