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Tag: biotech

  • Meet the Designer Behind Neuralink’s Surgical Robot

    Meet the Designer Behind Neuralink’s Surgical Robot

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    As a designer, what safety considerations did you have to think about with the Neuralink device?

    The primary safety considerations weren’t so much on the device but on the robot. We had a small role to play, which was to psychologically transform their first-generation robot, which was exposed steel—you could argue it looked pretty ominous—to something that was a little bit more approachable and ready for clinical trials.

    We worked with Neuralink’s engineering team to try and design facias—covers or cladding—for the outside of the robot, to start to give it a bit more of a visual language that was simple, approachable, and something that you can imagine people not being intimidated by. In that process, we were starting to introduce a lot more elements of design, and the safety concern wasn’t so much for the patients, it was for the operators.

    We thought about things like pinch points. You don’t want people crushing their hands while they’re operating the system. That’s Robotics 101. It’s what every designer who’s designing robots has to think about. These machines are pretty powerful, and when they want to go to a specific location, they’ll go there, and if your finger gets in between where it is and where it’s going, it’s going to be pretty dangerous.

    How did the design of the robot evolve over time?

    The robot design was a very collaborative process. It’s obviously a super-complicated robot, and so our design team came in to work closely with their mechanical engineers to understand the surgical process.

    We started with the part of the robot that has the needle and is doing the actual insertion of the neural threads [which record brain activity], because it’s the most sensitive constraint, and we kind of worked backwards from there. We spent a period of time with them designing the part of the robot that interfaces with your head. We had to understand all the ways that you’d have to assemble it to cover up the existing system underneath it.

    We then moved on to the rest of the robotic body, and we were able to develop the body in parallel with their internal electromechanical design team. We were able to order the units to be fabricated, and then we worked with them to assemble it. From there, they’ve taken it and done further internal testing.

    What interests you about designing neurotech devices?

    I’m always inspired by the people doing work in this space in terms of founders, scientists, technologists, neuroscientists, and personally it’s just really cool that the feat of this technology is unlocking big philosophical questions about how the brain works and what it means to be human. I think that’s super cool.

    You’ve worked with other brain device companies. Are there particular use cases for neurotech that really excite you?

    The field is focusing on the most vulnerable right now, which is inspiring. The immediate attention is on how to help people who need help the most, such as those who are paralyzed, and the problems that are being solved are very direct. I think seeing more work being done on these problems with AI, having the AI solve those very practical problems, is what I’m the most excited about right now.

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  • The Next Generation of Cancer Drugs Will Be Made in Space

    The Next Generation of Cancer Drugs Will Be Made in Space

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    During the course, King was part of a team tasked with identifying research that could be conducted in space with the best potential impact on humankind. Her team landed on the concept of crystallizing drugs in microgravity. There was data stacked up on the International Space Station hinting at the potential to “absolutely revolutionize cancer treatment,” King says. “This needs to be realized fully, and now is the time.”

    BioOrbit, which King founded in 2023, plans to scale up and commercialize this kind of drug production in space. After securing funding from the European Space Agency, the plan is to test out the process on the International Space Station early next year to make sure it works. And later in 2025, they’re planning a second flight which ideally will be with a pharmaceutical partner.

    King is not the first to send drugs into space to reap the benefits that microgravity has to offer. Big Pharma is also dipping its toe: Companies including Bristol Myers Squibb and Merck have been conducting research in space for drug development and manufacturing for years. “What makes BioOrbit special is that they’re trying to optimize it,” says Li Shean Toh, an assistant professor at the University of Nottingham who researches astropharmacy. King wants to blow it up to commercial scale.

    But there are roadblocks. There are long queues to get space on board a rocket to take material to the ISS, and it’s unsurprisingly expensive. Regulation is another hurdle: Will the rules and regulations of Earth apply in outer space? If one of BioOrbit’s drugs harms a patient, whose jurisdiction will apply? “Lots of people are thinking about the technology—but people are kind of skirting around how we are going to do quality assurance,” Toh says. This is something she’s researching: She has proposed a health version of the Outer Space Treaty, a body of principles that informed international space law.

    King is happy for her team’s venture to serve as a guinea pig for how this all might work, because she wants it to work. “There is so much benefit that microgravity can give to life science research, drug development, cancer research—and more that we just don’t know yet,” says King.

    Her ultimate goal for BioOrbit is to have a permanent facility in space just for doing science, research, and manufacturing. The pharmaceutical factories that sit in gray, barren business parks may soon become a little more extraterrestrial. One day, perhaps many of your drugs will have had a little sojourn to space.

    This article appears in the May/June 2024 issue of WIRED UK magazine.

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  • A Gene-Edited Pig Kidney Was Just Transplanted Into a Person for the First Time

    A Gene-Edited Pig Kidney Was Just Transplanted Into a Person for the First Time

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    Slayman received his first kidney transplant in 2018 from a human donor. The donor kidney initially functioned well, but Slayman started to go into kidney failure after years of living with diabetes. Diabetes is the leading cause of kidney disease, which can eventually result in kidney failure.

    He had no choice but to go on dialysis, a treatment that removes excess fluid and waste from a person’s blood. But the dialysis caused complications—his blood vessels were clotting and failing. Slayman wound up in the hospital regularly and endured dozens of procedures to try to fix the problem.

    “Slowly but surely, I witnessed my patient becoming increasingly despondent and depressed over his dialysis situation,” Winfred Williams, a kidney specialist and member of Slayman’s medical team, said on Thursday.

    Finally, Williams suggested a pig kidney transplant. Slayman agreed. “I saw it not only as a way to help me, but a way to provide hope for the thousands of people who need a transplant to survive,” Slayman said in a statement released by Massachusetts General Hospital.

    The procedure was performed under the Food and Drug Administration’s “compassionate use” pathway, which allows a patient with a life-threatening condition to access an experimental treatment when no other options exist. Slayman is also receiving an infusion of novel immunosuppressant drugs to prevent rejection of the organ. His medical team is currently monitoring his kidney function using ultrasound.

    The Massachusetts team thinks the ideal candidate for a pig kidney will be a patient who was approved for a regular human kidney transplant but has a long wait time for a donor.

    The pig kidney transplant comes on the heels of a procedure in January, in which surgeons at the University of Pennsylvania successfully attached a gene-edited pig liver to a braindead person and found that the organ functioned normally for 72 hours. The liver, also from eGenesis, contained the same 69 edits as Slayman’s kidney.

    The liver is a more complicated organ because of the many functions it performs, so researchers don’t think pig livers are ready to be used in place of human ones just yet. Instead, they could be used outside the body and connected to patients who are waiting for a human organ or those who need temporary support while their own liver recovers.

    Researchers have been working up to transplanting a modified pig kidney in a person. Last year, eGenesis reported that a kidney from one of its edited pigs functioned in a monkey for more than two years. And scientists at New York University and the University of Alabama at Birmingham have transplanted gene-edited pig kidneys into braindead patients to observe how well the organs function.

    Jayme Locke, an abdominal transplant surgeon at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who has overseen some of those experiments, was thrilled to hear about the Boston kidney transplant. “This is wonderful news, and it’s great to see it move into the clinic,” she told WIRED in an interview.

    Locke says the recent flurry of xenotransplantation experiments shows that the idea of using pig organs in people is gaining momentum and is here to stay. “I think it really has staying power and it’s going to really revolutionize the field and hopefully offer organs to all those in need,” she says.

    Locke’s team is also looking to do pig-to-human kidney transplants. She said she has several patients in mind for the procedures and is just waiting on the FDA to give the greenlight. “We’re ready to go.”

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  • A Pill That Kills Ticks Is a Promising New Weapon Against Lyme Disease

    A Pill That Kills Ticks Is a Promising New Weapon Against Lyme Disease

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    If you have a dog or cat, chances are you’ve given your pet a flavored chewable tablet for tick prevention at some point. What if you could take a similar pill to protect yourself from getting Lyme disease?

    Tarsus Pharmaceuticals is developing such a pill for humans—minus the tasty flavoring—that could provide protection against the tick-borne disease for several weeks at a time. In February, the Irvine, California–based biotech company announced results from a small, early-stage trial showing that 24 hours after taking the drug, it can kill ticks on people, with the effects lasting for up to 30 days.

    “What we envision is something that would protect you before the tick would even bite you,” says Bobby Azamian, CEO of Tarsus.

    Lyme disease is a fast-growing problem in the United States, where approximately 476,000 people are diagnosed and treated for it each year, according to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That number is likely an overestimate, because many patients are treated after a tick bite even if an infection isn’t confirmed, but it underscores the burden of Lyme disease on the health care system—which researchers at the CDC and Yale University put at nearly $1 billion per year.

    The disease is caused by the bacteria Borrelia burgdorferi, which gets passed to humans through the bite of an infected tick. In most cases, a tick has to be attached for around 36 to 48 hours before the bacteria can be transmitted. Symptoms include fever, headache, fatigue, and a characteristic skin rash that looks like a bullseye.

    Without a vaccine for Lyme disease on the market, current prevention includes using insect repellents such as DEET and permethrin and wearing closed shoes, long pants, and long sleeves when in a tick-infested area.

    “We’ve seen increasing rates of tick-borne diseases over the years, despite being told to do tick checks, use DEET, and impregnate your clothes with permethrin,” says Paul Auwaerter, a professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine who studies Lyme disease.

    A more effective treatment strategy would be welcome, Auwaerter says, especially because Lyme disease can sometimes cause serious health issues. Antibiotics are usually effective when taken early, although about 5 to 10 percent of patients can have lingering symptoms for weeks or months. If left untreated, the infection can spread to the joints and cause arthritis. It can also become established in the heart and nervous system, causing persistent fatigue, numbness, or weakness.

    The experimental pill that Tarsus Pharmaceuticals is testing is a formulation of lotilaner, a drug that paralyzes and kills parasites by interfering with the way that signals are passed between their nerve cells. Lotilaner is already approved as a veterinary medicine under the brand name Credelio to control fleas and ticks in dogs and cats.

    “Our animals have better options than we do for tick prevention,” says Linden Hu, a professor of immunology at Tufts Medical School who led the Tarsus trial. “There are quite a few drugs and vaccines available for dogs and cats, but there’s nothing for us.”

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  • Scientists Are Inching Closer to Bringing Back the Woolly Mammoth

    Scientists Are Inching Closer to Bringing Back the Woolly Mammoth

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    De-extinction startup Colossal Biosciences wants to bring back the woolly mammoth. Well, not the woolly mammoth exactly, but an Asian elephant gene-edited to give it the fuzzy hair and layer of blubber that allowed its close relative to thrive in sub-zero environments.

    To get to these so-called “functional mammoths,” Colossal’s scientists need to solve a whole bunch of challenges: making the right genetic tweaks, growing edited cells into fully formed baby functional mammoths, and finding a space where these animals can thrive. It’s a long, uncertain road, but the startup has just announced a small breakthrough that should ease some of the way forward.

    Scientists at Colossal have managed to reprogram Asian elephant cells into an embryonic-like state that can give rise to every other cell type. This opens up a path to creating elephant sperm and eggs in the lab and being able to test gene-edits without having to frequently take tissue samples from living elephants. The research, which hasn’t yet been released in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, will be published on the preprint server Biorxiv.

    There are only an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 Asian elephants in the wild, so access to these animals—and particularly their sperm and eggs—is extremely limited. Yet Colossal needs these cells if they’re going to figure out how to bring their functional mammoths to life. “With so few fertile female elephants, we really don’t want to interfere with their reproduction at all. We want to do it independently,” says George Church, a Harvard geneticist and Colossal co-founder.

    The cells that Colossal created are called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), and they behave a lot like the stems cells found in an embryo. Embryonic stem cells have the ability to give rise to all kinds of different cell types that make up organisms—a quality scientists call pluripotency. Most cells, however, lose this ability as the organism develops. Human skin, for instance, can’t spontaneously turn into muscle or cells that line the inside of the intestine.

    In 2006, the Japanese scientist Shinya Yamanaka showed it was possible to take mature cells and turn them back into a pluripotent state. Yamanaka’s research was in mice cells, but later scientists followed up by deriving iPSCs for lots of different species, including humans, horses, pigs, cattle, monkeys, and the northern white rhino—a functionally extinct subspecies with only two individuals, both females, remaining in the wild.

    Reprogramming Asian elephant cells into iPSCs proved trickier than other species, says Eriona Hysolli, head of biological sciences at Colossal. As with other species, the scientists reprogrammed the elephant cells by exposing them to a series of different chemicals and then adding proteins called transcription factors that turn on particular genes to change how the cells functions. The whole process took two months, which is much longer than the 5–10 days it takes to create mouse iPSCs or the three weeks for human iPSCs.

    This difficulty might have to do with the unique biology of elephants, says Vincent Lynch, a developmental biologist at the Universty at Buffalo in New York who wasn’t involved in the Colossal study. Elephants are the classic example of Peto’s paradox—the idea that very large animals have unusually low rates of cancer given their size. Since cancer can be caused by genetic mutations that accumulate as cells divide, you’d expect that animals with 100 times more cells than humans would have a much higher risk of cancer.

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  • 2054, Part VI: Standoff at Arlington

    2054, Part VI: Standoff at Arlington

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    18:46 April 15, 2054 (GMT‑5)

    Arlington National Cemetery

    That night in her apartment Julia Hunt ordered in sushi and watched the coverage of Slake’s botched press conference on her living room sofa. Days later, Slake’s panicked responses to the questions about Castro’s death continued to air, and they appeared even worse on the news.

    Hunt raised a piece of salmon sashimi between two chopsticks as she read the chyron for the next story: Castro Autopsy Leaked on Common Sense Confirms Foul Play and White House Lies. She dropped the fish onto her lap.

    News of the withheld autopsy exploded. On every channel the prime-time anchors flashed printed copies of the report to the camera. They read whole sections aloud, describing the dimensions of the marble-sized mass of cells inexplicably lodged in Castro’s aorta and the excerpted transcript of the autopsy itself, in which the chief internist concluded, “This can’t be the same heart.”

    Within the hour, Truthers flooded the streets in cities around the country. As Hunt scrolled the channels, a news crew in Lafayette Park was conducting interviews with the growing mass of protesters, one of whom she recognized; it was the man in the wheelchair she’d met on the Metro. She had thought of him often. Now she learned his identity: retired gunnery sergeant Joseph William Sherman III. Beneath his name on the screen were the words Truther Volunteer Organizer. She placed his name in a search engine and learned that he’d lost his legs in the Spratly Islands and that the Chinese nuclear attack on San Diego had killed his wife and three daughters, who’d lived at nearby Camp Pendleton. Hunt could hear in Sherman’s voice how deeply he resented a president who while alive flaunted constitutional norms by clinging to power for an attempted fourth term and whose successor, Smith, now flaunted norms again by withholding an autopsy and refusing to be transparent about his predecessor’s death.

    “Point your camera here,” said Sherman, thumbing toward his missing legs. “I sacrificed these for my country, and you’re going to lie to me … you’re going to lie to all of us.” He gestured expansively to a cluster of Truthers who’d placed him at their center, the core of them veterans, wearing old military fatigues adorned with medals that dangled from their chest pockets. “It’s a lie that Smith is the legitimate president when he so clearly had a hand in killing Castro. Is this what America has become? Dreamers drunk on power led by a dictator-president. Lies to the many so long as it gives power to the few.” Sherman held the camera’s focus with his insistent blue eyes.

    His tone was so resolved, the correspondent felt compelled to answer him. In a meek voice, she said, “I don’t know.”

    “Of course you don’t.” Sherman leaned into the camera. “President Smith,” he began, “you are illegitimate. You will find that everyday Americans—we patriots who demand the truth about your crimes and the excesses of the Dreamers—will not be led by a thief, by someone who stole the presidency. We served our country before, and we’ll serve it again. And don’t even think of trying to place your predecessor in Arlington’s hallowed ground.” Sherman swiveled around, turning his back to the camera, and wheeled himself away.

    The news cut to commercial.

    Julia Hunt rested her head against the arm of her sofa, her eyes still glued to the screen. Weeks of exhaustion swept over her. While she waited for the program to return, she fell into a black wilderness of sleep. Deep into this sleep, in the early hours of the morning, she began to dream: Here, in the dream, she is asleep in her girlhood bedroom and is woken before dawn by a noise, the sound of something hitting the floor. Her surroundings are familiar, the adobe ranch house in New Mexico where Sarah Hunt had raised her. Wearing her nightgown, she carefully shuts the door behind her and steps into the dark corridor. At its far end a single band of light escapes from the base of another door. She begins to walk down the corridor. The tiles are cool beneath her bare feet. As she draws closer, she can hear what sounds like a struggle.

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  • 2054, Part V: From Tokyo With Love

    2054, Part V: From Tokyo With Love

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    Zhao Jin cast an appraising glance at Mohammad, who moved his food around on his plate and said, “He won’t be a senator for much longer.”

    “No,” Zhao Jin answered. “He won’t.”

    “He’ll be in the White House soon.”

    “It would seem so.”

    “He won’t take Lily Bao with him,” added Mohammad.

    “Would Kennedy have become president if instead of Jackie he’d married a German? The daughter of Rommel or Guderian? The wounds of America’s last war remain open, and Shriver is too much of a coward to risk his political career for her. Also, there’s something else.”

    “What’s that?” the elder James Mohammad asked impatiently.

    Zhao Jin volleyed his gaze between them, as if he were weighing whether to share this last bit of information. “The sequence of code on Common Sense. In your reports, you mention concerns that it was stolen from an Okinawa-based researcher you’ve funded, a Dr. Yamamoto.”

    “Yes,” said Mohammad. “That’s my concern.”

    “Before Lily Bao set off on her own, she worked for the Tandava Group. I assume you’re familiar with them.”

    Again, Mohammad nodded.

    “Although they’ve divested themselves of the asset, they once had a significant investment in Neutronics, a biotech company. Lily Bao managed that account for the Tandava Group’s founder, Dr. Sandeep Chowdhury. At that time, Neutronics was doing cutting-edge work in nanorobotics, quantum computing, and bioengineering, including early-phase research of remote gene editing under the guidance of Dr. Ray Kurzweil. You’ve heard of him, of course.”

    Both nephew and uncle nodded.

    “He vanished some years ago after leaving Neutronics,” added Zhao Jin. “It seems the company wanted to turn a profit off his research, while he wanted to go further with it.”

    “What does this have to do with my nephew and Lily Bao?” grumbled the elder James Mohammad.

    “Truthers in America are agitating for a commission to investigate President Castro’s death,” said Zhao Jin. “Belief is spreading that there was foul play—an assassination. The sequence of code that allegedly killed Castro, the one released on Common Sense, what if that sequence of code wasn’t stolen from Dr. Yamamoto’s lab? What if it came from Neutronics?”

    “Can you prove that?” asked Mohammad.

    “Do I need to? If Shriver climbs a little higher, to the vice presidency or even higher still, his ties to Lily Bao and Neutronics are leverage we’ll have over him, a way to exercise control. That will give us an invaluable edge over the Americans.”

    “So you want to blackmail Shriver?” asked Mohammad.

    Zhao Jin scoffed. “That’s such an ugly term, and it won’t be necessary.” He asked if he might share a parable from his country. “Once there was a boy who was trying to figure out how to earn the money for a special toy that he wanted but couldn’t afford. On hearing his predicament, a friend of his at school explained that most adults had at least one deep, dark secret and that this made it very easy to get what you wanted from them by simply stating, ‘I know the whole truth,’ even if you don’t know anything. The boy thought this sounded like it might be a way to get the money he needed out of his parents. That day, when he came home from school, he decided to try out his scheme. He found his mother as she was preparing dinner in the kitchen and gave her a grave look, saying, ‘I know the whole truth!’ His mother quickly reached into her apron and handed him a 1,000-yuan note, saying, ‘Don’t tell your father.’ Pleased that his scheme seemed to work, he waited for his father to get home that evening. Greeting him at the door, the boy said, ‘I know the whole truth!’ His father, glancing from side to side, took out his wallet and pressed 2,000 yuan into the boy’s hand, saying, ‘Not a word to your mother!’ Even more pleased and closer to affording his new toy, the boy thought he would try this trick on a stranger. The next morning, on his way to school, he saw the mailman walking up his front path. He looked the mailman squarely in the eye and said, ‘I know the whole truth!’ The mailman quickly dropped his mailbag, fell to his knees, opened his arms, and exclaimed, ‘Son! Finally! Come give your daddy a hug!’”

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  • 2054, Part IV: A Nation Divided

    2054, Part IV: A Nation Divided

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    Wisecarver stepped across the threshold. “Good morning, Mr. President.” He gave a little nod. Beneath his arm he carried a single binder. “Good morning, Trent.” Smith gestured for Wisecarver to sit with him on the sofa while Hunt and Hendrickson sat opposite. As they settled in, Julia caught Wisecarver glancing at the half dozen other binders spread across the coffee table, as if gauging the competition. The president cleared his throat. “As you all know, Speaker Wisecarver believes a unity government, in which I’d select a vice president from his party, would be in the best interests of our country …”

    Julia felt her godfather shift in his seat, as if he couldn’t quite stomach the idea that Wisecarver’s interest in the matter had anything to do with the country as opposed to his own naked ambition. While the president spoke, Wisecarver looked around the room, his eyes running the walls. As Speaker, he’d been in the Oval Office plenty of times before as a guest of President Castro, but he seemed to be taking it all in for the first time, as if he were rearranging the furniture in his imagination and, quite literally, measuring the drapes.

    Smith finished. It was Wisecarver’s turn to speak: “With the loss of President Castro, our country has gone through a significant trauma. Now it’s time for us to heal. The formation of a unity government is an important first step in that healing process. The people are in the streets telling us this. We can’t afford to ignore them any longer. Really, we have little choice in the matter. Either we heal together, or we tear ourselves apart.”

    “Is that a suggestion?” Hendrickson asked. “Or an ultimatum?”

    “It’s a reality, Bunt.” Wisecarver glanced down at the binders on the table. “If you pick one of those candidates, you’re tying my hands.”

    “Tying your hands how?” Hendrickson leaned forward so that he was perched on the edge of the sofa.

    “Well, for starters, they won’t go home anytime soon,” and Wisecarver gestured to the encampment out the window. “There’s also the commission investigating President Castro’s death to consider, a process that could drag on, depending on who we in the Congress appoint to lead it. If you need more reasons than those two, I could continue.”

    “That won’t be necessary,” the president said to Wisecarver. He turned to Hendrickson with a look like a child pleading with an overly protective parent. He couldn’t sustain this level of conflict, the protests around the country, the machinations of his political rivals. Like any performer, Smith cared deeply what other people thought of him and couldn’t tolerate being hated, or at least being hated to this degree. He had all of a politician’s neediness without any of the cunning. He was doomed.

    Julia Hunt could see her godfather reconsidering what Wisecarver offered. A unity government would de-escalate the current crisis, at least in the near term. In the long term, elevating a Truther could prove an astute move. It would diffuse Wisecarver’s power within the party. Also, depending on who that person was, having steady leadership—at least steadier than Smith—could help stabilize the country, or at least keep it from tearing itself apart, to use Wisecarver’s words. But it all depended on who he was proposing.

    Hendrickson asked for the name.

    Wisecarver reached across the coffee table and handed him the binder he’d brought, with its pages of due diligence. Julia Hunt leaned over her godfather’s shoulder as he opened it. Of course, she thought. On the first page she glimpsed the official portrait of Senator Nat Shriver.

    COMING SOON

    2054, Part V: From Tokyo With Love
    “Had this all been contrived? Had his life become a game in which everyone knew the rules but him?”

    From 2054: A Novel, by Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis, USN, to be published on March 12th, 2024, by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Elliot Ackerman and James Stavridis.

    If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more.

    Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at [email protected].

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  • 2054, Part III: The Singularity

    2054, Part III: The Singularity

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    Lily didn’t want to approach B.T. She thought that might seem too aggressive; instead, she wanted him to notice her. At the roulette table, he had placed his chips on black, so she’d placed hers on red, and that had been enough. “Lily Bao,” he said, a smile barging its way onto his lips as he saw her from down the table. “Why am I not surprised it’s you who found me first?”

    Lily was still collecting the last of her winnings. “Can I buy you a drink?”

    B.T. leaned over, grabbed a pair of her chips, and tossed them as a gratuity to the dealer, who nodded in appreciation. B.T. then turned toward her, his one eyebrow raised, and said, “The drinks here are free, kiddo.”

    They crossed the casino to the restaurant, walking arm in arm beneath its ceiling painted with kitschy Italianate frescoes and studded with security cameras, dozens of black, watchful orbs. At B.T.’s request, the maître d’ agreed to open up a closed section in order to grant them a little extra privacy. “Come here often?” Lily asked, impressed.

    B.T. shrugged and replied, “Depends on your definition of often.” He ordered the two of them a prewar bottle of Bordeaux, a Château Lafite Rothschild. “The 2031,” he said authoritatively, which elicited a little bow from the maître d’, who answered, “Right away, Dr. Yamamoto,” before returning to the front of the restaurant.

    Lily suppressed a laugh. “Look at you.”

    “Look at me what?”

    “The 2031 … Right away, Dr. Yamamoto …” B.T.’s gaze dipped self-consciously toward his place setting. Lily reached across the white linen tablecloth and took his hands in hers. “It’s really good to see you.”

    “How’d you find me?” B.T. asked. As Lily opened her mouth to speak, he modified the question: “Wait, why’d you find me?” This was more complicated. The long answer began more than a decade before, when, awkward and alone, they’d met freshman year in Cambridge. Back then, they’d clung to each other as if drowning while they navigated the twin challenges of life away from home and MIT’s relentless academic load. B.T. had been Lily’s first boyfriend, a relationship that’d lasted a total of three months. In a season of firsts, he had, on a futon in her dorm room, become her first lover. Lily suspected she was his first lover, too, though he improbably alluded to other affairs. When he forgot Valentine’s Day and then her birthday within a three-week span, and had then taken her to dinner to make up for both but forgot his wallet so she’d wound up paying, she had had enough. Mindful of his feelings, she’d suggested that they would make better friends than lovers. His relief at this suggestion was palpable, the only mutual breakup Lily had ever experienced.

    After breaking up, they spent even more time together. For Lily—who’d lost her father, her country, and eventually her mother, all before the age of 20—B.T. began to feel like the only family she had. When the academic load at MIT proved too much for her and it seemed she might flunk out, B.T. intervened. He became her tutor, and they spent hours on those subjects she could barely pass; the ones that came so easily to him. For her part, Lily had taken on the role of older sister and confidant, over the years helping B.T. clean up his messes with other people (a heated disagreement with a professor over a grade, the poorly chosen phrase when critiquing a colleague’s work, the concerns of future employers who’d heard of B.T.’s “tricky” reputation). Which was, ultimately, the why of his question to her. “Because I know you’ve made a mess, B.T.”

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  • 2054, Part II: Next Big Thing

    2054, Part II: Next Big Thing

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    A bloody Sunday followed. In Tucson, a Border Patrol officer fired a rubber bullet that struck a Truther protester in the eye, killing her. When the news broke, the Homeland Security secretary resigned. But a single resignation wasn’t enough. Truther activists, organized into self-styled Truther brigades, ransacked a half-dozen federal buildings from Los Angeles to Boston in one frenzied afternoon. By Monday evening a crop of resignations, from the secretary of defense to the director of Health and Human Services, had arrived on Hendrickson’s desk.

    As chief of staff, Hendrickson had quietly requested these resignations. He delivered them to the new president. By the end of that week, it seemed the Truthers had achieved their goal of mass resignations within the administration and their protests subsided, but a sense of crisis remained. “Sir,” Hendrickson told the newly appointed president, “we’ve stopped the bleeding, but the patient is still on the table with a weak set of vitals.”

    18:22 March 19, 2054 (GMT+1)

    Lagos Island, Lagos

    This investment could blow up in his face. James Mohammad had hired three separate security firms to breach Yamamoto’s personal servers, and all three had reached the same conclusion: His servers were clean, containing no indication that the proprietary research on remote gene editing that Mohammad had bought exclusive rights to at great expense had been transferred. A fragment of code from that research had surfaced on Common Sense only a few days before. The code was incomplete, meaningless out of context, but its origin was unmistakable.

    The search algorithms Mohammad had in place to recognize even a portion of the code, anywhere, had picked it up immediately. But B.T.’s servers were clean … If he wasn’t the leak, then who was? Ultimately, this breach represented a human failure as opposed to a technological one. Yes, B.T.’s talents were undeniable, but so, too, were his weaknesses. A gambler through and through, B.T.’s impulses often got in the way of his genius. Mohammad should’ve known not to trust him.

    James Mohammad was a gambler, too, but he went about it in a different way. If asked, he would describe himself as a private investor. His investment vehicles rotated—Dark Stone Enterprises, Clear Wood Equity, Broad Water Capital—their names, like so many similar firms, fitting a common pattern: the interplay of an element and an adjective, striving at permanence. Like B.T., Mohammad had had a transient youth, moving every few years with his father, Benjamin Mohammad, a Nigerian diplomat of great promise. Like many globe-trotting elites from former Commonwealth countries, Mohammad’s father dropped him off at Eton at age 13. Shortly thereafter, in 2036, his parents succumbed to the pandemic forever associated with that dismal year. The old Etonians, never known for embracing outsiders, had, after Mohammad’s personal tragedy, allowed him to finish out the term but couldn’t find the wherewithal to underwrite the rest of his education. Then, unexpectedly, an uncle intervened.

    Much later, after a series of failed investments had taken the grown-up James Mohammad to the brink of bankruptcy, his uncle again intervened, offering to underwrite his losses and future investments so long as he—on occasion—shared with the Nigerian government discreet, nonpublic information related to those investments. Mohammad didn’t quite know how to think about the benefits of his arrangement until, one evening over a drink, an American tech investor 10 years his junior confessed to working in intelligence and described a similar relationship with his own government. He had a specific term for it: He was working as a NOC, non-official cover.

    Whatever his title, Mohammad knew that researchers like B.T. were on the cusp of implementing remote gene editing, a profound scientific breakthrough. If molecules really were the new microchips, the promise of remote gene editing was that the body could be manipulated to upgrade itself. Few could comprehend the implications: Governments would no longer need to roll out logistically complex and onerous vaccination campaigns to combat ever-quickening pandemic cycles and viral variants; advanced genetic therapies could be administered remotely, with far greater ease, by triggering the gene-altering properties of mRNA through wireless communication, the equivalent of sending a molecular-level software upgrade; and this was to say nothing of potential enhancements in human physiology and intelligence. The seamless integration of technology and biology was hardly a new idea. Decades before, in the opening years of the century, visionaries like the technologist Ray Kurzweil had predicted the coming of the so-called Singularity. Now, with the prospect of remote gene editing, Mohammad believed that moment had finally arrived.

    It was clear to Mohammad that a new Great Game was afoot. Whatever global order currently existed could only be characterized as no order at all. China and the United States had forfeited their dominance with a near-world-ending conflict; Russia’s decline had continued post-Putin, and the eastern part of Siberia was in effect a Chinese colony; and his native Nigeria had developed with intent and impact internationally, often cooperating with Brazil. And, of course, Japan—long written off, given its declining demographics—had leveraged artificial intelligence, robotics, and quantum computing to compensate for a diminished workforce, often trading with India, which offered a vast market for its technologies.

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