⁠Blackjack, Biosecurity and Big Bets | Alexander Titus, National Biotech Commissioner

What this episode covers

In this episode, we sit down with Alexander Titus—computational biologist, founder of the In Vivo Group, Head of AI at Avidity Biosciences, and commissioner on the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology. From backpacking through Central America on a one-way ticket to becoming the first-ever biotech director at the U.S. Department of Defense, Titus has built a career around a simple ethos: do hard things with good people and have fun along the way. Titus shares how a last-minute decision to move to the Bay Area, a spontaneous detour to Cuba, and a months-long bike ride from the Arctic Ocean to San Francisco all shaped his appetite for risk, resilience, and unconventional career moves. He talks about living in a Detroit casino while his wife worked night shifts at a children’s hospital—and how using a $100 blackjack bankroll with strict downside protection became both a crash course in probability and an unexpected asset in his grad school interviews. We dig into his work at the Pentagon, where he helped stand up biotech as a serious national security priority, and his current role on the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology, which recently released a $15 billion roadmap for strengthening the U.S. bioeconomy. Titus explains why he thinks “big initiatives” are really just 1,000 small, well-executed steps, why people and bio-literacy are the most underappreciated pieces of the biotech puzzle, and how policy, industry, and science can—and must—reinforce each other. Finally, Titus reflects on the real-world promise and hype of AI in biology, from automating tedious knowledge work to accelerating high-throughput experimentation, and why “zero-shot” drug design is still more aspiration than reality. He also gives us a preview of his hard science fiction novel, Synthetic Eden, which forces readers to confront a stark choice: human genetic engineering or human extinction. Throughout the conversation, Titus offers not just stories from a wildly non-linear career, but a playbook for taking smart risks, embracing humility, and building a life at the edge of what’s possible.