Who am I?!
I’m Alex Kesin!
I grew up on Long Island, NY, a place where suburbs hit peak suburbanness. After a brief detour through data science at the University of Michigan (go Blue), I quickly realized traditional academia wasn’t for me. Instead, I dove headfirst into biotech, spending the next eighteen months as an analyst at age1, a San Francisco life sciences fund fixated on longevity.
These days, you'll find me writing at Asimov Press and Works In Progress as part of a joint fellowship for emerging writers in biotech (and, of course, right here for more scattered thoughts).
My obsession: harnessing biotech to expand healthy lifespan, particularly by tackling frailty-related diseases—osteoporosis, sarcopenia, the stuff everyone faces eventually but few talk about compellingly.
Quick fun-ish facts, because listicles are internet catnip:
Biking is the one aerobic activity I genuinely enjoy, which sounds like faint praise but isn’t.
I can sustain a ten-minute conversation in Chinese–a feat achieved mostly through stubborn repetition and sheer force of will.
Favorite films include The Social Network, because Sorkin dialogue is a cheat code for making nerds look cool, with Dune and Oppenheimer inching dangerously close to dethroning it.
For one fleeting moment in first grade, I was the best Hebrew reader in my yeshiva class, a distinction that has yet to prove lucrative.
What this blog is about
Pharma blogging today can feel like decoding FDA legalese or corporate PR disguised as insight, catering to hyper-specialized niches. Across the valley, meanwhile, the tech and venture community engages biotech mostly through oversimplified thought experiments ("Why don’t we just YC this?") as though cellular pathways respond to seed funding and demo days.
Pharma, if it's ever truly to be disrupted, first needs to be understood—not just in regulatory minutiae or biochemical pathways, but in broader cultural, economic, and existential dimensions. That’s the goal here: to provoke understanding, incite change, and perhaps entertain along the way.
Welcome! I sincerely hope you enjoy the ride.
Contact me
Email: kesin[at]umich[dot]edu
Twitter: @alexkesin