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Writing Ruxandra
writingruxandrabio.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2024
Ruxandra Teslo, a genomics PhD, writes about biology research, drug development, FDA bottlenecks, and the culture of science and ideas.
What HN saysCommenters cite it in discussions of why medicine and cancer research are slow, arguing intelligence is not the bottleneck and regulation is a larger one.
29HN people shared it
5linked it in comments
35stories submitted
716story points
3 months agolast shared
2024people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Intelligence Is Not the Main Bottleneck4 people · 13 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 2Autism and the Internet will defeat the Monoculture3 people · 15 points · first shared 2024 · 3 comments on HN
- 3Ideas matter: How I stopped being a Culture Incel3 people · 6 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 4The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs2 people · 449 points · first shared 2024 · 477 comments on HN
- 5Why haven't biologists cured cancer?2 people · 83 points · first shared 2024 · 104 comments on HN
- 6The flight of the Weird Nerd from academia2 people · 50 points · first shared 2024 · 35 comments on HN
- 7The Road to (Mental) Serfdom and Misinformation Studies2 people · 4 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 8Is progress in medicine too slow?2 people · 3 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 9The bureaucracy blocking the chance at a cure2 people · 3 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 10Evidence that we have been living in an increasingly risk-averse culture1 people · 23 points · first shared 2024 · 6 comments on HN
- 11How to Test More Drugs1 people · 23 points · first shared 2024 · 10 comments on HN
- 12Culture over Policy: The birth rate decline1 people · 16 points · first shared 2024 · 11 comments on HN
- 13Elites are mostly lazily well-intentioned1 people · 7 points · first shared 2024 · 3 comments on HN
- 14Autoimmune therapies: an inspiration for anti-aging therapies?1 people · 3 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 15Manufacturing requirements are killing cell and gene therapy1 people · 3 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
levocardia · 2026-04-26
Elaborating a bit - brain is hard to study since you can't easily take a biopsy of it (from a living person at least), and various brain scans are not great at identifying the stuff we care about.
The slow acting nature of it means also you have to wait a long time to see results of clinical trials; also because early stages are easy to miss that also means you are stuck studying people who are already pretty senile and thus might be beyond the point where you can make a big difference.
Ruxandra has a nice piece, focused on cancer, but the reasoning is basically the same here: biology is just really hard. Sometimes we get lucky but in general it's a long, slow slog.
[1] https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/why-havent-biologists-cured-cance…
ZeroGravitas · 2025-04-30
This and Sam Harris realising that all his fellow travellers were both evil and stupid is my fave source of schadenfreude at the moment.
I think Scott had a subscriber only post a couple of weeks ago that was tiptoeing in the direction of admitting that all his BS concern about woke universities helped get us here but I can now find no trace of it (though I'm not a subscriber so that may be normal).
edit found it:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/twilight-of-the-edgelords
Still not read it as it's paywalled, but there's a response that suggests "the edgelord were right" implying Scott has started to realise the edgelords were wrong (though of course he can't just say that simply so it's all very vague):
https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/the-edgelords-were-right-a-respon…
discreteevent · 2026-08-17
See also this article by a genomics PhD about how intelligence is not the bottleneck in medical research.
https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/intelligence-is-not-the-main-bott…
red_admiral · 2026-06-12
For the state of new cancer-killing drugs and bottlenecks getting them approved, see also the top few posts on https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/archive
The post on AI and and cures for cancer is https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/a-response-to-dario-amodei-on-ai .
nextaccountic · 2026-03-29
> The bottleneck isn't research funding, it's getting past the FDA
Incidentally, that's the first point on his proposals to make the industry more healthcare first (slide 15)
He also links this https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/the-bureaucracy-blocking-the-chan…