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Reed Jobs would rather talk about curing cancer than his last name — TechCrunch

Good catch-up piece on Reed Jobs and Yosemite, his oncology-focused venture firm. Three years in: the firm now has a team of 17, and AI has helped accelerate part of what Yosemite does. A few things worth highlighting:

• Yosemite’s model is unusual — they only work in oncology and prefer building companies themselves rather than just writing checks, using no-strings philanthropy to de-risk early academic ideas.
• On AI’s actual near-term impact, Jobs is clear-eyed: it’s not necessarily doing science better, but doing grunt work incredibly fast and reproducibly — with the biggest opportunity being synthetic control arms that could cut clinical trial patient recruitment in half.
• The p53 section is the most striking part of the interview — a tumor suppressor gene implicated in nearly every human cancer, long considered untouchable, that Yosemite is attacking with three different companies.

Cancer is horrible. Lord knows Reed Jobs knows. Wishing him and the whole Yosemite team great success — this is exactly the kind of work worth rooting for.

First ‘true sugar’ molecule found in space — offering hints to life’s origins — Nature

Astronomers just detected erythrulose — a four-carbon sugar also found in raspberries and self-tanner — drifting in a molecular cloud near the center of the Milky Way. It’s the first true sugar ever found in interstellar space, formed with no star, planet, or life anywhere nearby.

The implication: some of the raw chemistry for life may have been floating around long before Earth existed, waiting for a comet to deliver it.