Who am I, what is Phase 5 - and why should you subscribe?

Hi! I'm Sy Mukherjee, and I've been covering or otherwise working in the healthcare and biopharma/digital health/life sciences industry for more than a decade. The vast majority of my career has been as a journalist specializing in this niche and the intersection of technology and medicine, including as an editor at BioPharma Dive and longtime writer at Fortune Magazine, alongside another stint or two along the way in the space. I currently freelance on the beat I've worked in my entire career (primarily for Inc. Magazine), and am also a strategic communications consultant.

Oh, and I’m the founder and author of Phase 5.

Let's take the subscription question first since it's easy: The Phase 5 newsletter and all Phase 5 content on the web is free. Sign up to receive one newsletter per week to your inbox, read up on all Phase 5 content and threads on the Substack app, follow me on Substack and social accounts (Sy Mukherjee on LinkedIn, @the_sy_guy on platforms like X/Twitter), share Phase 5 with your friends, colleagues, and networks - whatever you prefer as your experience, at no cost. Contributions are voluntary but appreciated (we did just launch in January 2024). Email me directly if you ever want to chat or want more details on how you can provide some support if you'd consider it: sy.mukherjee.2012@gmail.com

Now…

Seriously, What Is Phase 5?

Here's some background - if you trawl through published posts on the site (but seriously, please consider signing up - it's free!) you'll get a sense for Phase 5’s overarching vision and ambition. The following is cribbed from my launch announcement on January 2, 2024:

Phase 5 is a biotech, digital health, science, and med tech-focused newsletter with broad ambition – the ambition to put the work and rigor expected in any prestige newsroom into a newsletter form, a serious work of journalism and reporting (inspired by, among others, my first-ever boss Judd Legum's exceptional Popular Information newsletter) and ensuing analysis on industry trends and what they mean for patients, society, and the globe as revolutionary technologies like CRISPR gene-editing and AI/ML, among others, take flight.

It will raise provocative and necessary questions about the blending of technology, medicine, agriculture, and energy throughout industries as we head into the tumultuous coming decades – decades that will be defined by an exploding elderly population, alongside the encroaching carrying capacity of humanity itself on the globe, climate change, and future global transformations yet unknown. It will explore the social ethics and bioethics of the decisions companies, governments, and regulators make today that will define the impact and consequences for human beings well into the long term. It will tackle issues that too much of the mainstream media coverage today does not address, to encourage dialog among business, scientific, and government leaders about the truly important questions of tomorrow. I will interview, and conduct podcasts and videos, with decision makers and thought leaders in arenas ranging from industry to government to academic science to philosophy and ethics.

I define journalism as the critical public service that attempts to bridge the gaps and map the connections between epistemology and ontology in the pursuit of a better society. In less heady terms, taking the way we use knowledge and data, channel it through tools and technologies, and the ensuing effect it has on human beings’ and society’s every day reality and circumstance. That’s why this publication is called Phase 5 – beyond mechanism, beyond the clinic, beyond the market and post-market, and all the way into a broader, ontological impact.

If that sounds interesting, please subscribe, spread the word, contact me for any contributions you might consider if so inclined - and maybe take a glance through the posts to date to get a feel for some of the ways Phase 5 will tackle critical questions about the future of medicine, technology, the planet, and humanity by asking the right questions and a standard of journalistic excellence.