Robert Rhinehart: Building the tools for research

Robert Rhinehart is most known for Soylent, a company and product he founded in the search for nutrition supported by science. But, Robert has always been interested in technical underpinnings of biology.

So, after reading a paper about the effect of COVID on the brainstem, Robert jumped into action. He launched the Corona Initiative, a public benefit corporation dedicated to building the tools for research. These tools, such as a psuedovirus, are required for researchers to run experiments and test treatments. In this conversation Robert and I discussed why basic research is underfunded, what we need to accelerate COVID research and the implications this pandemic could have on biotechnology companies going forward.

Some of the resources we discussed are:

marsbio.vc

corona-initiative.com

https://cdn.elifesciences.org/articles/57309/elife-57309-v3.pdf