Alex Strudwick Young (@AlexTISYoung) / X

Alex Strudwick Young

5,671 posts

Alex Strudwick Young

@AlexTISYoung

Asst. Prof. @ UCLA Human Genetics. Statistical geneticist. Advisor @herasight. Oxford PhD. Mendelian inheritance is the most important natural experiment.

Los Angeles

alextisyoung.github.io

Joined January 2013

Pinned
Alex Strudwick Young
@AlexTISYoung
Apr 9
I am recruiting a quantitative/computational postdoc to my group at UCLA. This is a great opportunity to work on foundational theory, methods, and software in statistical genetics. Apply here: recruit.apo.ucla.edu/JPF10842. Please repost!
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Alex Strudwick Young
@AlexTISYoung
Apr 7, 2025
This seems massively overhyped. "Creating the dire wolves called for making just 20 edits in 14 genes in the common gray wolf." In other words, it's not a dire wolf - it's a gray wolf modified to be more like a dire wolf. That's a cool achievement but they have not 'brought the
TIME
@TIME
Apr 7, 2025
TIME's new cover: The dire wolf is back after over 10,000 years. Here's what that means for other extinct species ti.me/4jlJB54
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Alex Strudwick Young
@AlexTISYoung
Jul 30, 2025
I’ve been working with an IVF startup, @herasight, that has already screened hundreds of embryos. Today we come out of stealth with a paper showing that our predictors for 17 diseases — validated within-family — beat the competition, with improved performance in non-Europeans🧵
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Alex Strudwick Young
@AlexTISYoung
Aug 21, 2023
Replying to @jonatanpallesen
If the apparent placebo depends mostly on a tendency to regress to a healthy mean, there should be no placebo effect in RCTs of terminal cancer patients, or Alzheimer's disease, or other diseases that follow a predictable deterioration path. Is that true?
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Alex Strudwick Young
@AlexTISYoung
Apr 7, 2025
Replying to @AlexTISYoung
"the dire wolf has three genes that code for its light coat, but in gray wolves they can lead to deafness and blindness. The Colossal team thus engineered two other genes that shut down black and red pigmentation, leading to the dire wolf’s characteristic light color without
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Alex Strudwick Young
@AlexTISYoung
Jun 26, 2023
In PNAS today, Greg Clark documents the inheritance of social status in an impressive dataset on 422,374 people born in England between 1600 to 2022. Clark finds a strong persistence in social status going from close to distant relatives, which fits a model dating back to RA
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Alex Strudwick Young
@AlexTISYoung
Apr 10, 2025
Replying to @Babygravy9
Ancient DNA does not support major population replacements in that timescale. Ancient DNA samples from China from the 7500-1700BP lie on a cline between Southeast Asian and Tungusic populations. The PCA plot below shows maybe a slight west Eurasian shift in late bronze age/early
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Alex Strudwick Young
@AlexTISYoung
Nov 7, 2025
I'll never forget when James Watson walked in on my first year PhD student talk at Oxford. He took the student talks seriously although didn't seem to like how mathematical mine was.
The Spectator Index
@spectatorindex
Nov 7, 2025
BREAKING: James Watson, who helped discover the structure of DNA, has died at 97.
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Alex Strudwick Young
@AlexTISYoung
May 15, 2025
In March last year, at the age of 35, I was diagnosed with advanced stage III rectal cancer with a metastasis in my liver. This was a shock: I had no family history, and none of the doctors suspected it. In fact, I'd had a negative occult blood test when I went to ER with severe
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Alex Strudwick Young
@AlexTISYoung
Nov 2, 2025
England is two economies: SE England - up there with the wealthiest parts of Europe - and the north, comparable in gdp/capita with Eastern Europe. Much commentary in the US ignores this distinction.
Tom Forth
@thomasforth
Nov 1, 2025
Loved the graph on top incomes in the FT so much that I reproduced. But with just a little tweak. I compared two equal sized pieces of England.
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Alex Strudwick Young
@AlexTISYoung
Nov 5, 2025
Uni-causal explanations of genius miss something. Super outliers like Von Neumann had both outlying natural abilities and the right environment to develop those talents. It's no coincidence Mozart's father was a talented musician, both for the genes he passed down and the
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@hamptonism
Nov 2, 2025
the IQ pill is absolutely brutal. Game Theory, The Manhattan Project, Quantum Mechanics, Monte Carlo Methods, Entirety of Modern Computing, Entropy, Numerical Weather Prediction, Stochastic Computing, you just can’t compete with this.
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Alex Strudwick Young
@AlexTISYoung
Nov 6, 2025
Today parents can, for the first time, access polygenic embryo testing for IQ and many diseases through a routine test (PGT-A) done worldwide and in 60% of US IVF cycles. Read on to learn how Herasight’s ImputePGTA algorithm is enabling polygenic testing in IVF to go global. 🧵
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Alex Strudwick Young
@AlexTISYoung
Apr 7, 2025
Replying to @MattyBoySwag143
The company is entitled to hype. Others are entitled to point out the reality.
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Alex Strudwick Young
@AlexTISYoung
Oct 26, 2025
Even highly intelligent people can be confused about the distinction between intelligence and consciousness.
vitrupo
@vitrupo
Oct 26, 2025
Stephen Wolfram says LLMs may have put the final nail in the coffin of the idea that consciousness is something magical beyond physics. What we call awareness, this “single thread of experience,” might have begun as a way for early animals to decide whether to turn left or
00:00
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