Jacob Kimmel

The best evidence is that it's probably not cellular.

So the reason your skin sags is there's a protein in your skin called elastin, which does exactly what you'd think it would based on the name.

It kind of keeps your skin elastic-y like a waistband and holds it to your face.

So you have these big polymerized fibers of elastin in your face.

And as far as we understand it, you only polymerize it and form a long fiber during development.

And then the rest of your life, you make the individual units of the polymer, but they, for reasons no one, as far as I can tell, understands, they fail to polymerize and you can't like make new

long cords to hold your skin up to your face.

So I think the eventual solution for something like that is likely that you need to program cells to states that are extra physiological.

There might not be a cell in your body.

It's not just like a young skin cell from a 20-year-old is better at making these fibers.

As far as we can tell, they don't.

But you could probably program a cell to be able to reinvigorate that polymerization process, to run along the fiber and repair it in places where it's damaged.

Obviously, these things get made during development, so it's totally physically feasible for this to occur.

Maybe there's even a developmental state which would be sufficient to achieve this.

I don't think anyone knows, but that would be the kind of state that one might have to engineer de novo, even if our genome doesn't necessarily encode for it explicitly.

Okay, what is Irum's Law?

Irum's Law is a funny portmanteau created by a friend of mine, Jack Scannell, where he inverted the notion of Moore's Law, which is the doubling of compute density on silicon chips every few years.

So Moore's Law has graciously given us massive increases in compute performance over several decades.

And Irum's Law is the inverse of that, because in biopharma, what we're actually seeing is that there's a very consistent decrease in the number of new molecular entities, so new medicines that we're able to invent, per billion dollars invested.

And this trend actually starts way back in the 1950s and persists through many different technological transitions along the way.