Grow | The Futures Issue

By Ginkgo Bioworks 2022

The Futures Issue

Grow is a magazine that tells the unfolding story of synthetic biology. We publish digitally every month and once a year in print.

Grow is published by Ginkgo Bioworks and edited by Massive Science.

Ginkgo Bioworks is building a platform to enable customers to program cells as easily as we can program computers. We design custom microbes that help companies grow better products, everything from materials to food to therapeutics. Our labs are powered with software and automation in order to widen our view of the biodiversity and the possibilities that nature holds.

Massive Science is a media company that delivers bleeding-edge scientific research and expertise to the public across formats and platforms. We work with partners to help craft science stories with an impact.

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Disclaimer

This is an editorial publication, and the views and opinions expressed herein, including those expressed by Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings, Inc. (“Ginkgo”) employees, former employees and other authors are those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of Ginkgo.

Safe Harbor Statement

This publication includes forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. Statements other than statements of historical or current facts, including statements regarding Ginkgo’s plans and goals set forth in its letter to shareholders dated April 27, 2022, made in this publication are forward-looking. Words such as “anticipates”, “believes”, “expects”, “future”, “intends”, and similar expressions are used to identify forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements reflect Ginkgo’s current expectations and are inherently uncertain. Actual results could differ materially for a variety of reasons. You should carefully consider the risks and uncertainties described in the “Risk Factors” section of Ginkgo’s quarterly report on Form 10-Q filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”) on August 15, 2022 and other documents filed by Ginkgo from time to time with the SEC. These filings identify and address other important risks and uncertainties that could cause actual events and results to differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date they are made. With respect to the letter to Ginkgo shareholders, this date is April 27, 2022. Readers are cautioned not to put undue reliance on forward-looking statements, and Ginkgo assumes no obligation and does not intend to update or revise these forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. Ginkgo does not give any assurance that it will achieve its expectations.

MASTHEAD

Publisher

Ginkgo Bioworks

Executive Editor

Christina Agapakis

Creative Director Grace Chuang Senior Editor Leon Dische Becker

Associate Editor Alexa Garcia Managing Editor Amy Tran Editors Alana Levinson Max G. Levy

Contributing Editors

Maddie Bender Cosmo Bjorkenheim Cassie Freund Dan Samorodnitsky

Art Directors, Print jazsalyn Livia Foldes

Art Director, Digital Nina Garcia

Book Design by Livia Foldes Logo by Image Conscious Studios Cover by Harriet Parry Inside Covers by Dasha Plesen

Printed in Canada by Hemlock Printers

Contributors

Nadia Berenstein Brad Bolman Grace Chuang Claire L. Evans Keolu Fox Alexa Garcia Danya Glabau Davian Ho Cliff Kapono Max G. Levy Michelle Lhooq Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu

Illustrators

Najeebah Al-Ghadban Jee-ook Choi Sofia Crespo Debora Cheyenne Cruchon Nicolás Ortega Mark Pernice Magali Polverino Studio Alejandra Rajal Elaine Regina Tiare Ribeaux Alex Valentina Qianqian Ye Alice Yuan Zhang

Many Thanks

Quinn Berkman, Joseph Fridman, Allan Lasser, Nadja Oertelt, Annick Saralegui, Alexandra Ting

The spoils of the distant future are much more enticing than the struggles required to attain them.

Nadia Berenstein

FROM THE EDITORS

Dear Grow community,

When we started brainstorming this issue back in January, we weren’t sure whether it was going to be The Future or The Futures Issue. That may sound like a fine distinction, but, in this case, one letter can make a whole world of di fference.

The Future sounds authoritative. It excites and scares people. As it should: it is a powerful and often hegemonic notion—this inevitable outcome we’re hurtling towards. Co-constructed by private investment and public fear, it is a mythical place of speculation, prediction, and cliché.

The much more humble Futures, on the other hand, is reassuring, empowering, and closer to the multifactorial truth. It conveys that nothing is decided yet. That there are as many di fferent future visions as there are people in the world. That, if we have the agency, we can change how things turn out.

In keeping with our approach from last year’s issue, we went for the more equitable option. Instead of forecasting what technologies will shape our existence several decades from now, this issue interrogates why certain technologies get funded into existence over others. It delineates what forces determine whether those transformations are used for the benefit of the few or the good of the many. Instead of predicting future health and climate disasters, we dig deep into new ways we can organize to prevent those outcomes. Above all else, this issue allowed us to break with the clichés of Futurism: utopia and dystopia, the crossroads and the moonshot, the visionary and

the tech revolution. In the end, The Futures Issue presented itself as an opportunity to demystify how The Future is constructed.

This approach, we hope, has opened up new ways of dreaming forward—offering alternatives to nostalgia and all-consuming pessimism. Hope of this kind is a gateway to transformation. It is an act of resistance, the only real threat to the fossil fuel-based status quo.

It is also a useful way to think about our field. Synthetic biology is a relatively young, transformative power that has the potential to democratize the methods of production, but could also be a new way to streamline the status quo. It may do a bit of both; but how this outcome is weighted depends on us, and the questions we’re willing to ask. Who has the power to make scientific research and funding decisions? How could synthetic biology affect the organisms and organizations in our ecosystem? Will these decisions be made by a small group of privileged people, or will the people who’ve historically been excluded finally get an equal seat at the table?

As in every Grow issue, we chose to cover this expansive topic by assigning specific stories that in sum offer a comprehensive overview. Every one of our authors and illustrators explores an alternate future and the role of storytelling in its manifestation.

Opening the issue, Danya Glabau profiles the speculative technology of external wombs, considering how our societal understanding of family could change with this new capability for

kin-making (page 10). In an epic food review, Nadia Berenstein captures the struggles of labgrown seafood-makers to get their simulacrum to taste like the real thing (page 22). Michelle Lhooq investigates the strange new world of GMO marijuana and explores all that stands to be gained and lost by demystifying our favorite drug (page 34). Brad Bolman grounds our aspirations for chimeric humans in the reality of scientific limitations (page 48). Claire L. Evans converses with James Bridle about how artificial intelligence will fit into our understanding of sentience (page 59). Max G. Levy analyzes how we will have to rethink our approach to public health to stave off the next pandemic (page 68).

Keolu Fox and Cli ff Kapono imagine a wastefree Hawai’i, built on Indigenous futurism, industrial symbiosis, and a synbio-based circular economy (page 82). Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu transports us to a world of immortal celebrities enabled by anti-aging technology (page 94). Davian Ho surveys the overlapping interests between synthetic biology and the solarpunk movement, and breaks down how they could combine to actually help us reduce our carbon footprint (page 108). Zooming out, Alexa Garcia presents a collated vision of the future of synthetic biology, co-created by students, artists, and industry veterans (pages 44, 80, 118).

This has been a year of incredible growth for our magazine. Our third print edition, The Equity Issue, was the winner of numerous awards, including an American Society of Journalists and Authors

award for Kavin Senapathy’s reporting on “The Black Box Breakers”; three Art Directors Club cubes; three Society of Publication Designers medals, a National Magazine Award for Photography and Illustration, and first place in illustration and second place in editorial at the 2022 PRINT Awards. Grow was nominated for Science Breakthrough of the Year in the Innovation and Management category for the Falling Walls Foundation. We’ve expanded our magazine to more readers, bookstores, schools, and homes. Our Spanish articles have been used in synthetic biology curricula, and we’ve translated Grow to three new languages—Chinese, Russian and Kazakh—in collaboration with translators and synthetic biologists from around the world. And for the launch of our fourth issue, we are working with Pop-Up Magazine to turn five of our Grow stories into a live show with music, animation, and storytellers.

As we contemplate all these possible futures, we invite you to contribute your own. In the meantime, as always, thanks for reading.

The Editors

Christina Agapakis Grace Chuang

Leon Dische Becker Alexa Garcia

FROM THE CEO

While speaking at the famed Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the 1970s, Alan Kay popularized the phrase “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” He was right, of course—the team at PARC went on to invent many of the components of personal computers, directly inspiring the Apple Macintosh. But inventing the future can be an act of extreme conceit. It’s easier for those with agency, self-confidence, and a safety net, who can ignore consequences. That means it's not often done by those denied agency or who are vulnerable and clear-eyed about risks—those you’d most trust to get the future right.

What should scare you about inventing the future? The people who should be inventing it know the answer, of course—that it can go wrong.

In 1971, in his legendary debate with fellow philosopher Michel Foucault, Noam Chomsky described the perils of political action, his way of intervening in the future. In “trying to construct a vision of a just and free society,” he recognized that we are compelled to act, yet any action undertaken with only a partial understanding of the human realities in play could lead down a destructive path.

But, Chomsky argued, “at the same time it is of critical importance that we know what impossible goals we’re trying to achieve, if we hope to achieve some of the possible goals. And that means that we have to be bold enough to speculate and create social theories on the basis of partial knowledge,

while remaining very open to the strong possibility, and in fact overwhelming probability, that at least in some respects we’re very far off the mark."

We have to be bold enough to invent a just future. We have to live with the overwhelming probability that we’re going to get it wrong, but that it’s better to try to invent such a future anyway. And most importantly, we need the people who have been historically denied agency, that lack confidence, and that are most scared to get it wrong to be the ones who step up to lead.

Synthetic biology is beginning to work at scale. We are entering the DNA Age, and many of you reading this will derive your power to invent the future from this technology. I hope you enjoy this edition of Grow, where students, artists, scientists, and writers inspire and confront us with Futures of post-scarcity, Indigenous futurism, kinmaking, pandemic prevention, new foods, chimeras, and more. We’re proud of our leadership position in synthetic biology at Ginkgo, and in this issue you’ll also be able to see our annual letter to the shareholders (page 124) and an overview of our work in 2022 (page 127).

We’re building our platform at Ginkgo to enable you to access the power of synthetic biology. I can’t wait to see what Futures we’ll invent together.

Jason Kelly CEO of Ginkgo Bioworks

By Ginkgo Bioworks

68

Danya Glabau

Who Will Control the Exowomb?

Growing babies outside the body could bring utopia, dystopia, or both 22

REPORTAGE

Nadia Berenstein Fish out of Water

REPORTAGE

Max G. Levy Go Big or Stay Home e incrementalist approach to pandemic prevention leaves us vulnerable to another outbreak 82

PROPOSAL

Keolu Fox and Cliff Kapono Back to the Future

How to make lab-grown seafood delicious 34

REPORTAGE

Michelle Lhooq Custom Highs

GMO weed is the next step in demystifying your favorite drug 44

Q&A

Alexa Garcia SYNBIO 2050 Imagining the future of synthetic biology 46 80 118

The state of the science

The future of the field The pie-in-the-sky dream 48

HISTORY

Brad Bolman

Farm-to-Operating-Table e self-ful lling prophecy of xenotransplantation 59

INTERVIEW

Claire L. Evans There’s Nothing Unnatural about a Computer

James Bridle’s Ways of Being wants us to take a fresh look at nature’s intelligence

Intertwining Indigenous knowledge with synthetic biology to restore Hawai‘i’s ecology 94

SHORT STORY

Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu The Fullness of Time

Some things aren't supposed to work 108 ESSAY

Davian Ho Down to Earth

To achieve the future it advertises, synthetic biology must reimagine itself 120

INTERVIEW

Grace Chuang Meet HAKKO25 e world’s most self-su cient vending machine 4 6 124 127

From the Editors From the CEO To the Shareholders Year in Review

By Danya Glabau

Illustrations by Najeebah Al-Ghadban

In late July 1954 , New York obstetrician-gynecologist Emanuel Greenberg wrote to the U.S. Patent O ce with a sketch of a fetus. His ling contained schematics for a new device, annotated to denote its constituents: a few pumps, a heater, an arti cial kidney. e elements of Greenberg’s system all interfaced with a box. Within that box was his rendering of the fetus laying on its back, looking up toward the title for Greenberg’s grand idea:

Arti cial uterus.

As an ob-gyn, Greenberg was concerned with the health of babies born too far preterm. “Only a small percentage of babies live if their weight at birth is less than two pounds,” he wrote in his patent filing, which was granted the following year. By then, technological advances in oxygenating blood and f iltering waste suggested to Greenberg that those premature infants were not a lost cause.

While progress in the decades since has been slow, recent developments suggest that “artificial wombs” could one day support fetuses before viability. Technology capable of duplicating gestation without a human uterus has long captured our collective imagination. Though it’s still far off, it’s not out of reach. Human embryos have grown inside a lab dish for two weeks, and neonatal care has improved for preterm births between 21 and 24 weeks.

In 2017, researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia reported results on a system tested on preterm lambs. The group’s Biobag design also called an “extracorporeal system for physiologic fetal support” was able to keep lambs alive for up to four weeks of gestation. (The team makes clear in their paper that their goal is not to extend the limits of viability, which helps paint the device as “ethically unremarkable,” according to The Guardian .) A 2019 paper described doing something similar with sheep fetuses, which were delivered surgically at 95 days of gestation (the human equivalent of 24 weeks of gestation) and were kept alive outside of a uterus for 5 days.

The immediate goal of this research is to support fetal development for preterm human babies who transition to breathing air too early for their bodies to handle. It may offer hope to the families of the approximately one in ten babies born prematurely in the United States each year, and disproportionately help African American infants, since over 14% of these babies are born before they are ready.

It’s disorienting to process how close this technology is when you consider that it has long been a staple of dystopian science fiction. Picture, for example, the peachy amniotic cells in The Matrix , stacked into towers like a Japanese Metabolism-style apartment block. In this scenario, human biochemistry is harvested to run the motors of Earth’s future robot overlords while human minds are suspended in

a simulation of the late 20th century. Or recall the artificial gestation units of the Borg, called maturation chambers, that were dramatized in several episodes of Star Trek . Children are suspended in these pods until they reach a level of development appropriate to begin working effectively as

members of the Borg collective. Or perhaps, some fear, artificial gestation will allow for the enforcement of biological castes, as in Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel, Brave New World

In these dark futures, artificial wombs are organs of reproduction that enable the social control of human beings. Huxley’s vision of scientifically controlled gestation opens up fetuses to manipulation that backstops social hierarchies.

In The Matrix and Star Trek universes, artificial wombs pave the way for machines or machine-human hybrids to treat humans as a kind of raw material. They benefit from the warmth, chemistry, and structure of human bodies while co-opting them for their own ends. In both cases, the technology to gestate humans outside of human bodies is imagined to be a tool of oppression and control.

Who Will Control the Exowomb?

If managed carefully, however, artificial wombs could expand the potential for creative kin-making, decouple gender and sex from reproduction, and free up women and other gestators to make more meaningful choices about their bodies. Existing birth technologies, like gestational surrogacy and in vitro fertilization (IVF), suggest that science may be able to expand the potential for making kin beyond the confines of the nuclear, heterosexual family. Technology has already enabled gay and lesbian couples to have biologically related children via IVF, for children to be born with three biological parents, and for many people with wombs—from extended family members to paid strangers—to play the vital role of gestator in a child’s life. Such creative possibilities could support ongoing feminist efforts to denaturalize the nuclear family, make parenthood available to anyone beyond the limits of penetrative heterosexual sex, and expand the circle of people involved in loving and caring for children. Sophie Lewis calls this possible future for artificial wombs the “queer gestational commune.”

Yet it is the dystopian applications of artificial wombs that have caught the attention of tech boosters. Elon Musk and his Twitter followers worry that corporations may have

trouble motivating future colonists to work in his off world ventures. Artificial wombs could solve that problem, their thinking goes, by speeding up population growth to ensure there are enough desperate people to settle Mars on the cheap. In the meantime, more profoundly, some feminists worry that artificial wombs could undermine bodily autonomy around pregnancy and abortion. If an embryo or fetus no longer needs a human body to survive, then terminating pregnancies might become even more monstrous in the eyes of anti-choice advocates. In addition, external gestation extends anxieties that artificial reproductive technologies could be coupled with new gene editing strategies like CRISPR-Cas9; that it could be used to edit out undesirable genetic traits and separate society into genetic haves and genetic have-nots. If we are not careful, artificial wombs could bring about a Brave New World-style future of further-exacerbated bio-social hierarchies.

A very fine line separates the utopic and dystopic futures that may grow out of artificial wombs. Utopian applications of new technologies are impossible when they are born into an oppressive context. Protecting against coercive reproduction by bolstering abortion rights an increasingly

unrealistic reality in America and funding reproductive technologies for all are two steps that are necessary to make sure that artificial wombs support reproductive autonomy and social justice.

The history of reproductive innovation provides some useful reminders about how far we have come in making birthing safer, but also provides cautionary tales about how new technologies do not always make people more free and safe. In the hands of medical experts, birthing technologies have often compounded the oppression of gestators even though the goal was to improve outcomes for both them and their babies.

To prepare for a possible future of artificial wombs, and to make sure that future turns out better than the past we wish to leave behind, we must understand this history so that we do not make the same mistakes again.

For at least the last two centuries, mostly women gestators who simply want to have a safe and relatively comfortable birth have struggled against mostly male medical experts who see rigid, rule-based procedures an approach called “rationalization” by

medical historians as the surest path to a good birth. This transition has had tremendous social as well as health consequences, since, as historian Judith Walzer Leavitt puts it, childbirth “is a vital component in the social definition of womanhood.”

Before this change was widespread, midwives delivered most babies. As historians Richard and Dorothy Wertz describe in their sweeping history, Lying-In: A History of Childbirth in America, this was the case for most of the 19th century in the United States, whether women were urban or rural. The midwife was the woman who stayed with you through this terrifying and meaningful event. She had probably attended dozens if not hundreds of births, especially if she was an older woman, but she likely did not have structured medical training. Prayers and charms were as common as practical encouragement to the birthing person. A lot of the birthing process involved simply waiting for the body to move things along on its own.

But as the 19th century came to a close and the 20th century dawned, even country doctors more often had pharmaceutical pain relief to offer, which helped to improve their standing and grow their practices. At the same time, changes in medical training, regulations regarding who could practice medicine and attend births, and the Progressive-era fervor for building state-of-the-art medical infrastructure conspired to reduce the number of practicing midwives, increase the skills of obstetricians and family doctors, and improve the spaces available in hospitals for women.

With the shift to doctor-attended hospital birthing came a drive to rationalize the birth process, the Wertzes explain. Hospitals only had so many beds, and doctors relied on a high throughput of patients to run a profitable practice for themselves and the facility. The time pressures meant that the old midwifery approach of “wait and see” was replaced by a series of active, painful, and often dangerous interventions. Interventions followed one another in an ever expanding process. For women and doctors alike, it became preferable to block out the pain of interventions like forceps assistance and routine episiotomies with anesthetizing and memory-erasing pharmaceutical concoctions like twilight sleep. While still under after birth, countless women were also subjected to unrequested hysterectomies. Doctors, secure in their professional and cultural status as experts, used their professional judgment to sterilize women whom they personally judged to have birthed too many children or to be otherwise undesirable mothers.

What this all added up to was a significant shift in the

role that women played in birthing their children. Instead of a social time spent with neighborhood women over the course of several days, Richard and Dorothy Wertz argue, birth became a sort of assembly line process limited to 24 hours or less, with the doctor in the driver’s seat. Rationalization of childbirth took the birthing person out of the birthing process, sometimes leaving them with no memory of it at all. For some, certainly, this was preferable to remembering the pain. But at many facilities, the same techniques were used whether a woman wanted to remember or not, and whether she wanted to face the pain or feel sweet, numb relief. Rationalized birth in the middle of the 20th century was too often birth without choice.

More recent technological innovations in birthing have placed more emphasis on granting agency to birthing people and their families. In response to the loss of autonomy that women experienced in the first half of the 20th century, midwifery, lactation, and feminist activists restored some aspects of women’s ability to make choices about their procedure. The first stirrings of activism started early in the post-war period with the founding of organizations like La Leche League and the establishment of some of the first hospital-based midwifery practices. By the 1970s, there was a clear, national movement to return control over birthing bodies to the birthing people themselves in the United States. Consent was now routine, for example, before sterilizing women immediately after childbirth though

brutal and unjust exceptions continued to be made for Indigenous, Black, disabled, and incarcerated women, some of whom have been subject to forced sterilizations even into the 21st century.

The groundwork for women’s autonomy in pregnancy and childbirth was largely in place when assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) like in vitro fertilization became an option for families who could a fford it in the 1990s and 2000s. These technologies offer more than just agency; they also offer opportunities for creative kin-making. Anthropologist Charis Thompson argues that using ARTs to make babies also creates parents in a process she calls “ontological choreography.” When all the pieces work when preimplantation and prenatal testing shows “normal” results, when all genetic parents and gamete donors (and surrogates, if involved) sign off on the legal paperwork agreeing on who will count as “parents” when the baby is born, when doctors are attentive to parents’ needs and warning signs of medical issues, and so on parents are made as well as babies.

While legal structures governing birth and adoption already a fforded some ability for a child to lack a genetic connection to their legal parents, reproductive science has further expanded who can become a parent and how biologically related or unrelated children are to their parents. Same sex parents, single parents, and parents who can’t conceive through sexual intercourse can birth babies using gamete donation or have their babies gestated by surrogate. Depending on the technique, babies can have varying degrees of biological relatedness or non-relatedness to the legal parents, by choice and by preference. Babies can even have three biological parents, if genetic material from two parents and an egg cell from a

third are carefully combined. One parent can birth one, two, three, or even eight babies at the end of a single pregnancy.

Modern, technology-assisted birthing is thus a deeply creative process, even as it is highly rationalized to fit into medical and technological standards. As feminist scholars Donna Haraway and Adele Clarke point out in the introduction to Making Kin not Population, we live in an age where both technological and societal imperatives have decoupled making kin from making babies. Modern reproductive technologies allow people to do both at once with great flexibility and creativity about who counts as kin.

It is, as Kim TallBear contends in the essay “Making Love and Relations Beyond Settler Sex and Family,” merely the ideology of white, settler patriarchy that makes us think kin-making must follow rigid rules, rules which are themselves exclusionary and destructive. TallBear contends, “white bodies and white families in spaces of safety have been propagated in intimate co-constitution with the culling of black, red, and brown bodies and the wastelanding of their spaces. Who gets to have babies, and who does not? Whose babies get to live? Whose do not? Whose relatives, including other-than-humans, will thrive and whose will be laid to waste?”

our current culture willy-nilly, dystopian scenarios are all but assured. For example, if fetuses can survive outside a gestator’s body, how might that a ffect the moral status of abortion? This next step in the rationalization of birth might pose threats to the autonomy of the people birthed via artificial wombs as well. Some in the tech world already imagine a future in which artificial wombs will be used to quickly produce a surplus labor force to work on future megaprojects. But what of the rights of those children to choose their own fate?

While artificial wombs could lead to creative forms of kinship, societal attitudes and regulations governing bodily agency, reproductive choice, medical rationalization, and other forms of expert control will need to be proactively managed. If artificial wombs are introduced into

With the overturning of Roe v. Wade, it is not farfetched to expect that parents could be forced to watch their fetus develop via compulsory external gestation when they simply wished to terminate a pregnancy. The political winds are trending toward compulsory gestation even without novel technologies available to help the process along. And under the current privatized healthcare system in the U.S., if a fetus was gestated against parental wishes, who is on the hook financially? The parent or parents might still get billed for months of laboratory and NICU costs that could balloon into the millions. Parents would start parenthood burdened by crushing debt to care for children they did not want in the first place, and technology could enable this lack of self-determination. Or, perhaps, they could give them up for adoption and still be on the hook, most likely, for the costs of gestational care. They would lose both a living child they were not prepared to bring into the world and any chance of financial stability for years, if not decades, to come.

A second dystopian future for arti f icial wombs is the baby factory scenario, in which the rights of children birthed through artificial gestation are considered less important than those

Who Will Control the Exowomb?

This new technology may be able to expand the potential for making kin beyond the confines of the nuclear, heterosexual family.

birthed naturally. This is almost an inverse of the world sketched out in the 1997 movie Gattaca , where genetically engineered children are designed to have reduced incidence of a wide array of diseases. These individuals have both a biological and cultural edge, as parents of traditionally-conceived children seem to view these children as fragile, ticking time bombs for an early death, and less than their engineered siblings.

In the workplace, genetic defects serve as basis to weed people out of certain high-prestige jobs, like serving as an astronaut. When tech tycoons salivate over the idea of a labor force that can be expanded on demand to take on hard, dangerous work, like missions to Mars, they implicitly devalue artificially gestated people relative to traditionally birthed people. Arti f icially birthed humans are seen as raw materials for capitalist exploitation, a faceless mass expected to have no objection perhaps even no right to have an objection to being shipped off away from all they hold dear on Earth to a hard existence and likely early death from radiation-induced illnesses in space. They are Marx’s lumpenproletariat on steroids. A future in which people are bred to do work that someone else assigns them to do approaches a future of human enslavement, one that United States history suggests is entirely possible. Compulsory child-bearing and compulsory work: these are not the futures feminists want.

Removing the potential for coercive gestation, work, and debt would go far toward weighting the possible uses of this technology toward neutral or positive ends.

What, then, is the future this feminist wants for artificial wombs?

I want a future in which artificial gestation is one of a panoply of free gestational and birthing technologies that every adult coupled or not, rich or poor, queer or straight can choose from.

I want healthcare to be free for all, including “natural” gestators, gestators who choose to use or must use artificial gestation, and for all children, artificially gestated or not, with all disability statuses, whether congenital or acquired.

Abortion is healthcare, so I also want abortion to be easily accessible and free.

I want a future in which new parents have at least a year of generously paid time to bond with their child, regardless of their wages, job, or working conditions prior to or following this bonding leave.

I want gestational surrogacy to remain an option for those who prefer it, but I want gestational surrogates to be recognized as workers and granted appropriate legal protections for wages and health, and I want gestational surrogacy to be free to the parents who hire the surrogate.

I have a wishlist for the institution of the family and the social support families receive. I want a future in which the primacy of the nuclear, heterosexual family is abolished. Instead, people should be allowed to co-parent children in groups with all the legal rights and responsibilities without needing a marriage certificate or the process of adoption.

To truly increase the options provided by arti f icial wombs without introducing new harms, three things would be necessary: cheap or free healthcare and childcare, preemptory legislation and regulation placing the rights of artificially gestated people on par with biologically gestated people, and strong protections for abortion rights.

I want a future in which parents especially women, queer, and trans parents who are disproportionately targeted for abuse in our current reality can raise their children free from fear, violence, and abuse.

I want a future in which childcare and high-quality schooling are free and abundant, in which educational workers receive skilled training and education for free, and are paid generous wages directly by the state from fairly collected tax revenue.

Glabau

Removing the potential for coercive gestation, work, and debt would go far toward weighting the possible uses of this technology toward neutral or positive ends.

Who Will Control the Exowomb?

In short, I want a just society for children and families.

If this wishlist seems like a utopian roadmap for society, this is no accident. Artificial wombs are a sexy technology, to be sure. But technology never operates in a vacuum. And it certainly never fixes social problems on its own. Technology is always social: it is made by people living in a society, made useful in the context of social relations, and remakes aspects of society by virtue of its use in everyday life. Usually, if there is a problem with how technology a ffects the important things in people’s lives, it is actually a social problem about how the technology is distributed, paid for, or controlled.

Parenthood in the contemporary U.S. is quite untenable, absent any groundbreaking technological innovations concerning who can become a parent. To make the future of artificial wombs a just one, we need to start by getting our proverbial house in order. In one version of future society, the one in which we do nothing to change how childcare, healthcare, and workers’ rights are provided and protected, artificial wombs would lead to a dark reality of compulsory work and gestation. In a di fferent one, one in which social and financial support for health, childcare, and education are robust, artificial wombs might deliver on their promise concerning creative and intentional kin-making.

To make artificial wombs a reality, then, technologists would be best served by paying attention to the society around them. Who is su ffering? Who doesn’t have enough money to feed their family three healthy meals per day or pay a babysitter while they go to work? Who cannot have children due to medical issues, but wishes they could? Who doesn’t have children because they have too much debt?

It is by providing meaningful support to the people who do not have it all, and who are not at the forefront of technology, that we can make society ready for artificial wombs.

Danya Glabau is a medical anthropologist based in New York City. She teaches at NYU Tandon School of Engineering and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Her first book, Food Allergy Advocacy: Parenting and the Politics of Care , is now out from the University of Minnesota Press.

Najeebah Al-Ghadban is an art director and collage artist from Kuwait, based in San Francisco. Her collage work is often figurative and explores themes of the psyche.

Compulsory child-bearing and compulsory work: these are not the futures feminists want.

How to make lab-grown seafood delicious

By Nadia Berenstein Photography by Magali Polverino Studio

in late March, Larissa Zimbero arrived at Wildtype's San Francisco headquarters, ready to eat.

Zimbero , a journalist, is the author of Technically Food, an exposé of Silicon Valley’s e orts to “replace real food with technology-driven approximations.” She is also one of the world’s few connoisseurs of future food in its beta-testing stage, having sampled everything from mycelium-based steak and lab-made cocoa-free chocolate to cream cheese coaxed from microbes found in geysers at Yellowstone National Park.

She was onsite to dine on Coho salmon, harvested from Wildtype’s recently completed pilot plant, which has the capacity to produce 200,000 pounds of sushi-grade salmon a year. is was no ordinary sh. Wildtype’s salmon grown from immortalized cells is not available to the public, nor is any other cell-based seafood product. As of now, only Singapore’s government has approved the sale of a cell-based product: cultivated chicken developed by U.S.based Eat Just. Against this regulatory impasse, cellular agriculture has grown in the past decade from a sci- fable to a $2 billion industry, with more than 80 companies racing to bring cell-based meat to the dinner table. Among the 14 companies (and counting) speci cally focused on cell-cultured seafood, Wildtype, founded in 2016, is among the most advanced. “We haven’t had to interact with a live sh in about three years,” Aryé Elfenbein, Wildtype’s cofounder, told me.

After touring Wildtype’s plant, Zimberoff sat down for her meal. She described a block of flesh, “the approximate size of a bar of soap,” of that vivid orangey-rose hue that can only be described as salmon-colored, striated at regular intervals with bands of pearly albumin.

She watched closely as chef Monique Feybesse, fresh off a stint on Top Chef Season 19, transformed the block of salmon into three elegant presentations: on a slice of toasted brioche with creme fraiche and herbs; served ceviche-style with a dash of citrus; and minced and spicy, like the inside of a salmon roll.

The sta ff looked on as she dug in. This was a supercharged version of the classic critic-visits-the-restaurant scene we know from movies like Big Night or Chef, except that in this case the meal in question took years of research and millions of dollars to generate. Zimberoff chewed, considered, and made up her mind. The taste and texture: Unobjectionable. Even pleasant. Definitely salmonesque. But and this was a big “but” oddly artificial. “Almost too perfect,” she concluded. “It’s not quite there yet, you know?”

This verdict was painfully apropos. Cell-cultured seafood has been “not quite there yet” for years, its future remaining stubbornly on the horizon. The hurdles it faces on its way to market are numerous. Many of them are primarily of academic interest: growth media, scalability, regulation. Zimberoff ’s nosh, however, cuts right to the meat of the challenge. How do you build a fish from scratch, and manage to get its taste and texture just right? How do you convince consumers who are notoriously wary of synthetic “Frankenfoods” that lab-grown fish is just as good as the time-tested original or maybe even better?

1

Elusive Fishiness

The promise of cellular agriculture is the mass production of real animal products foods and goods that carry tremendous cultural, emotional, and economic value with a fraction of the environmental impact and no animal su ffering. The companies focused on making cell-cultured seafood a reality seek to avert an ongoing crisis of oceanic proportions. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warns that more than a third of the world’s marine fisheries are overfished and in danger of collapsing. Popular fish like Atlantic cod, Chilean sea bass, and bluefin tuna are particularly a ffected. Rising levels of heavy metals and other contaminants, including microplastics, make eating certain kinds of fish a risky prospect. Despite these snowballing concerns, global seafood consumption continues to increase, having more than doubled between 1990 and 2018, according to the FAO. The human hunger for fish is rising while the supply falters.

The hopeful pioneers of cell-cultured seafood promise a simulacrum of this important staple of the world diet, without all the contamination: a bounty of fish, shellfish, and crustaceans, fresher than we’ve ever experienced and entirely traceable. In short: we can eat our fill of fish and still have fish left in the ocean, too.

But all these ethical perks only get you so far with consumers. Specifically—explains Christian Dammann, COO of Berlin’s Bluu Biosciences, the largest cellular seafood startup in Europe—they only get you to the first bite. Consumers “buy it the first time because animals don’t have to die,” he says. “We want people to bite into it and say, ‘Hey! This tastes great! And: you can do something good for yourself and the planet.’” Consumers consistently cite taste and texture as the most important factors in determining whether they would make alternative seafood products plant-based or cell-cultured a part of their diet. Environmental bona fides and health claims are not enough. Most people will not sacrifice their tastes for their values. How do you make the simulacrum as palatable as the real thing?

You might expect salmon cells grown in a bioreactor to intrinsically taste a lot like salmon from the ocean. After all, aren’t they the same thing, biologically speaking? Salmon tastes like salmon rather than cod, tuna, crab, or any other kind of thing because of a particular set of chemical reactions and compounds formed within and among its cells. These processes are encoded in DNA, and should be present in free-swimming or cell-based seafood.

But this is only part of the story. Flavor isn’t simply an expression of DNA, a realization of innate genetics. It is also a reflection of the life lived by an organism before it became food, its own trajectory from planet to plate. A fish’s flavor is informed by the environment it lives in, its diets and movements, something that can’t readily be duplicated by a constellation of cells in a sterile bioreactor. Food engineers have been working hard to refine the tricks that can turn the right cells into the right flavor, replicating a subtle and not-always-popular taste and texture that comes out of dozens of constraints, biological and geographic. The dicey question they face isn’t just, ‘what does this particular fish taste like?’ but ‘what do people want it to taste like?’ These flavors are complicated cultural as well as biochemical constructions.

In a 1985 episode of her public television series, The Way to Cook, the formidable Julia Child guides viewers in the art of confirming the freshness of fish. In addition to looking for glistening skin, bright eyes, and pink gills, she offers an olfactory clue: “Just smell it,” Child instructs, holding a red snapper up to her nose and taking a deep sniff. “Not a trace of fishiness there! If it’s fishy at all, don’t buy it.” Trimethylamine, the compound that we most associate with nose-wrinkling “fishiness,” is largely a product of microbial decomposition. Following the tutelage of Child and other culinary authorities, many eaters in the U.S. prefer fish that is mild-tasting and

definitively not “fishy.” Freshness is not always desirable, of course. Deeply funky fermentations, like Southeast Asian fish sauce and the ancient Roman condiment garum, develop their craved-after umami tang from carefully controlled rot. This is another part of cultured seafood’s most essential challenge: notions of good fishiness are culturally highly specific.

Mihir Pershad, the cofounder and CEO of Umami Meats in Singapore, is exquisitely aware of the importance of attending to flavor expectations. His company is working to cultivate Japanese eel, a fish deemed endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) since 2014. Japanese eel caught in Northern Japan tastes quite di fferent than eel from the rivers of the Southern part of that country, Pershad tells me. The former is firmer and fattier, while the latter is milder. These di fferences correspond with divergent uses in cuisine and, indeed, with distinct culinary cultures. Successfully meeting the Japanese demand for eel might mean developing multiple cell-cultured eel products with distinct flavor profiles. Their goal is not just to feed people a singular cell-cultured eel, he reflects. It is “to give people what they’re getting today, so we don’t feel like we’re losing a major part of culture.”

If that weren’t challenging enough, the flavor of individual species is in constant flux. The changing environment is doing its part. There is building evidence that the warming of the ocean water has consequences for flavor. A 2022 study by Australian scientists surveyed existing research into the e ffects of climate change on the nutritional and sensory qualities of seafood. The Chinese razor clam improved in aroma according to a 2019 study modeling climate change. The pacific oyster, meanwhile, showed no appreciable di fference after being exposed to warmer, more acidic waters.

How do you build a fish from scratch, and manage to get its taste and texture just right?

Sam Dupont, who studies the effect of climate change on marine ecosystems at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, investigates the likely effects of warmer, more acidic oceans on the flavor of seafood. In one study, a panel of tasters were asked to evaluate Northern shrimp raised under two conditions: at the current ocean pH, and at a decreased pH meant to model the future state of the oceans. The tasters found the shrimp of the future, raised in more acidic waters, significantly less tasty than the shrimp of today. The study was repeated with mussels. “For local tasters, the mussels of today were preferred to the future ones, but for foreigners, it was the opposite.” This, he said, shows the role of acquired taste; “the local mussels have a strong taste that locals really like, but is too strong for foreigners. The main conclusion is that taste is changing under ocean acidification, but what is preferred depends on what you are used to.”

All these boundary conditions are so subtle and highly specific that some experts find it useful to think of them as terroir. In wine, terroir, or “taste of place,” describes all the ways the land and labor of a specific region shape our experience of the flavors in the glass. In recent decades, the terroir concept has oozed out from the wine world to encompass all kinds of things, from clams to cannabis. Terroir reflects a belief that place instills particular sensory qualities; this translates to increased market value. In other words, people tend to pay more for goods that communicate their origins. So where does that leave cell-cultured seafood, grown in sterile vats designed to be scalable, standardizable, and deployable everywhere? Is there a laboratory terroir?

2

Labfresh

Cell-cultured seafood remains a step or two behind labgrown meat, which over the past two years has been making rapid strides towards the market. “The learning curve for fish has been steeper, because there has been so little fundamental research on fish muscle tissue engineering,” observes David Kaplan, chair of Biomedical Engineering at Tufts. People just eat many more species of seafood than terrestrial animals, and every new cultured species requires a fresh investigation. “Rainbow trout will have di fferent requirements than crab, which will be totally di fferent than oyster,” says Reza Ovissipour, an assistant professor at Virginia Tech. To recreate something, you must know it intimately. Creating new cell lines often means getting on a boat and going fishing. “I have been seasick in the name of science,” David Kaplan laughs.

When new cell lines are established, the tastiness of a particular fish specimen is generally not part of the selection criteria. Instead, researchers focus on more practical concerns: capacity for immortalization, the rate of cellular division, and general robustness. In other words, they’re looking for cells that are good performers, not flavor bombs.

They are also looking for cells that are good team players, as cellular engineers must also build texture, which in seafood is at least as important as taste. When we take a bite of fish, we are consuming di fferent kinds of cells muscle, fat, connective tissues arrayed together in accordance with the vital requirements of the species. Consider the flakiness of grilled sea bass, the way the filet separates into discrete layers with the gentlest prod of a fork. The sea bass’s body grows like this so that it can live, but it won’t grow this way unassisted in a bioreactor. Producers of cell-cultured seafood like Wildtype must find ways to recreate or mimic the three-dimensional arrangements of cells.

Flavor is the final step in the cultivation process. As Kaplan explains, “one of the really important advantages of cellular agriculture is that you have direct access to the cells. And cells are amazingly flexible, if you handle them correctly.” He suspects that manipulating the growth media and the environment within the bioreactor may significantly

influence the flavor qualities of the final products. “This is an area of research that hasn’t been pushed very far,” he acknowledges, “but I think there’s a lot that you can do by what you feed the cells.”

In some ways, the taste of the simulacrum could turn out to be superior to the original. The seafood we eat now is often far removed from its place of origin, whether wild-captured or farmed, and is almost certainly frozen at some point. Even fish bought fresh at a fish market might have been captured weeks earlier, depending on the length of the vessel’s journey. Cell-cultured seafood, meanwhile, could be the freshest we’ve ever consumed, days or even moments from harvest. And because it is grown in a sterile environment, the trimethylene fishiness produced by microbial metabolism will also be curtailed: a decidedly less fishy fish. This unfamiliar freshness may contribute to the slight uncanniness in our initial encounters with these lab-grown seafoods. “People will often describe our product as mild,” notes Aryé Elfenbein, cofounder of Wildtype. The taste of truly fresh salmon is delicate and subtle; an eater accustomed to today’s commercial salmon may be missing that. “If you were to pull a salmon out of the river and take a bite right there, that flavor profile would be very mild.”

In other words, accepting and growing to love cell-cultured seafood may mean recalibrating our expectations, tuning in to subtler qualities, and savoring the unplaceable freshness of laboratory terroir.

3 Imitation Tuna

The world of sushi seems like a natural destination for this future product and a lucrative industry to disrupt. In 2019, a 600-pound bluefin tuna a species known as the gem of “the sushi economy,” which keeps slipping in and out of endangered status fetched over US$3 million at Tokyo's famous New Year’s auction.

Lou Cooperhouse, the CEO of BlueNalu, a cell-based seafood company that raised $60 million in 2021, has taken particular interest in the bluefin. The former head of Rutgers Food Innovation Center, a startup incubator and accelerator, Cooperhouse says he is “fascinated with technology, but only technology that delivers delicious products.” BlueNalu’s efforts to know and eventually reproduce this expensive fish occur in close consultation with sushi chefs and other food service operators. “We’ve brought them in to try to understand what’s most desired,” he says what qualities they value most. BlueNalu is designing for the market, on a cellular level.

“We found that there’s extraordinary variability between one bluefin and the next,” he says. “Bluefin tuna, it’s a big fish. The lean meat near the dorsal fin, called akami, is bright red in color, and has a metallic aftertaste. By contrast, toro, the tender belly of the fish, has a clean, fatty mouthfeel.”

In the sushi economy, toro fetches top value. But as sushi-grade fish is often sold whole, sushi bar operators have to find uses for the less popular cuts. Cell-cultured seafood removes the necessity of separating the meat from the bones, the filets suitable to be served whole and pan-seared from those best left for stew, disposing of the fins and scales, the guts and eyes. In other words, cell-culturing solves what is known as the “carcass-balancing problem,” the challenge of creating markets for the less-than-desirable parts.

We can eat our fill of fish and still have fish le in the ocean, too.

Berenstein

“This is a paradigm buster,” gushes Cooperhouse. “We can ask, where are you making your money? What do your customers enjoy? We can make just the parts [of the fish] that your customers come to you for.” BlueNalu could produce one continuous, never-ending ribbon of fatty belly, a bluefin that is all toro

I ask him about the possibility of making a toro that is somehow more delicious than exists in nature. He demurs. “Right now, we’re focusing on giving people what they expect,” he says. “It’s challenging enough to get our product approved” by the USDA, which is overseeing cell-based seafood, without making alterations that can compromise a regulatory greenlight. “But we certainly realize that there are interesting opportunities to do more, whether on the flavor side or the nutrition side.”

Keith David, a cofounder of Bluefin Foods, a San Diego startup also aiming to grow the prized tuna, is more eager to speculate about the future of designer cell-based fish. “One of the beautiful things about cultivated meat and seafood,” he says, “is that you have the ability to control the product at the cellular level or even the molecular level. You have so many di fferent levers and knobs to pull.” Producers could alter the ratio of fat to muscle, for instance. “There’s an inherent customizability that just comes out of the process.” Of course, none of the companies operating in this space are quite at this stage yet. “This is not a simple or an easy problem,” he concedes, “but it is a solvable problem.”

4 Will anyone eat it?

Palatability is about a lot more than flavor, of course. It is also about how we feel about a food and where it comes from, how it is made. It’s a basic principle of anthropology: food preferences and prohibitions define the distinctions among cultures and groups. Tell me what you won’t eat, and I’ll tell you who you are, to paraphrase Brillat-Savarin. Anyone who has ever cared for a small child knows how stubborn food preferences can be, how incontrovertible a refusal. This is also a lesson well-known within the food industry. Around 80 percent of new foods introduced in grocery stores fail. Supermarkets are haunted by the ghosts of Crystal Pepsi and Heinz’s green ketchup.

For modern eaters, the distinction between natural and unnatural in food is increasingly critical even as the lines between the two are ever more blurred. According to the International Food Information Council, nearly two-thirds of U.S. consumers prefer products made with familiar-sounding ingredients, and the fewer the better. Food companies have scrambled to oust “artificial” ingredients from their products, reformulating processed food staples like Kraft Mac & Cheese and Nerds to remove all traces of synthetic or “chemical-sounding” components. Meanwhile, the symbol of a butterfly on a blade of grass, signifying that a product contains no GMOs, proliferates in supermarket aisles among snack foods and staples a nod to consumer fears about new food technology.

This resistance to new kinds of food is not indelible, nor is it inevitable. When Vermont passed a law in 2016 requiring food labels to disclose the presence of bioengineered ingredients, the multinational food companies like Monsanto and Pepsi that opposed it assumed it would raise alarms among consumers and lead to declining sales. Instead, opposition to

GMOs in the state fell nearly 20 percent, even as attitudes in the rest of the country were shifting in the other direction. One lesson is that transparency and information can change attitudes.

Transparency doesn’t mean that eaters want to know every detail of how the proverbial sausage gets made. This is another consideration for an industry where calf blood remains the primary growth medium. Does the lab origin itself scare consumers away? How do you present this new product? This fascinating design and marketing challenge also extends to language. The industry only recently settled on the adjective “cell-cultured,” after trying out the more evocative “lab-grown” and the unpalatable “in-vitro meat“ beforehand.

For David of Bluefin Foods, at least, taste will be the decisive factor. “One of our greatest strengths is our ability to offer fresh, healthy, sustainable seafood anywhere on Earth or off of it,” he says. “We’ll be able to produce delicious seafood in the middle of the desert, two thousand miles from the ocean. We’ll be in Elon Musk’s Mars mega mall.” How to get there is a question for another day. This is the promise and the pitfall of food futurism. The spoils of the distant future are much more enticing than the struggles required to attain them.

Nadia Berenstein calls herself a flavor historian, but technically she’s a historian of science. Her writing has appeared in Epicurious , The Counter , Lucky Peach , and Forbes , among other places.

Magali Polverino is a food and still life photographer from Buenos Aires, Argentina. She explores emotions through food and textures and is interested in the intersection of artificial and natural light.

Magali Polverino Studio Credits

Photographer: Magali Polverino; Art Director: Pato Katz; Food Stylist: Loli Braga Menendez; Sushi Chef: Agustín Vázquez; Studio Manager: Candela Cortes; Assistants: Sheila Becker, Agus Salatino, and Juan Quiros; Thanks to ceramic artist Antonella Meloni

GMO weed is the next step to demystifying your favorite drug

By Michelle Lhooq Photography by Alejandra Rajal

Adecade after the rst states legalized recreational cannabis, American weed culture is in the last gasps of its decadent era giving up a life of fun for a phase of pharmaceutical stability. e $10.8 billion market has u ed that inscrutable stu you used to buy o a disheveled guy on a bicycle into a urry of lifestyle products engineered for your self-optimization. e next phase of its evolution will be less trendy, but possibly more trippy. ink: genetically modi ed weed, super-plants that ower all year round, “skinny” strains that curb your appetite. Scientists are trying to bio-hack this ancient plant, demystify its biochemical composition, and refashion it to deliver targeted, custom highs. e goal in the long run is a new class of strains that treat symptoms as reliably as pharmaceutical medicine.

is new wave of sci- weed is not far away, and Big Pharma is investing millions into the science that would shuttle it into the mainstream, possibly replacing the super-charged but scattershot strains we’ve gotten used to. But if this once-mysterious plant loses its ine ability to a DNA-enhanced model of analysis and reproduction, would it even still be the same thing? What do we stand to gain from splicing the mystery out of marijuana, and what would we lose along the way?

As we decode weed's cryptic chemistry, we are also learning a lot about its coevolutionary relationship with humanity.

1

The Perfect High for Coding

To taste the rainbow of tomorrow’s pot market, you go to Hall of Flowers, a California trade show where the gentrification of marijuana has reached its latest extreme. Imagine a music festival inside the world’s biggest dispensary and you’ve got it: the Coachella of cannabis. Individual tickets cost $750. DJs spin house music next to decked-out party buses. Stylish stoners in bucket hats lounge in shaded cabanas, sipping sparkling THC water and pu ng on prerolls of the latest “strain drops.” More than an industry event, where dispensaries discover new brands, this is a weed wonderland where the hype machine is on full blast.

On an afternoon in May, a shuttle bus full of weed influencers drops me off at the Palm Springs conference’s entrance gates, where I shu e through the security line, relieved not to have to hide my vape pen. I follow the fog of skunky smoke billowing from the consumption area an AstroTurf lawn covered in orange bean bags, where grizzled ganjapreneurs with arms full of tribal tattoos talk shop with perfectly coi ffed publicists. In the cacophonous event hall, weed brands display their goods: Pure Beauty’s menthol joints, Sundae School’s yuzu-flavored mochi gummies, Beed’s Nespresso-like machine that spits out perfect prerolls. One dominant trend is impossible to miss: instead of hawking popular weed strains like Blue Dream or Purple Kush, brands are selling experiences describing products with labels like “CREATIVE” and “COOL” to suggest the feelings they could elicit.

Recreational cannabis is being pitched as a panacea that can do it all: boost productivity or put your brain on mute, send you to sleep or keep you wired, dull your senses or kick them into hyperdrive. In today’s post-legalization marijuana market, there’s a product for every type of need including some you didn’t even know you had. Wanna get high and horny? Lavish yourself in Kiva’s THC-infused edible body chocolate! Can’t fall asleep and want to lucid-dream? Check out this CBD tincture to help you “drift off into the ethereal,” from Icelandic band Sigur Ros. The science behind these claims is scarce and hardly the point. As weed goes from sanctioned substance to lawful lifestyle product, the

versatility of its multifaceted high has made it infinitely marketable a wellness wonder-drug for both hedonists and the health-conscious alike.

This move towards what the industry calls “e ffectsbased marketing” has been years in the making. In the early days of legalization, writes cannabis PR guru Rosie Mattio in Rolling Stone, the industry often relied on consumers’ knowledge of perennial strain favorites like OG Kush and Sour Diesel. But strain-based marketing was confusing to newbies, Mattio argues, and as the market matured, brands began to sell feelings instead. Canndescent was one of the first weed brands to name its strains plainly after the effects they’re supposed to bring about. There’s Create (for “when it's time to paint, jam, or game”), Cruise (to “keep up the pace, relax your mind, and sail through the day”), and Connect (for “when it's time to laugh, go out with friends or get intimate”), among several others. This strategy proved so effective that many other brands followed: for example, Kiva’s popular gummies promise to make you feel “Chill,” “Lucid,” or “Social,” while OLO’s sublingual strips o ffer moods like “Focus,” “Social,” and “Active.”

The funny thing about this kind of prophetic branding is that it can be self-fulfilling. If the label on a weed strain tells you that you’re about to be creative, it’s a subtle push in that direction. For now, effect-based claims are often based more on anecdotal accounts than research. On the online platform WeedMaps, the top effects for specific weed strains like Northern Lights (“Relaxed,” “Sleepy”) are crowdsourced from hundreds of user reviews a stoned person’s idea of a clinical trial.

The cannabis industry’s reliance on this form of research is the byproduct of federal prohibition, which has rendered cannabis research almost comically cumbersome. Before 2020, just one growing facility in Mississippi was authorized to grow weed for FDA-approved studies, and scientists were required to store their stashes in DEA-approved vaults.

We are still in the early stages of demystifying this holy plant. Researchers have discovered that cannabis contains over 500 compounds, including 140 cannabinoids with some degree of psycho-pharmacological activity. That is to say: any old weed strain has ten times more active ingredients than a pharmaceutical like, say, Prozac. While THC and CBD are the most well-known, scientists are still unpacking how rarer cannabinoids like CBG, THCV, and CBN interact with the plant’s terpenes and flavanoids compounds that give weed its rich smells and flavors to produce a

compound high known as the “entourage effect.” Further complicating matters, a cannabis plant’s chemical makeup can also di ffer wildly depending on growing conditions; the same strain could produce di fferent levels of cannabinoids and terpenes depending on factors like climate, weather, and soil.

As we decode weed's cryptic chemistry, we are also learning a lot about its coevolutionary relationship with humanity. It wasn’t until the 1990s that Raphael Mechoulam, the “father of cannabis research,” discovered that the human body produces its own endogenous cannabinoids, known as endocannabinoids, which help to regulate critical functions like learning, sleep, pain, immunity, and stress. This could explain the bewildering variety of behavioral and psychological effects of cannabis on our bodies, and why this complex plant remains such a mystery. Thus, products that claim they can customize the properties of weed to induce specific feelings are more often creating an illusion of control over a highly individualized and unpredictable experience, distilling the ambiguity of cannabis into a consumer choice: it all depends on finding the right product for you

But what if we could hack the cannabis plant to deliver that customizability? Scientists have been harnessing DNA technology to sequence the cannabis genome and create genetically-engineered strains that are not just more productive and hardy, but could one day deliver the targeted experiences that consumers, investors and farmers are craving. Biohacking weed might sound surreal, but it’s already happening. In 2019, New Mexico-based biotech company Trait Bioscience debuted the world’s first genetically-modified cannabis plant. The transformed plant can produce cannabinoids like THC and CBD throughout its stems and leaves, not just its flowering buds, thus making it more productive and profitable. Another superpower the mutant plant possesses: its cannabinoids are water-soluble, making them ideal for creating weed drinks (traditional plant cannabinoids are fat-soluble, and usually require a process of emulsification to disperse them in water).

Companies like StrainGenie, Endocanna Health, and Dynamic DNA Laboratories go even further, sending at-home DNA tests to consumers, and purporting to use that data to recommend customized doses, products, and strains that are most compatible with their genetic pro f iles. Endocanna, which markets itself as “the future of personalized cannabinoid therapeutics,” charges $199 for their services. (Users can send in existing tests from services like 23andMe for a smaller fee.) The company recently partnered

with California cannabis brand Sunderstorm to launch a line of tinctures that will be tailored to match individual customers’ DNA results. These companies are leaning into the allure of “precision medicine,” a medical approach that optimizes therapeutic benefits for patients through customized genetic or molecular profiling.

Commercial interest in these futurist strategies is already heating up: In 2018, for example, Canadian cannabis conglomerate Canopy Growth paid more than $300 million to acquire Ebbu, a small Colorado-based biotech company that pioneered manipulating the cannabis genome with the gene-editing tool CRISPR–Cas9. The company specializes in creating single-cannabinoid strains, such as plants that only produce CBG. Ebbu’s CEO Jon Cooper said in a statement, “We believe this groundbreaking work will result in the most consistent and predictable products in the industry.”

Genetically-modified weed could increase the drug’s pharmaceutical potential and its ability to be patented, thus boosting its allure to Big Pharma nevermind the generations of Indigenous cultures who farmed cannabis, people who have gone to prison for selling or using it, and other stewards of this plant. That none of these communities will benefit from their contribution to this millenia-long project or if anyone can even own a strain of marijuana is largely irrelevant to the pharma patent system, where the winner takes all. As Trait’s Chief Strategy O cer Ronan Levy told Extraction Magazine: “The biggest knock on most products that exist right now is the lack of predictability of experience … As progress moves forward in this respect, we expect that Big Pharma will start to make active investments in the industry, which we think they would be smart to do.”

But as we edge towards weed’s biosynthetic future, are we arriving at something genuinely cool or could this be the next bubble of overpromise?

2

Knowable Plants

The attempts to demystify our favorite past-time raise epistemological questions about the knowability of plants to humans. The original stewards of cannabis developed it over generations sampling, crossbreeding, and repropagating the ones with traits they most enjoyed. Today’s industry wants to identify every active compound and deconstruct the work done over millennia by farmers, using genetic data to create unique plants that meet a variety of needs . This may also make it easier for companies to navigate the byzan-

The original stewards of cannabis developed it over generations sampling, crossbreeding, and repropagating the ones with traits they most enjoyed.

tine legal structure around cannabis in the U.S.

The same week as Hall of Flowers, I attended another cannabis conference on the opposite end of the cool spectrum: a research convention called CannMed that draws top weed scientists from around the country. Located in a sleek business center in Pasadena, the hallways are full of bespectacled PhDs sporting polo shirts and laminated name-tags, sitting around eating packed lunches and discussing the latest cutting-edge weed science. Presentations have names like “Genomic Tools for Cannabis Sativa and Psilocybe Cubenis Propagation,” and “Exploring the Fascinating Development of CannabinoidProducing Trichomes in Cannabis Flowers.” Even the advertisements plastering the building’s walls read like educational texts: “In the bloom phase, cannabis devours MORE nitrogen, potassium, and zinc (and a tad more phosphorus) and uses LESS calcium iron manganese and boron,” reads one by Advanced Nutrients, a fertilizer company that claims to help cannabis plants reach their genetic potential.

Medicinal Genomics, the cannabis genetic company that organized the conference, claims it was the first to sequence the cannabis genome in 2011. While genomic breeding has been used in the agricultural industry for decades, due to restrictive legislation under prohibition, the first crude map of the weed genome was only published in the 2010s a feat that allowed scientists to delve deeper into how exactly cannabis plants inherit their chemical profiles. By cross-breeding a hemp plant with the popular strain Purple Kush, researchers began to unravel one of the biggest mysteries in weed science: how hemp and marijuana evolved as separate strains with distinct chemical properties, even though they belong to the same species Cannabis sativa . Mapping the cannabis genome suggested that the ancient cannabis plant’s DNA were colonized by viruses millions of years ago, which drove the divergence of its gene sequences into THCA in marijuana and CBDA in hemp.

In the past five years, our understanding of the cannabis genome has become increasingly complex, thanks to new technologies and a

loosening of U.S. federal regulations that allow researchers to handle cannabis DNA. Recent studies using genetic sequencing have helped to unravel the plant’s evolutionary history, including the finding that early cannabis domestication came from East Asia and modern-day China not the Middle East, as popular cannabis mythology goes. Genomics is also helping scientists to artificially synthesize rare cannabinoids found in the weed plant, like CBC and THCV, by infusing cannabis genes into yeast cells, thus bypassing the plant completely.

Medicinal Genomics offers several services to growers, including the ability to sequence their plants’ genomics. This data allows breeders to verify that they are growing their selected strains, determine these strains’ rarity, and even build a case for IP protection. “To date, the vast majority of cannabis breeding has been really traditional,” Mike Catalano, Head of Genomics Services at Medicinal Genomics, tells me. “Having a genomic sequence of your plant allows you to show a DNA fingerprint of what you have, and cultivators are looking to create unique profiles that meet di fferent needs including increasing yield and resistance to pests and disease.”

I slip into a dimly-lit auditorium where a sociologist turned cannabis breeder named Seth Crawford is giving the keynote presentation. Using advanced DNA tools like the PAC Bio Sequel II sequencer, Crawford and his team at OregonCBD have been mapping the cannabis genome and working with research institutions like Oregon State University’s Global Hemp Innovation Center to share their findings. As I sit in the dark, scribbling notes on “phased diploid genome assemblies” and “stem-cell pangenomics,” it feels as if I’m surveying the biofuturist techscape of cannabis’ mutant future.

“Genome sequencing as a field has made some pretty radical advances in the last two to three years that have transformed the entire discipline,” Crawford later explains over the phone, as tractors from his hemp farm in Oregon roar in the background. “Cannabis is basically entering into legality at the same time as these technologies are becoming available. So what that's doing is

allowing us to rapidly accelerate the timeline on cannabis breeding, getting it up to speed with other modern crops.”

However, Crawford notes, “It's not like genomic sequencing is going to suddenly make the plant totally predictable in every instance. The underlying reality is that just because a plant has a gene doesn't necessarily mean it's going to predictably have the same chemical profile every single time. That one is always going to be up in the air.”

Excavating the plant’s most intimate genomic architecture could be particularly useful for the hemp industry. This is because, per the 2018 Farm Bill, legal hemp cannot contain more than 0.3% THC, and crops that test over the legal limit are routinely destroyed, resulting in crushing financial losses to growers. According to the Department of Agriculture, 42% of hemp crops in 2022 were found non-compliant with the testing requirement. Plant genetics could help alleviate this issue by allowing breeders to rapidly screen seedlings for THC levels, rather than waiting for plants to go through their entire life cycles.

“Our goal is to make plants predictable for farmers,” said Crawford. “We're taking plants that we've identified through selective inbreeding, sequencing those, and then trying to get a deeper understanding of what's going on in those plants that make them desirable in the first place.”

The world’s food crops have been ruthlessly screened and bred over generations for genetic properties like resistance to droughts, pests, and changing temperatures. As a result, today’s crops are more resilient and productive, but genetic diversity has also shrunk by 75% in the 20th century in favor of single, well-defined monocultures. I ask Catalano if cannabis could someday su ffer the same fate: “One of the greatest strengths of this plant is the unbelievable diversity that it expresses, but it’s a possibility that we could be breeding towards a monoculture, especially if folks are trying to optimize for the same set of conditions.” He pauses, then adds, “I don’t think we’re there yet though.”

After Crawford’s keynote speech, I slip my notebook back into my backpack and wander through the convention center, scoping the hodgepodge of cannabis culture unfolding in the building’s maze of hallways. A scrum of cameramen for the upcoming reality show “High Science” brought to you by the same TV crew as “Ice Road Truckers” and "Most Dangerous Catch” scurry after cannabis scientists as if they were tailing hotshot celebs. Next to the coffee stand, the stoner-bro host of podcast Cannabis Talk 101 interviews two weed nurses, propping his foot up on the table and rattling off questions with the macho bluster of a sportscaster. In the

exposition hall, jars of soil fertilizers for growing weed are displayed next to beauty products like a “bio-restorative crème” infused with cannabis oil and gold (apparently these scientists are still susceptible to the seductions of stoner decadence).

At the end of the furthest hallway, I run into Jeff Chen, a bright-eyed rock star in this burgeoning field. At age 29, Chen earned his chops as the founder of UCLA’s Cannabis Research Group one of the world’s first university programs dedicated to cannabis. There, he and his team of 40 researchers analyzed both the benefits and health risks of medical cannabis, delving into critically understudied topics like the drug’s impact on adolescent brains, Alzheimer’s, and opioid use disorders.

As we strike up a conversation, Chen shares that he grew frustrated with the lingering barriers to cannabis research during his academic tenure. Describing cannabis as “arguably the most di cult substance to study in America,” he lists the myriad of restrictions that scientists still contend with down to the type of weed they’re allowed to use in their work, which comes from that single government-approved facility in Mississippi, and does not chemically resemble the pot consumed today. The biggest issue, he says, is the lack of funding for clinical trials; federal grants are nearly impossible for Schedule I drugs, and pharmaceutical companies only fund research into proprietary cannabinoid formulations so they can bogart the market.

“The Pharma clinical trial model doesn't really apply to cannabis, because you only invest millions in trials if you can patent and monopolize something,” Chen explains. “So [cannabis] is a democratized product that people are seemingly getting significant benefits from, but the data is relatively lacking.” In 2021, Chen left UCLA to start Radicle Science, a health-tech company that recently examined over a dozen CBD brands to determine whether their health claims correlate to user experiences, shipping products to participants who reported their effects through online surveys.

Chen’s work at UCLA and Radicle Science has made him especially adept at separating fact from fiction in a cannabis market rife with pseudoscientific claims. When I tell him about the product trends I noticed at the conference in Palm Springs, he laughs. “Effects-based marketing is largely a myth,” he says. “The cannabis industry has done a good job figuring out how to cultivate and extract cannabis, but doesn't have much information on the effect of cannabinoids on the human body. That requires clinical trials, sophisticated knowledge, and equipment that Pharma and universities will not touch.”

According to Chen, the cannabis industry is still a long way off from using DNA testing to customize weed products. Genetic sequencing currently has a very limited use in the broader healthcare space, he continues, and is mostly applied for attacking certain types of cancer. “Outside of that, we’re not really using DNA in any widespread clinical setting,” he says. “So the odds that the cannabis industry has somehow figured this out is pretty low.” However, Chen posits that biosynthetic cannabis compounds created by inserting cannabis genes into yeast will be especially attractive to pharmaceutical companies, who will spend millions of dollars getting these costly products approved by the FDA and thus covered by insurance.

Chen also notes that genetically modified cannabis could be more environmentally sustainable in the long-run. “People are worried that GMO products might be harmful for human health, but keep in mind that if it uses less water, pesticide or fertilizer, the carbon footprint is dramatically reduced,” he says. “That’s a fair trade-off, and these are the questions we will have to grapple with as a society going forward.”

DNA hacking the cannabis plant may yield all manner of practical benefits. But, if the plan for predictable, customized highs works out, would weed even still be fun? For some of us, drugs are exciting and intimate experiences precisely because they’re not predictable, commodifiable sensations. Perhaps one day, our yearning for the mysteries of weed will just be another misplaced nostalgia elided by a new class of designer drugs. The cannabis plant broken down into its components and reverse engineered from the molecule up might not even be the same thing to the generations after us, but rather a Ship of Theseus sailing into the unknown (and perfectly stoned) future.

Michelle Lhooq is a music and drugs journalist, and author of the stoner cult classic, WEED: Everything You Want to Know But Are Always Too Stoned to Ask (Penguin Random House). She writes a Substack newsletter called Rave New World, and throws a party called Weed Rave.

Alejandra Rajal is a freelance photographer based in Mexico. She is a member of Women Photograph and Diversify Photo. In her work she tries to expand the understanding of our different realities and how they coexist through themes such as drug policy, the environment, and gender.

Imagining the future of synthetic biology

By Alexa Garcia

SYNBIO 20 50

it is determined by our choices. e question is always: who gets to decide? As we forge the future of synthetic biology, it is crucial that all who are involved in its co-creation can also have a say in its overall direction. And that this draws on a multiplicity of voices—with the greatest possible variety of lived experiences and social backgrounds. To that end, this year, Grow asked a select group of young synthetic biologists and industry veterans to share their unique perspectives on how the eld will develop in the future. We wanted to include the voices of those who are not always empowered to de ne the futures of synthetic biology, to hear from more than just the usual handful of renowned names in the eld. Answering three questions, these practitioners, educators, students, artists, ethicists, entrepreneurs, and activists tell all: their perception of the state of the science today; their projection for the future of the eld; and their pie-in-the-sky dream for a world grown with synthetic biology.

The future isn't just something that happens to us;

THE STATE OF THE SCIENCE

Defining equity for itself

The big question for synthetic biology today is who gets a say in deciding the kind of futures we want to build? And how will that shape our understanding of the field? How do we select what ideas will get cemented over others? Who will have physical and intellectual access to the things we create?

Aishani Aatresh, Undergraduate Student at Harvard University

Secret power

Synthetic biology is no longer an emergent technology. It has le the lab and can now be found in the technologies and products we use every day. Most people have yet to register that transition, but the future of synthetic biology is now.

Anab Jain, Founder of Superflux

Not a panacea

It's very easy to fall into the “technology will save us” trap, especially with the expansive power of biology as a resource. But on its own, synthetic biology will not solve our broken systems or untenable consumption habits. It must be viewed as just one in a range of possible solutions to the climate emergency.

Amy Congdon,

at Biofabricate

Chief Design Officer

What comes to mind when you think of the current state of synthetic biology?

The scaling challenge

I became interested in synthetic biology because it seemed like the most useful way we could use biology to repair the damage done to our planet and reimagine how we manufacture things. We are now figuring out whether our social technologies will scale with scientific advancements.

Leon Elcock III, Researcher at Interius Biotherapeutics

In creative flux

I used to think of synthetic biology as a terrain ruled solely by industry and capital. Thanks to Black feminist scholars like Sylvia Wynter, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, I now imagine the author, artist, teacher, and community organizer as biocultural actors actively shaping our visions of the future.

Ayana Zaire Cotton, Artist and Cultural Worker

Swayed by the market

A HOPEFUL VISION

We are still in the early stages of a long, possibly revolutionary transformation. The biological processes we are designing could eventually replace the materials that make our buildings; the dyes that make our clothes pop; the foods that delight our senses and fuel our cells.

Christina Agapakis, Creative Director at Ginkgo Bioworks

6

At risk of streamlining the status quo

I am worried that as the technologies of synthetic biology evolve, like so many technologies that came before, we are going to leave out large portions of the population who won't be able to access them. Synthetic biology can make our lives better and easier and help reverse climate change, but the technology must first be accessible and affordable.

Alex Pearlman, Bioethicist & Communications Director at Concentric by Ginkgo

8

Not as democratic as I’d hoped

Synthetic biology once seemed like it would be able to bridge the world of people domesticating microbes in their homes for food and agriculture to the high-tech world of industries that are shaping the future. I have this conception of what synthetic biology can do, but that doesn't really seem like the types of technologies that we're seeing emerge.

Daniel Chan, President of Biotech Without Borders

I'm quite worried that synthetic biology, a practice that could transcend the limits of capitalism and its extractive paradigms, is instead in danger of being distorted by capitalism into yet another system of exploitation. Many of the issues of biotechnology boil down to scale, and the scale that contemporary industry demands is ecologically problematic.

Andrea Ling, PhD Candidate at ETH Zurich

Disrupting industries

Synthetic biology has already disrupted the food and fashion industries. I hope pharmacology will be next, so that we can support localized healthcare with farm-totable medicine.

Tina Shing Li Lai, Leader of Open Plant NYC

An in mplete loop

We talk a lot about synthetic biology as a solve-all, amazing, magic power, which I think it can be. But we don't o en talk about the full circle of what that means, or what inputs we're starting with (like sucrose or carbon). We only talk about the outputs, like solving petroleum alternatives. We need to talk about the whole loop.

Torrey Sirdevan, Founder of Better Earth Bio

Alexa Garcia is a proud Trinbagonian, trained bioengineer, and dedicated abolitionist. They are currently the Associate Editor of Grow

Elaine Regina is a postdisciplinary designer, researcher, and maker, with interests in biodesign, sustainable systems, and speculative futures.

The self-fulfilling prophecy of xenotransplantation

By Brad Bolman Illustrations by Mark Pernice

TABLE F ARM-TO-OPERATIN G

On October 26, 1984, surgeon Leonard L. Bailey removed the heart of an anesthetized, seven-month-old female baboon and transplanted it into the body of infant Stephanie Fae Beauclair. “Baby Fae,” as she became known, was born premature with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a congenital and typically fatal birth defect in which the left side of the heart cannot adequately pump oxygenated blood to the rest of the body. With few treatments available, she was discharged to her family to die.

Fae was not initially Bailey’s patient, but her referral presented him with an opportunity. For over a year, Bailey’s team had been preparing to carry out a pediatric heart xenotransplant, practicing on goats and juvenile primates. e severity of her diagnosis o ered a chance to move from experiment to practice. And at rst, remarkably, it worked: e baboon’s heart pumped life-giving blood throughout her body, averting all-but-certain death. Bailey and his collaborators were with her, day and night, ready to intervene should a surprise turn threaten their success. en, 21 days later, on November 15, Beauclair died.

Bailey didn’t expect the procedure to get much attention, but the “Baby Fae” story provoked outrage and fascination, wall-to-wall media coverage, and fiery editorials across major scientific publications. “It was an election year, and you hardly knew Ronald Reagan was being re-elected,” he recalled many years later. After an initially hopeful month, buoyed by Fae’s brief survival, transplant scientists responded to public critique with a self-imposed “moratorium” on further human xenografts.

Baby Fae’s story frames most modern accounts of the history of xenotransplantation, a precautionary tragedy demonstrating the immense complexity of making organs from other animals function inside human bodies. Even as new immunosuppressant drugs and breakthroughs in genetic modification of donor animals dissolved the moratorium, her fate continued to paint the possibility of xenotransplanted hearts as a dangerous dream: something that existed, if at all, only in some distant future.

Until January 2022, that is, when David Bennett, a 57-year-old American man with life-threatening heart disease, received a transplanted pig heart. His news came not long after a widely publicized pig kidney transplant to a person with brain death in September 2021, and newspapers and television commentators voiced hopes that the “breakthroughs” were charting a path to the supply of organs for the many thousands languishing on donor waitlists. In a field long defined by protracted and fierce debates Is xenotransplantation possible? Is it ethical? Bennett’s surgery seemed to prove the boosters right.

Like any scientific discipline, xenotransplantation is sustained both by practice and by a constellation of stories. Those trained and inducted into the profession are taught about heroes, such as Bailey, and revolutionary procedures, like Fae’s. The past is a place of trials and lessons learned, the future one of possibilities and potential triumphs. As a field, xenotransplantation has always been future-oriented, hopeful. Even when March 2022 brought sad news of Bennett’s death, the prevailing sentiment was clear: “We hope this story can be the beginning of hope and not the end,”

Bennett’s son said in a statement published by the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

As with, say, space travel or atomic physics, xeno practitioners foretell what they hope to actualize, a process that anthropologist Lesley Sharp calls “scientific prophecy.” Experts tell stories about the future inevitable breakthroughs, infinite organs, an end to waitlists to justify the work they hope to carry out. Science fictions, in this sense, are central to the production of science facts. Yet a persuasive vision of where we're going also requires an account of where we used to be. Xeno-researchers have offered this, assembling reimagined myths and symbols from ancient history into a quirky tapestry that formalized the timeless desire for human-animal crosses. Between these two xenophilic visions, of past and future, the strangeness of combining human bodies with other animals’ organs is naturalized and normalized. We have always been, and sought to be, hybrid s.

If successful and widespread, xenotransplantation would transform our world. Countless lives might one day be saved, exchanged for the sacrifice of countless animal donors. But what do we owe other animals? And what do we owe each other? Exploring the stories scientists tell, and how they tell them, is vital for our capacity to engage these questions and understand the futures we may be rushing toward. Does the big story told about xenotransplantation portend its true outcome or is it a web of partial hopes meant to hold its place in the future of medicine?

1

Old Stories

There’s a joke organ transplant scientists like to tell. It goes, “Xenotransplantation is the future of transplantation and always will be.” Credited at times to pioneering xeno-surgeon Thomas Starzl (a xeno-optimist) and at others to heart transplant expert Norman Shumway (a xeno-pessimist), the joke is ambiguous. Allotransplantation, the transfer of organs between individuals of the same species in this case human beings found success in the mid-20th century, and many saw attention

to xenotransplantation as a distraction from improvements to technique and the delivery of much-needed care. Xenotransplantation will always be the future, the joke suggests, because it won’t actually work. But a flipside to the joke reveals why someone like Starzl might get credit: perhaps xenotransplantation is the only future for transplantation. That flip-flop, between impossibility and inevitability, reveals the ambivalent status of the discipline, and the need for supporters to tell convincing stories about its necessity. Despite serving as a major milestone in the storytelling of xenotransplantation, Baby Fae was hardly the first noteworthy attempt. At the start of the 20th century, surgeons in France, Germany, and the United States attempted a variety of highly experimental kidney xenografts from rabbits, pigs, goats, lambs, and one nonhuman primate (most were unsuccessful). In the 1960s, before long-term dialysis was possible, Tulane University transplant surgeon Keith Reemtsma attempted a series of chimpanzee-to-human kidney transplants on six patients with terminal renal failure. They survived for periods that ranged from one week to nine months. But for some, xenotransplantation’s history was much older and harder to pinpoint. Reemtsma, for instance, found xenotransplantation’s origins in myth. In the Metamorphoses of Ovid, Daedalus, the skillful craftsman whose labyrinth ensnared the Minotaur, built wings of feathers, wax, and thread to escape Crete with his son, Icarus. By strapping or “grafting” wings to his body,

Daedalus became, in Reemtsma’s words, “perhaps the first to transplant across the species barrier successfully.” Yet it was a success with tragic consequences. As Icarus flew higher and higher, rejoicing in the awesome power of his wings, wind caressing his cheeks, the wax melted and he fell into the sea an “acute graft rejection, attributed to a thermolabile adhesive,” Reemtsma wrote.

The universe of transplantation is infused with such mythicism. In 1974, the year the American Society of Transplant Surgeons (ASTS) held its first national meeting, the group hired well-known medical artist Clarisse FranconeAshworth to design a logo. In consultation with members, she drew a chimera, a lion-goat-snake hybrid. ASTS’s newsletter The Chimera, debuting in 1989, took its name from the logo. In the first issue, transplant surgeon Barry Kahan explained that the chimera was a hybrid, a symbol of the “conquest of the supernatural.” At the same time, the word chimera also denoted “a figment of the imagination or a fantastic idea.” What is more fantastic, wondered Kahan, than clinical transplantation? The chimera embodied “the substance (multiple diverse body parts)” as well as “the spirit of our specialty.” Chimerical concerns were also key to the naming of the field itself. “Xenotransplantation” is mid20th century coinage: early transplantese was populated by a variety of other terms, such as “hetero-”, “homo-”, and “isografts”; “hetero-“ and “homo-transplantations.” Only in the 1960s did “xeno-grafts” and “-transplantations” take over. The reasons were variously scientific, political, and

Xenotransplantation is the future of transplantation—and always will be.

Bolman

etymological, but “xeno” was chosen principally to avoid connecting a Latin prefix to a Greek su x. Even the debates on naming were debates about chimeras.

Human transplantations did rely already on other animals, at least for preclinical testing, but the metaphor of a chimera felt preparatory—as if xenotransplantation was already the f ield’s destiny.

The Chimera newsletter debuted one year after a prominent meeting, Xenograft 25, which also chose the chimera as its symbol. The “moratorium” following Baby Fae had not yet lifted, but researchers had begun assembling at major transplantation meetings in the mid-1980s around a shared interest in returning attention to xenotransplantation. The loose band of researchers decided to call themselves, on Reemtsma’s advice, “ClubXeno” a reference simultaneously to the “underworld” and their (in some views) illicit goals. ClubXeno’s f irst organized symposium in Barcelona in 1989 had 200 attendees, signaling to many the reemergence of xenotransplantation as an openly stated scientific objective.

By this time, the chimera was the “animal most commonly selected to symbolize xenografting,” surgeon David K. C. Cooper noted in a 1991 book on xenotransplantation. Yet sometimes described as a “savage creature” or “symbol of complex evil,” Cooper considered the chimera less than “ideal” to “represent a field of surgery and science that is intended to be wholly beneficial to the human race!” Instead, he proposed the lamassu, a protective human-bird-bull deity that stood guard, in statue form, before Assyrian palaces. This careful selection of a new symbol revealed that concerns about image and storytelling were essential in xenotransplantation’s struggle for legitimacy. The lamassu was, Cooper wrote, “a highly successful example of xenotransplantation,” with a human head set on an animal’s body. “Surely, we, the potential xenotransplanters, would prefer our aims and efforts to be associated with an animal of ‘kindly’ disposition and ‘divine character.’” In 1998, when the International Xenotransplantation Association (IXA) was founded, members opted to keep the lamassu as their logo.

By using chimerical symbols (at times playfully), researchers can downplay the exotic, dangerous, or monstrous undertones to their work. Xenotransplantation, seen thus, is an integral part of the human story, not something to be afraid of. But the Icarus account is in some ways the most revealing, and most honest, because it grapples explicitly with xenotransplantation’s relationship with sacrifice; Cooper quips that Daedalus’ “50% success rate” remains “enviable.” Baby Fae’s transplant was meant to save her, but her loss could also be justified if it meant moving closer to saving others in the future. Daedalus, after all, must risk Icarus to reach the distant shore.

2 Science Fictions

Xeno’s future is often imagined and depicted very di fferently from accounts of the field’s yesteryears. The past is a simian time of experiments and failures; the future, instead, is porcine.

Xeno-optimists today claim that genetically engineered pigs could make the donor-organ shortage a thing of the past. Despite the chimera’s and lamassu’s suggestions of numerous species stitched together, for the last 15 years, coverage of xenotransplantation and its promise has focused on pigs, rather than nonhuman primates or anything else, as the plausible bottomless source of human organs.

The first serious attempt to transplant a pig organ into a human being was undertaken by French surgeon René Kuss in the mid-1960s. The transplanted kidney quickly experienced hyperacute rejection, deterring the team from further work on pigs or initially reporting their findings. It took a couple decades for pig organs to regain some traction in xenotransplant research. Alongside the public reemergence of an organized xenotransplantation research community, cracks began to appear in the field’s stated preference for “concordant” donors (i.e. primates) over “discordant” donors, such as pigs. At 1988’s Xenograft 25, a symposium marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of Reemtsma’s “first successful xenotransplant in man,” scientists still largely focused on

nonhuman primates, but multiple attendees noted the attraction of shifting to hogs. “From many standpoints,” Harvard Medical School’s Robert L. Kirkman explained, “the pig seems an ideal donor for xenotransplantation into man.” The two species shared “remarkably similar internal anatomy” and “pigs are widely available, breed readily, are extensively used for domestic purposes and are unlikely to generate extensive opposition to this additional use for the benefit of man.”

Even if transplantation between concordant species might be easier, discordant sources offered clear benefits in terms of supply, an increasingly prominent framing for the field. If so many people are waiting for organs, boosters argued, the only question is how to produce more of them. Nonhuman primate donors were especially problematic in this way. They were often endangered species and therefore subject to practical and philosophical restrictions. This was particularly true if the operations required gene editing, which appeared more and more essential from the 1990s onward as scientists earned a greater understanding of immune rejection. Many mid-century experimenters saw graft rejection as unidirectional: the receiving body refuses the alien organ. But Thomas Starzl and colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center argued in a 1997 paper titled “The Future of Transplantation” that rejection was a two-way process. The organ rejects its new body too. It was an “epiphany,” in Starzl’s framing, that rejected medicine’s presumed subject-object dichotomy. If the two-way paradigm was right, then xenotransplant doctors would need to do more than suppress the immune system of the recipient. They needed to breed chimeric animals with cells and genetic material from human beings that bore organs which appeared, immunologically, “human.”

Gene-editing nonhuman primates would have rung alarm bells among conservationists, philosophers, and bioethicists. Xenotransplantation scientists knew this, receiving a preview of that uproar at Xenograft 25 from no lesser authority than the primatologist Jane Goodall.

Confessing that her own mother’s life had been saved by a surgical pig valve, Goodall made

Science fictions are central to the production of science facts.

her position and that of animal lovers more broadly crystal clear: “I do not believe that it is ethically acceptable to use chimpanzees for any procedure that will result in their death such as heart transplant research.”

Hogs, on the other hand, had been reengineered from head to tail over centuries of agricultural use, and there were no beloved porcinologists ready to stand up in opposition.

Ethical considerations were, in some ways, subsidiary to the basic logistics of breeding. Primates produce off spring slowly and sparingly. Wild female chimpanzees tend to reproduce once every five years, baboons every other year cycles that could plausibly be accelerated, but not without invasive interventions. This challenge limited the expanded use of nonhuman primates in experimental research throughout the 20th century. Pigs, on the other hand, can generate large litters at a rapid clip. At least 1 billion pigs are produced by the global agricultural industry annually, and they are killed at an unfathomable rate. (Imagine the entire population of India disappearing every year.) As anthropologist Alex Blanchette has recently shown in his book Porkopolis, the saturation of our everyday lives by pig products in foods, gelatins, fuels, and much more makes it di cult to even imagine a world without their decimation. As more and more voices began to support pigs as organ donors, the baboons that nearly saved Fae began to disappear from view, yet not entirely from practice: Starzl and others still had to demonstrate that chimeric pig-baboon organs could be successfully transplanted into the bodies of baboons before they could imagine putting pig-human organs into us.

stories by Margaret Atwood and Yann Martel, along with episodes of Star Trek and much else. In Atwood’s dystopia Oryx and Crake, scientifically engineered “pigoons” hold multiple organs ready to be transplanted at a moment’s notice; in Martel’s, heart xenotransplants convert their recipients into beasts. Fiction and fact become muddled. After the recent pig transplant attempts, author Scott Sigler described it as “your sci-fi plot [becoming] reality.” Author Malorie Blackman saw “her sci-fi novel about a pig heart transplant come true.”

Some researchers have even dabbled in their own science fiction. Cooper and scientist Robert Lanza’s book Xeno: The Promise of Transplanting Organs Into Humans (2000) begins with a foreword from physician and novelist Robin Cook, a friend of Cooper’s, whose novel Chromosome 6 (1997) focused on a near-future where genetically modified chimpanzees emerge as possible organ donors for humans. Cook acknowledges that Chromosome 6 exists as “a mixture of scientific fact and fiction that is only a step ahead of the real-life medical advances that are taking place today”; Xeno itself serves as proof that “the future has almost arrived.”

3

One Unit of Future Measurement

The future of xeno is pigs, but it is also a future filled with strange characters: high-tech biofarms and seas of “humanized” pig organs flowing freely into needy human bodies. It is unsurprising that xenotransplantation has been an essential set piece to signify distance from the present in sci-fi

The book’s first chapter, “The End of the Night Shift,” begins in a future where the authors describe a routine, late-night porcine xenotransplantation at an unnamed hospital. The case is far from exceptional, the story explains, with “Similar operative procedures” taking place “at several other donor centers strategically placed throughout North America, in Europe, Japan, and Australia.” Up to 200 organs are transplanted each day, amounting to 50,000 yearly. Cooper and Lanza ask readers to “imagine this scenario,” one sustained and made possible by “veterinary institutions situated in farms where [specially bred] pigs are … reared by the thousands.” Then we return, with our authors, to the present.

What is striking about this sci-fi fragment is how similar it is to our reality: cities, countries, and regions are the same; organ transplant numbers parallel present projections. Cooper and Lanza’s future is not particularly far away. This, however, is representative of the particular

futurity of xeno discourses. For practitioners, the future is not-yet-here and not-very-far-off, squarely within the timeframe of the “soon.”

Xenotransplantation can’t be here yet, with all of the present obstacles. But at the same time, it can’t be very far away either, because grants need funding, experiments need doing, and urgency must be maintained. Thus, predictions for the field’s major breakthroughs typically fall in an intermediate frame: in 2002, attendees of the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science predicted pig transplants by the end of the decade. In informal conversations, scientists will often get more specific: the first successful porcine heart transplant by 2022, the first lung transplant by 2030. Of course, these numbers can always be pushed back a few years, as necessary.

One of the crucial reasons for the immediacy of these predictions is that xeno is really only one of the possible futures of the field of transplantation. For instance, what if the future of transplantation is just 3D-printed organs? Some advocates predict 3D-printed cellular sca ffolds for regrowing tissue and a printed rodent heart within 5 years. Or what if the future of transplantation is simply improvements to organ preservation technologies, enabling more to be recovered from cadavers? The United Kingdom’s “Organ Donation and Transplantation 2030” blueprint focuses on the need for legislation to increase voluntary

donations and improve utilization of existing organs, while a team of international transfusion researchers predict that “organ conditioning or repair” will become a “hot topic” over the next 10 years. Others anticipate the emergence of new composite allografts, the possible discontinuation of immunosuppressive medications, the use of stem cells for organ regeneration, or even biomechanical devices that replace the functioning of entire organs. “The future of transplantation is one full of exciting possibilities,” explained a 2009 statement from the American Society of Transplantation but with so many possibilities, it can be hard to know which one is actually coming.

Many in the transplantation field have long been convinced that alternatives to xenotransplantation are more likely to work than porcine organ farms. Resources and time, they say, should be dedicated to accelerating their arrival instead. But xenotransplantation advocates usually respond that those alternatives are simply producing their own science fictions, selling an immediacy that is out of pace with actual technological progress. Artificial organs would be great, xeno researchers often admit, but they’re just a bit too far away. In the particular story about the future that keeps xeno running, the now-time of allotransplantation and scarcity and the then-time of printed organs must be bridged by the necessary sacri f ices required by xenotransplantation. Whether they are right, only time may tell.

For practitioners, the future is not-yethere and not-very-far-off, squarely within the timeframe of the “soon.”

Hybrid Futures

Narratives about past and future are key not only to how we talk about science, but also to how science happens. We know from studying the cycles of hype and hope that shape the contemporary biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries that the ability to effectively articulate and define the future might win funding and social approval or risk failures and rejection. In a parallel way, for many decades, xenotransplantation researchers have explained the necessity of their work by offering stories and arguments about where we come from and where we might yet go. Long, long ago we dreamed of combining ourselves with other animals, and future generations may someday be saved from tremendous pain and death by becoming hybrid in the same way. But will it really work, or remain just another science fiction? For now, even terminological debates are unresolved: researchers introduced the term “chimbrid” in the 2000s to resolve ambiguities in the use of the terms “chimera” and “hybrid” across the biological sciences. Stranger creatures still might be just beyond the horizon.

If xenotransplantation really is the future of transplantation, Cooper and coauthors argue that it would make allotransplantation, eventually, “of historic interest only.” In the long view of our species’ long love a ff air with alien organs, allotransplantation will be but a blip. After Bennett’s successful surgery, researchers from the University of Minnesota’s Department of Surgery argued in The Annals of Thoracic Surgery that the pig heart transplant “further solidifies a foundation of evidence to someday make xenotransplantation commonplace as the key to the organ shortage problem.” Bennett’s procedure represented the culmination of “countless stories of hybrid human and beast throughout history.” Someday, very soon.

As much as we all might wish it otherwise, the story of xenotransplantation is still one of longing and tragedy, losses that often quickly disappear from popular memory in the surge of optimism about what is yet to come. David Bennett passed away, even as some speak of the “success” of his procedure. If myths and fables predicted xenotransplantation, perhaps Bruegel’s depiction of the fall of Icarus did so most aptly: the plow is pushed forward, and far in the background, a life is extinguished in the ferocious swell of the idyllic sea not far away, but hardly noticed as the present moves ever onward.

Brad Bolman is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge at the University of Chicago. His first book, a history of the beagle dog in science, will be published by The University of Chicago Press.

Mark Pernice is an illustrator, art director, and designer based in Brooklyn, NY. He is also a cofounding partner of the multi-disciplinary design studio Out of Office.

James Bridle’s Ways of Being wants us to take a fresh look at nature’s intelligence

By Claire L. Evans Art by Sofia Crespo

There’s Nothing about a Computer

Interlocking Growths This work, created by Sofia Crespo, was generated with artificial intelligence. A dataset was made from digital collages. From that dataset, a convolutional neural network extracted patterns and rearranged them into a new image.

James Bridle is sitting

in an old stone courtyard, radiantly tan, a silvery-green olive tree over their shoulder. In the distance, dry hills curve towards a sky blue with songbirds and distant bells. It’s precisely the scene I imagined I’d see, reaching the writer at home in Aegina. Bridle moved to this Greek island in early 2020, a big change in a year of even bigger changes, and it’s here, in this dappled courtyard, that they wrote Ways of Being, published by Farrar, Strauss & Giroux in June.

“I’m just very, very lucky to have been able to work and to think here,” they tell me. Ways of Being is a meditation on arti cial intelligence’s place in a morethan-human world, and Greece alive, ancient, and all watched over by loving satellites is omnipresent. In the book, Bridle drives a home-brewed autonomous vehicle up the slope of Mount Parnassus; they trace how AI is used to identify oil drilling sites in remote Epirus; they harvest metal-accumulating plants in the Pindus mountains. In one of the book’s loveliest passages, swallows swooping over Aegina’s abandoned beaches signal the coming of spring, even in the midst of a pandemic. Everything is connected. Speaking of computers and mythology alike, Bridle summons oracles.

In my own garden in Los Angeles the nch nesting in my mallow pips insistently whenever anyone comes near. e wild owers are already going to seed. A big planet separates us, but for the moment, Bridle and I share a screen, and for that we are indebted to the vast computational reality that contains, counts, and corrupts the larger world of swallows and nches. It is this reality, Bridle writes, that needs re-wilding if we are to survive the coming decades.

In their vision of a more-than-human future, slime molds take the place of silicon; and the “wood wide webs” interconnecting old-growth forests are a model for more resilient computer networks. From the embodied minds of octopi to the complex dances of bees, we are surrounded by radically di erent forms of intelligence. As we work towards developing AI, Bridle argues, we would do well to look to our more-than-human counterparts for inspiration, guidance, and solidarity. e mind of a computer is just one of many a way of being on Earth, among others.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

In the introduction to Ways of Being you ask, “what would it mean to build artificial intelligences that were more like octopuses, more like fungi, or more like forests?” You show a lot of di fferent paths towards such an AI, but you stay away from any explicit speculations. Still, I know you write fiction, and you have an art practice that’s a bit more comfortable imagining. So, I will ask you: What does an AI modeled after an octopus, a fungus, or a forest look like?

Not entirely sure yet. But it definitely has to involve invitation, rather than command. I’m focused on creating the conditions for this to happen, rather than trying to design it all, top-down, from the outset. To bring things into relationship with one another, rather than set fixed outcomes from the beginning. And treating every participant as a colleague, as a comrade, rather than the subject to an experiment.

Which entails taking care of them.

Yeah, absolutely. But you can’t get away from some level of use and power in this. There’s always going to be those kinds of dynamics. We farm, we use other beings in all kinds of ways, and we shape their lives. We’re not going to stop doing that, because it’s part of our own survival. But doing so with greater thoughtfulness and care, and with a certain expectation that the benefits of doing it will not only accrue to us, should be the cornerstone of it.

Something closer to a small organic garden rather than big agriculture.

I don’t think there is such a thing as an artificial intelligence. There are multiple intelligences, many ways of doing intelligence. What I envisage to be more useful and interesting than artificial intelligence as we currently conceive of it—which is this incredibly reduced version of human intelligence— is something more distributed, more widely empowered, and more diverse than singular intelligence would allow for. It’s actually a conversation between multiple intelligences, focused on some narrow goals. I have a new, very long-term, very nascent project I’m calling Server Farm. And the vision of Server Farm is to create a setting in which multiple intelligences could work on a problem together. Those intelligences would be drawn from all di fferent kinds of life. That could include computers, but it could also include fungi and plants and animals in some kind of information-sharing processing arrangement. The point is that it would involve more than one kind of thinking, happening in dialogue and relationship with each other.

How does one onboard more-than-human intelligence into such a project?

There’s a particularly wonderful place in France called Bec Hellouin, which is this amazing permaculture organic farm in Normandy that has shown that you can create really impressive agricultural yields, food crops, through a totally di fferent technique of farming than the industrial agriculture that is mostly in use. Alternatives exist. One of the intentions of Server Farm is to try and bring a bunch of those things together to see what happens.

I really appreciate your call, throughout the book, for people to get their hands dirty. Not to critique technology in the abstract, but to actually build things. That resonated with me as a gardener, in the sense that gardening has allowed me to develop a more active awareness of the fact that we live in a morethan-human world. It’s a really powerful kind of awareness to have, and it’s precisely the kind of awareness that I would want to have about technology. Is making things the technological equivalent of gardening with code?

The central metaphor of [my previous book] New Dark Age was plumbing. Which was about the necessity of having not just a vague understanding of where all the pipes go, but a really solid mental model of how the whole system operates. And the central metaphor of Ways of Being is, probably, gardening. If you’re not in communication, in relationship, with other beings, then no conversation is possible at all. We don’t know what’s possible with these tools unless we use them ourselves. And we don’t know what’s possible in relationships unless we have those relationships ourselves. We also don’t know it as individuals, because we have such limited individual perspectives and biases and privileges. So it requires as many people as possible to have those relationships, because that’s the only way we’ll find out what is really possible. The more people who are engaged in this, the better for everyone.

I think gardening is a way to practice sustained observation of natural life, but I’m sure there are other ways, like birdwatching. I wonder about birdwatching technology…

There’s birdwatching technology in the book! There are vast, continent-scale radar systems which are used for birdwatching. Nocturnal flight was discovered using wartime radar. These were technological things that enabled really extraordinary new views onto the nonhuman world. But we don’t think of them. When we think about birdwatching, we don’t think about those things, particularly. But you could think about binoculars as being a pretty revolutionary technology for birdwatching. It’s a matter of what we choose to do with those tools.

That might be the biggest takeaway of your book for me this idea that even technologies developed for nefarious purposes, to surveil humans, for example, can be turned around and used differently. That swords can be ploughshared. The thing is, we live in a more of a ploughshares-to-swords kind of world.

Absolutely. And I’m not making any claims that this is magically going to happen.

Do you believe that it can happen, though? That what we do with technology can be the first step the cause, rather than the effect, of a social change?

I don’t think it’s needlessly idealistic, because it’s also my experience. So it must be shared by some other people. I have this bias, through seeing my way to things through technology. And that’s how I came to write this book. It’s not necessarily the pathway for everyone, but a lot of us live in highly technological environments. Changing our attitudes to, and our use of, those technologies is a very powerful way of changing our relationship to the world.

Like trying to make more ecological choices in your daily life. It can be a small gesture, but collectively, these things have an impact.

And they also don’t necessarily have concrete, immediate impacts in the ways that you expect. A lot of the stuff that I’m doing at the moment particularly around building various kinds of little renewable energy things, or doing weird gardening stu ff is not because I expect this particular practice to change the world. But I think it builds capacity and agency. That means that the possibility of that happening increases.

One thing that surprised me about the book is that you didn’t get into Artificial Life. I feel like Artificial Life is one of those concepts in computer science where the open-ended creativity of evolution and the tremendous capacities of life are actually taken seriously.

The things that were most compelling to me were things that were quite hybridized that provided weird, interesting bridges between the world of computation and everything else. I’m sure that Artificial Life does that conceptually. But I guess I just really wasn’t looking for things that I felt existed inside machines. Or, you know, inside petri dishes. But there’s some discussion in the book of the role of simulation things like climate simulators and other kinds of models that do develop our thinking, in such a way that when we bring it back into the world, it does really, really interesting things.

When I interviewed the ALife pioneer Tom Ray last year, he told me that the digital creatures that emerged within his system were not a model of life, but an instance of it.

That really chimes with what I said earlier about not really believing in such a thing as artificial intelligence. That AI whatever it is, or might become is not artificial. It’s an instance, as you say, of intelligence. That is something that cannot be artificial. Because it exists.

By the end of the book, I extend that beyond artificial intelligence, to all technologies. All artifacts of life are also outcomes of evolution in various forms. There’s nothing unnatural about a computer. It’s just another di fferent way of putting silicon and hydrocarbons and a bunch of other stu ff together to do things, just as evolution has put together all kinds of other interesting forms. After a while, for me, those kinds of distinctions between the natural or the unnatural, the artificial and the real became completely meaningless. I see all these things as processes of relationship and becoming.

order to get more interesting and more useful and fun intelligences to emerge.

But is intelligence without a body an impoverished form of intelligence?

Well, the way that I think about it is that intelligence is relational. It’s not something that exists within bodies, but between them. Or between beings, or between awarenesses, or between beings and things, between beings and places. I wouldn’t even necessarily restrict it to bodies. But intelligence without relationships I don’t think I could really understand what that is.

How can AI help us to re-evaluate how we assess intelligence in the animal and plant kingdoms, and how we relate to the animal and plant kingdoms?

I suppose one distinction is the lack of embodied experience that an artificial intelligence might have. In your chapter on animal intelligence, you write about the ways in which the intelligence of animals has been historically underestimated by researchers who can’t think about those animals’ lives in context. Because intelligence is something that’s done by a whole body, in interface with the world.

The AIs we’re making do have those interfaces with the world they’re just incredibly narrow. And they’re set and directed by humans to such a degree that artificial intelligence can only ever be a subset of human intelligence. It lacks any other kind of access to the world. And if intelligence is, as I tend to believe, an emergent property of engagement with the world, then you need to open that channel to the world in more ways, in

I don’t know to what extent it can, directly. Maybe by modeling certain processes, or allowing us to see patterns in certain things. One of the examples I cite in the book are studies into animal behavior and earthquakes, and, basically, how animal sensing networks make really advanced predictions for earthquakes. Those patterns were only spotted when researchers used really smart machine learning algorithms to see the patterns of the animals. In that case, artificial intelligences interceded between the humans and the nonhumans, in order to allow that information, that awareness, to cross over, and therefore that relationship to be built. So there are points at which the use of these technologies allows us to see things, and realize things, about the nonhuman world that just weren’t accessible to us before.

But I have this very strong sense that one of the broader roles of AI in the present is really just to broaden our idea of intelligence. The very existence, even the idea of artificial intelligence, is a doorway to acknowledging multiple forms of intelligence and infinite kinds of intelligence, and therefore a really quite radical decentering of the human, which has always accompanied our ideas about AI but mostly incredibly fearfully. There’s always been this fear of another intelligence that will, in some way, overtake us, destroy us. It’s where all the horror of it comes from. And that power is completely valid, if you look at human history, the human use of technology, and the

way in which it’s controlled by existing forms of power. But it doesn’t need to be read that way.

Well, our model largely formed through fiction has always been that we’re creating “artificial man.” And of course that’s scary, because “man” is scary. Fear of AI is fear of ourselves. Fear of building a mirror that actually shows us who we are. What you’re proposing is that we can instead build something that allows us to look beyond the edge of the mirror and see something more interesting than ourselves.

That’s why I’ve always had the fascination with all the glitches and weird edge cases and strangeness of AI. Because some of that is reflecting back whatever trash these things have been fed on. But it’s also genuinely presenting radically new ways of seeing the world that expands our view in ways that we don’t yet fully understand.

Yet we characterize those things as failures.

Yeah, we characterize them as failures. And we often have quite some horrified reactions to them. But that’s just a failure of imagination.

Can I share a fear with you? My fear is that the vital importance of wisdom that is rooted in place and by that, I mean everything from Indigenous land management to the lessons we learn studying ecology in context comes into view just as place itself disappears. You write about plants needing to migrate 115 centimeters a day to survive climate change. How can

we nurture knowledge that is rooted in place as zones of habitability shift? Can we move knowledge 115 centimeters a day to keep pace?

I think it’s what we do all the time. The reason this is urgent and a fight is because we are literally losing knowledge. Through habitat destruction, through climate change, through loss of biodiversity it is knowledge that is being lost. But that process is hardly new. It’s been going on for centuries, if not millennia. It’s the main action of colonialism and imperialism. It’s just a fight. And it’s going to keep being a fight. But of course we can move these knowledges. Of course we can translate them, and we can listen for them better, and we can construct new habitats and reserves, in possibly a slightly newer sense, for them. And we can continue to work with them.

I remember going to the British Library many years ago. I got an amazing behind-the-scenes tour, it’s completely incredible: the building goes down, probably more stories than they say, underground, and it has these vast robotic systems for moving artifacts around. It’s this incredible grounded spaceship for preserving stu ff. But that preservation isn’t just putting stu ff in cold rooms. It’s also an incredibly active process. You’ve

Intelligence is relational. It’s not something that exists within bodies, but between them.

got all of these studios where they’re doing preservation work. In one room, you will have someone prizing open 10th century books or X-raying ancient papyri to try and pull the information back up off the page, out of this rotting medium. And in the next room, you’ve got someone who’s working on piecing together shellac discs, the very first audio recording tools. And in the next one, you’ve got someone who’s trying to get something off a Mac that’s 10 years old. I remember walking around this place and having this real vision of all culture, all human knowledge, all human experience, piled on a huge conveyor belt moving inexorably towards the fire. And the whole work is just constantly shoving that stu ff away from the fire in any way that we can. And that’s not just the work of librarians, or even artists and cultural workers. It’s really what we all do all the time in trying to preserve and transmit knowledge.

But what’s also crucial about that is that every time you do it, you’re enacting it. It’s not just about portaging dead media, or frozen ideas from the past. It’s about finding what their place is in the present. How they are useful in the current moment. That enacting becomes possible when you’re doing the work of understanding and listening and transmitting. Because that’s where it always happens. The knowledge is in the telling of it. It’s true of everything. I don’t like falling back on Indigenous knowledge as an example the “magic native” trope but it’s much clearer in non-Western cultures, I think. In Australian Aboriginal storytelling these things have a direct relationship to the lived landscape. They’re survival tools of the present. I think all knowledge is that. We can and do use these things processing knowledge over time. That’s how we get on. And we’ll continue to get on.

it represents centuries of observation of one environment. But environments are changing so quickly now.

Sustained observation is wonderful. But it’s also a survival tool, because it allows you to react specifically to new situations. And that’s really the key. We are facing situations that are novel to humanity. But all organisms, at some point, face situations that are novel, and the ones that survive are the ones that have the broadest range of experience to draw on to find new solutions, and the broadest diversity of experiences.

On the same tip, sometimes I feel that the best thing for survival is to have absolutely no memory. Think about an insect on the sidewalk, just crossing the road. It has no idea that the sidewalk isn’t natural. It was born in this world and for the insect, that’s nature. I sometimes wish that we had that kind of innocence.

I think that’s a really important skill to develop to deal with everything we’re facing. While certain forms of environmental change are accelerating, in the present, there has always been change. One of the biggest problems I think we have certainly at a high-level, scienti f ic government and communication of climate change, but I think also, for most of us, mentally and internally is this idea of some kind of Before and After. Or some kind of fixed line over which everything changes, rather than these just being processes of change that we can adapt to. That we can build systems that are resilient to. And that we can mitigate to some extent. But that we can also change with. It’s not just the plants that have to head north, or have to adapt to stay in place. It’s us as well.

The changes necessary for that are huge changes, both in our societies and our thinking. I think you’re right in saying that involves a huge letting-go of our expectations of what is normal. And what is natural. Because those things don’t really apply. They’re not really useful models for thinking about the situation that we’re in.

It can be di cult to look at the world around you, and just be like: this is it.

I feel that the things that are the most important to know are things learned from sustained observation. That’s why Indigenous knowledge is so deep, because

I don’t think it is that hard, if you pay attention to the place that you’re actually in. I live in a place that’s going

to get hotter, and you do too. It’s going to get hotter, it’s going to get drier, there’s going to be more wildfires. And that’s going to a ffect how we live, how we build, and how we structure our societies, all of these things. But we have the incredible luxury of being pretty aware of those processes. And being in a position where we can structure things, and we can anticipate them, to a huge extent, and create the conditions in which we and many others will survive and thrive within them. But it’s not a question of holding on to that place as it exists in the present. That time has passed, unfortunately, if it ever really existed.

Your book concludes with this beautiful vision of the “internet of animals,” a planet-spanning network of sensors that can help us see the world as it really is. But given that you spend a lot of time talking about the dangerous ways in which data is centralized and deployed, can you speak a little bit about the governance of such a thing?

It was a huge surprise to me that the internet of animals became the final example in the book, and I really stress that I don’t think it’s some grand, singular solution to everything. But it is a mechanism for doing some of the things that I say in the book are necessary, which include having a much broader, technologically-augmented view of life on Earth. The internet of animals gives us an idea of nonhuman lives with sucient grain to shift our patterns of life to make more space for them. I also describe that as a form of suffrage, essentially that what you’re essentially creating is a political system in which nonhumans have a say, have a voice. And so really, why I’m interested in the internet of animals is simply that it’s a way of giving them a voice that we can hear and listen to in ways that we haven’t been terribly good at so far. The ultimate aim always being to act on that voice.

I think there are a lot of precedents within human data use and human data management that are very rarely followed, as we know, but which exist. Things like the EU’s “right to be forgotten” as a precedent for a kind of human-centric, compassionate use of data. That could be extended to interactions with nonhumans in various ways. But one key part of what I say about that particular vision of the internet of animals, allowing us to work towards a shared planet, is also that we get the

hell out of quite large areas. That includes data and monitoring when we know what we need to know, we stop. We erase the data and we erase our presence and we move ourselves away from the center in every way that we can. I think it’s a bit too easy to get caught up in the very, very real problems with doing some of this stu ff, when we’re already doing it at such a hideously large industrial scale that not trying to do it better seems to be a slightly foolish barrier to going forward. We have this power and we’re already misusing it. I’m no fan of massive geoengineering schemes, but we are already doing massive geoengineering schemes. That’s what 300 years of burning fossil fuels is.

Fortunately some of the most damaging uses of human data come from people trying to sell things to us, or sell us to others. Animals can’t buy anything. You can’t sell leggings to a moose. Not yet anyway.

I’m sure someone will try.

I’m sure someone will try.

Claire L. Evans is a writer and musician. She is the singer and coauthor of the Grammy-nominated pop group YACHT; author of Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet ; and co-editor of the speculative fiction anthology Terraform: Watch Worlds Burn , out from MCD Books in August 2022.

Sofia Crespo is an Argentinean artist working with biology-inspired technologies. She looks at the similarities between how AIs generate images and how humans express themselves creatively. She’s also the cofounder of Entangled Others Studio.

By Max G. Levy Illustrations by Nicolás Ortega

The incrementalist approach to pandemic prevention leaves us vulnerable to another outbreak

In spring 2020, as the COVID pandemic spread across the United States, a new technological system focused its watchful gaze on humankind’s most elemental output —our poop. Just outside of Tempe, Arizona, wastewater operators and researchers pulled samples from the gutter of a small town called Guadalupe, scanning for fragments of SARS-CoV-2 genomic material. ough this method can’t diagnose individual people or count cases, according to Rolf Halden, director of the Biodesign Center for Environmental Health Engineering at Arizona State University, it sure is good at predicting surges. Four years ago, Halden and his colleagues started using the same technology to monitor opioid levels hoping to better understand how drugs were impacting local ecology. During the pandemic, the researchers pivoted to searching for traces of COVID instead. In May 2020, Halden was rst to notice that Guadalupe was becoming a COVID hotspot. “ is cluster was undetected, and we saw it in the wastewater,” he says. e town mobilized all its resources: dispatching masks, testing, and quarantine orders. anks to that head start, Guadalupe’s SARS-CoV-2 levels fell below detection limits in a matter of weeks. ey attened the curve before most residents even knew there was one.

is, unfortunately, is a rare success story. On a policy and implementation level, the current crisis has often revealed a tendency to react and a reluctance to prevent a need for fundamental changes, but a preference for minor xes. Driven by political and scal considerations, this order of operations has not only extended this pandemic, but in fact makes us much more vulnerable to future replays.

What to do? Speaking to a host of pandemic experts, a clear directive emerges. Pandemic preparedness is one area where future success depends crucially on learning the lessons from the past. Our ancestors were forced by mass outbreaks of disease to transform their societies to be less hospitable to contagion. The soundness of their specific choices determined whether they mourned their dead and rebuilt their lives, or suffered through another pandemic shortly after.

These failures and successes should inspire something within us a new appetite for systemic change and structural solutions, like Guadalupe’s wastewater alarm system, that may just help future-proof our world against another tragic contagion.

1 Memorials & Facilities

Every day, whether you notice or not, you are surrounded by the relics of disease outbreaks from centuries ago. These mass biological events fundamentally reshaped our living environments and habits. In the 19th century, cholera tore through our cities, bringing death and a new burst of scientific information. At the time, the public still imagined disease as spread through miasma , meaning “bad air” or “night air.” It supposedly bubbled up from soil, swamps, sores and slums. Society adapted accordingly. Cities cleaned their streets and established new standards of hygiene. Avenues widened. Indoor plumbing standardized. More expansive public spaces appeared to free urbanites from the vapors. Frederick Law Olmsted designed New York’s Central Park as “the lungs of the city” with miasma in mind.

After bubonic plague came to San Francisco around 1900, germ theory primed policymakers to consider its nonhuman “zoonotic” hosts. They targeted rats. New city ordinances replaced rodent-friendly materials like wood and dirt with cement. Piers, sidewalks, basements, backyard chicken coops got facelifts. With the hygienic trends that debuted in the 19th century, "We rebuilt the physical environment,” says Elena Conis, a historian of medicine, public health, and

environment at UC Berkeley. “We started to make a concrete city.” And that concrete made it sturdier and more attractive to tourists and investors.

“Every norm-shifting epidemic or pandemic leaves its mark,” says Conis. “Some of those marks actually are profoundly shaped by early misconceptions about what was causing the disease to spread out of control.” In the early 1880s, germ theory replaced miasma in the public imagination. By the late 19th century, the public came to understand tuberculosis as an airborne germ meaning that whatever spewed from an infected person’s lungs could spread it. An anti-spitting campaign erupted in the U.S. and it stuck. “People don’t spit in public in the U.S. anymore,” says Conis. “You can trace this all the way back to the anti-tuberculosis campaigns.”

Each disease that followed brought with it new ideas of how to fight back. Got a plague problem? Here’s some concrete. Malarial parasites spread from mosquito bites? Here’s some pesticide, window screens, and bed nets. The human immunodeficiency virus spreads from sex? Here’s some PSAs, condoms, and prophylaxis. Coronavirus is spread through close contact? Here’s some masks, contact tracing apps, and 15-minute diagnostic tests. These new habits, too, endure long after the threat recedes.

The way that we choose to think about diseases informs how we interpret the very idea of responsiveness. Misconceptions about how animal viruses “spill over” into humans, for example, have primed people to think that pandemic control should be reactive, rather than predictive “Understanding how spillovers happen,” says Emily Gurley, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins, “that’s the missing part that we’re just not doing enough.” Some strategies for disease prevention stick around and become a part of the broader culture, like safe sex or contactless Taco Bell delivery. Others can’t boast the luxury of instant cause-and-e ffect, or a seductive profit margin. These lessons get left behind. “Pandemics create panic. And in a panic, you want to protect yourself, your family, your loved ones, your community, your state, your nation today,” Conis says.

“You’re not thinking about 20 years down the line.”

It’s the unprofitable, unsexy science coming out of this pandemic that yields the best advice for stopping the next one in its tracks. As COVID teeters between pandemic waves and endemic burden, the acute panic has subsided. Public health’s mainstream moment is waning. And experts warn that the hope for most precious, evidence-backed remedies are disappearing alongside it.

2

Spillover

The misconceptions we have about pandemics begin with how they start. Yes, wild animals like bats carry viruses that can infect humans. Researchers deduced in early February 2020 that SARS-CoV-2 likely originated in bats, which harbor hundreds of diverse viruses. Yes, a tiny fraction of those viruses make people very sick, racing from host to host across the world via borders open to global travel and trade. Health o cials declared COVID a pandemic in March, only three months after its first detection in December 2019. But the virus’s odyssey from bat to quarantine didn’t happen overnight.

“Viruses spill over from animals all the time, including from humans to animals,” says Maureen Miller, an epidemiologist and medical anthropologist at Columbia University. The exchange happens over and over again for many years. People living near wild animals pick up viruses. While they may not get sick, these viruses evolve in their hosts and mix with each other. A chunk of genetic material from Asymptomatic Virus A ends up in the backbone of Virus B. Suppose this mutant is now a killer: a couple of benign viruses have shapeshifted their progeny into a contagion that shuts down the world.

Although scientists aren’t certain that this is the process that gave rise to SARS-CoV-2, there’s plenty of evidence that it happens from other diseases, such as Ebola, which begins with fever and fatigue and can end with diarrhea, bleeding, and death. Around 1980, virologists studying Ebola conducted “serosurveys” in Liberia, looking for Ebola antibodies in the blood samples of people presumed una ffected by any known outbreaks. Six percent of the population tested positive, suggesting that the virus was just around. Four years after that serosurvey study was published, three others reported that 10.6, 13.4, and 14 percent of people in the region had antibodies. Unfortunately, Liberian health o cials were not kept meaningfully abreast of these discoveries. About 30 years later, a tragic Ebola outbreak killed over 11,000 people

“We predicted it every time. You just didn’t listen.”

in the region. “That spillover was already happening,” says Miller. “It took 30 years to show itself, to become virulent enough and transmissible enough.”

SARS-CoV-2 also likely existed as milder forms in people for a while, according to Miller. “It was probably an evolutionary process that took place over a period of potentially years,” he says. “It’s only become more transmissible over time, particularly with these Omicron variants. We see it play out. Why do we suddenly believe that it was one spillover that infected a person and disaster occurred that is so unlikely.” In 2015, Miller’s team found that about 3 percent of people in a Chinese community near a bat cave carried SARSlike coronavirus antibodies likely from recent asymptomatic exposure.

This is why the most promising avenue for pandemic prevention is an early warning system. Miller’s current research focuses on precisely those strategies, designed to consider viral evolution, serosurveillance, land use, and human behavior to identify high risk viruses and hot spots. “It’s scary. You know, the phrase I hate the most during the course of this pandemic is ‘No one could have predicted it,’” she says. “No. We predicted it every time. You just didn’t listen.”

such widespread testing done at home especially asymptomatic testing. Biotech companies are manufacturing hundreds of millions of at-home tests every month.

As it did in Guadalupe, COVID brought wastewater surveillance to the attention of policymakers. Scientists pioneered this method many years ago, but it’s never drawn as much attention as it has during the pandemic, says Halden, who has studied wastewater as a public health tool for two decades and runs nonprofit and private companies which both specialize in sewage analysis. The system is sensitive and detects when the virus is present, not just when people get tested. “Think of it like a watchtower on a hilltop, overlooking the forest,” Halden says. “If there is a wildfire, if there’s a danger, you can spot it from a distance, inexpensively. And you can look all day long. All things that clinical testing cannot do.”

3

The Centrality of Waste

COVID’s indelible mark seems to be more administrative than architectural, says Geoff Manaugh, an architectural writer who co-authored Until Proven Safe, about the history of quarantine dating back to the 14th century. Employers embrace remote work (and workers) more than ever. People stay home when they’re sick and wear masks. We see disease tracking web apps and choose contactless payments as default. “You didn’t have to touch anything. So you didn’t have to risk getting germs,” Manaugh says. “All of those trends overlap really well with an infectious world.”

A positive development with this latest pandemic was an unprecedented boom in at-home diagnostic tests. While PCR testing predates SARS-CoV-2, the United States has never seen

Sampling a source of poop is about 60 times cheaper than clinical diagnostics, Halden has found. But that doesn’t mean it’s an easy sell. In 2001, an EPA scientist proposed monitoring sewage as a non-intrusive tool for measuring illegal drug use in a community, in order to understand its ecological effects. It was already possible, technically: A 2005 study of Italy’s Po river calculated that four kilos of cocaine were consumed by inhabitants of the Po basin every day nearly three times higher than national estimates. But practically, wastewater monitoring required a city’s buy-in to sift through its sewers. And what mayor would voluntarily accept that kind of stigma?

Before COVID, Halden also struggled to get funding to track health and environmental contaminants. “It was very di cult to convince others that there’s value in there,” he says. Though many have overcome their skepticism, it’s not always clear who can control or access the data. And privacy concerns linger. “We don’t all want to be surveilled in all of our activities all the time,” says Halden.

He believes there’s a misconception that cops might sleuth data from a city, then neighborhood, then block, then home, in order to make arrests. Other experts agree. “Very likely impossible

unless one is gathering wastewater from a single residence or single toilet, and that would raise serious legal and ethical concerns,” says Jeff rey Ram, a professor of physiology at Wayne State University who has studied wastewater epidemiology. In a recent paper for the University of Richmond Law review, Ram and his collaborators note that “the legal literature, to date, has almost uniformly failed to even consider the ramifications of wastewater-based epidemiology.”

Civil liberties, of course, apply to communities as well as individuals, and this is where it could get dicey. A widespread sewage control system might be abused, for example, to ramp up police patrols in neighborhoods with disproportionately high drug levels. The stated use, disease detection, might also spur fears in marginalized communities. The history of pandemics is rich with scapegoating, leaders deflecting blame onto the least protected people in their society. The bubonic plague led to generational pogroms against Jewish communities all over Europe. Chinese-Americans su ffered awful persecution in the San Francisco plague of 1901. The current pandemic caused a spike of hate crimes against Asian-Americans all over the country, tacitly supported by President Trump. In an increasingly unstable America, how comfortable would you be giving the federal government another layer of biological surveillance?

Thankfully, experts say, community sewage control may well not be the most e cient place for preemptive disease detection. A more impactful approach would plug in somewhere upstream. Think of pandemic preparedness in three tiers: stopping spillover altogether; reducing the outbreak’s size; and controlling the burden of disease medically, with hospital beds, antivirals, and vaccines.

“We’re focused very much on a medical model of preparedness,” says Miller. Although that stu ff does help us control outbreaks, it dooms you to playing catchup.

“It’s all out of order,” agrees Gurley. “We should be finding the spillovers when and where they happen.” Gurley used these principles in Bangladesh almost 20 years ago, discovering that

Nipah viruses jump from bats to humans when both drink tree sap from the same date palms. “Once we did that, you can think about intervention to stop spillover,” she says. Her team promoted covering the sap pots and trees to keep bats out. They also tried messaging to simply ask people not to drink it.

To halt and control the next pandemic, you can’t just know this stu ff you’ve gotta use it. And these well-vetted ideas struggle to get any traction. Congress can barely maintain suf f icient funds to control the pandemic at hand. This year, a bipartisan duo of senators announced the PREVENT Act, requesting about $2 billion to stave off future outbreaks. (Biden’s plan had called for $65.3 billion.) And even in the more generous proposal, over 60 percent of funds would go to reactive technological solutions vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics, not tools meant to catch a threat in stride.

The global community needs better disease surveillance at all levels: surveillance, serosurveillance in zoonotic hotspots, and monitoring pathogens in wild animals, livestock, and insects a real-time epidemiological pulse.

“But right now, we usually just wait until there’s a big outbreak that we can’t ignore,” says Gurley. “And by then, often the trail of how the spillover occurred is cold.”

4 Data Outbreaks

“The future is a di fferent place than the past,” says Colin Carlson, a global change biologist from Georgetown University. “The rules are di fferent.” Carlson’s research focuses on how climate change supercharges health burdens around the world. A warming world moves animals into new places and makes them sick. Sick animals shed more virus and seek refuge from heat in human neighborhoods.

In a recent study, Carlson’s team found that biodiversity hotspots and densely-populated regions of Asia and Africa will see cross-species viral transmission risk increase with warming. “It hasn’t happened much yet, because not a lot of

In an increasingly unstable America, how comfortable would you be giving the federal government another layer of biological surveillance?

climate change has happened yet,” he says. Cutting greenhouse gas emissions to keep this century’s warming under 2 degrees Celsius won’t be enough to stop it.

A recent study estimated that it would cost $22 to 31 billion per year to prevent pandemics by snu ffing out recognized spillover risks ending wild meat trade, reducing deforestation, and funding early detection. These numbers are a call-to-action, yet even if there were a $20 billion annual allowance, experts disagree over how to use it.

There’s broad agreement that money should flow to the communities that frequently rub shoulders with wildlife. But how might that money help the most?

“People really overestimate the relevance of wildlife trade,” says Carlson.

In 2020, political leaders called for China to shutter “wet markets” that sell wild animals. In 2021, the World Health Organization urged all countries to halt wild mammal sales in food markets. More than $19 billion of that $22-31 billion call-to-action went to ending China’s wild meat trade. “That’s not to say that focusing on that interface is bad,” says Carlson. “It’s to say that if we focus on the interface at the expense of everything else that’s where we might find ourselves in trouble.”

For viruses propelled by global change, a key part of preparedness comes back to sharing data: the genetic sequences for new and familiar threats and prevalences of viruses discovered, timestamped and pinpointed. “That’s the magic stu ff,” says Carlson. “And it can help develop vaccines for the viruses we’re most worried about.”

Data helps control outbreaks too. There are systems for hospital systems to report patients with symptoms matching high-risk pathogens. Right now, these systems are patchy at best. “By the time somebody sick shows up at a hospital that’s equipped enough to identify this as an unrecognizable virus,” says Miller, “it is so far removed from where the virus likely originally originated.” The network of the World Health Organization’s outbreak-monitoring hospitals doesn’t extend to the impoverished communities and marginalized people who need them most.

In cases where those hospitals do exist, clinicians need the know-how and authority to bring that information to their government. “Promoting a free press goes a long way,” says Gurley. “We need to think more about incentive structures, financing and how we weigh the priorities of spillover detection against other public health priorities.”

A government may want to prevent the next pandemic. But doing so may require an openness to data-sharing with and scrutiny from the global community that they, frankly, aren’t willing to give.

That hesitance isn’t unfounded. After South Africa’s viral sequencing infrastructure detected the Omicron variant in 2021, the U.S. suspended travel from eight countries in the region. Travel bans dealt a huge blow to already weakened economies. “It’s a very hard sell to say: Reallocate your resources, find these emerging threats, and in return, you’re just going to catch hell for it. Who’s going to do that?” says Gurley. The global community sent the wrong message in punishing South Africa for its vigilance.

The forces that could do something about this are constrained by inflexible political systems, leaning with the winds of global change, while we wait trapped on the coast, hiding behind a waisthigh seawall.

5

The Sticking Point

It’s unlikely that we’ll ever stop all hot-spot zoonoses from bopping around locally. It is reasonable, though, to intercept a killer as it goes global. And the technology to do that at airports already exists.

There’s talk of tech like 3-minute diagnostic tests, and even “panviral” tests that screen for many viruses at once. COVID’s waves of variant after variant serve as a proving ground for early warning strategies that may help control the next pandemic.

The CDC detected the first North American cases of Omicron BA.2 and BA.3 variants by batch testing nasal swabs from volunteers at four major

U.S. airports. Ten percent of eligible travelers enrolled. (The researchers pooled those 16,000 swabs into 1,454 groups over 15 percent of pools tested positive.)

When an infected person steps off an international flight, it benefits society to know that the pathogen has landed too. But they may be asymptomatic and unaware. They may be in a rush or just not want to get swabbed.

Sewage surveillance adds an extra layer to the virus-catching net. “It is a brilliant, brilliant strategy,” says Miller. “Especially now with the fatigue of the pandemic. People aren’t getting tested, or they’re testing on their own.”

Researchers detected the Omicron variant in wastewater at Frankfurt Airport five days before the first local clinic did. Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport has that capability too. The genetic material in airport sewage won’t give immediate answers, and it won’t point to who the infected travelers are, but it’s an inexpensive early-warning system. Sewage surveillance is cheaper than clinical diagnosis and low resolution enough to not require consent. “Even if the person leaves,” says Halden. “You know the point of arrival. That is very important information.”

You get around most civil liberty concerns since airports and transit hubs are public spaces. And you can hold off on travel bans, by sampling sludge from specific flights, or even cruises. Miller imagines using airport wastewater to monitor for highly pathogenic avian influenza, which she fears is still the biggest threat around the corner. Like COVID, flu shows up in sewage; we just have to look for it.

But what guarantees that the interest in sewage survives COVID? Or, more philosophically, what makes one public health lesson outlast another? That remains an open question for this pandemic. It’s not merit, or a measure of longterm impact. History tells us society’s too shortsighted for that. The biggest factor is whether it resonates with people’s current concerns and beliefs.

The culture wars have weighed down pandemic preparedness like an anchor, politicizing necessary expenditures as hand-outs, and disease

surveillance efforts as part of a nefarious plan to subjugate the few remaining patriots. According to the Pew Research Center, the portion of Americans who trust medical scientists “a great deal” decreased from 43% to 29% between April 2020 and December 2021. States like Florida are emerging from this pandemic with less power to enforce public health measures, like masking or lockdowns. “That attitude might be great for drumming up turnout in the midterm elections,” says Manaugh. “But I think it’s going to bite people pretty hard when the next pandemic hits 15 years from now and no one can do anything, because public health authorities have had all their powers taken away.”

6

A Way Out

The coronavirus pandemic is not over. Global vaccination e fforts surged at record speeds, but not fast enough to eradicate it. The virus is endemic. People around the world continue to catch and die from it. And new variants loom, threatening wave after wave. Yet even now, pandemic preparation policies for the next one appear to remain short-sighted focusing on stitching together fabric from tech solutions and politically savvy legislation, when the entire quilt is a little rotten.

“Not to be glib, but the main reason is capitalism,” says Conis. Private industry profits from biotech solutions, and their profits keep the economy afloat. Even sewage surveillance is in this category, as a technological solution that engages private companies. Whereas the system-level policies that reduce food insecurity and improve healthcare access carry less shareholder appeal. “A lot of people don’t like to admit this. But public health exists to keep economies in place. It exists to protect the wealth of nation states.”

Newfangled tech can’t stop the next pandemic alone. “This is not to say that technologies like vaccines don’t create good health in poor areas they do,” she says. “But they address them one at a time.” Economic support pulls people out of challenges of overall health, like malnutrition

and stress, which make pandemics hit harder.

Even in the United States, a pandemic’s death toll is a function of who seeks out medical care and who can afford to do so. “We are unique in the ways that our health system has just completely sabotaged our own outbreak response,” says Carlson. Studies have consistently shown that universal health care would save money, save lives, and reduce the burden of disease.

Wealth bought health during this pandemic. Kids without internet access at home couldn’t keep up in school. Working-class Americans living in multi-generational homes had to put grandparents at risk. Remote work protected millions from disease. But you can’t grind chicken thighs over Zoom.

COVID’s public health measures placed an unequal burden on all essential workers, like those at meatpacking plants who faced rampant outbreaks. This increased risk compounded with already-elevated medical vulnerabilities, such as poorer access to healthcare and means to pay for it. (Black and Hispanic Americans are overrepresented in essential work.)

“The same mistakes tend to be made over and over again,” he says. During earlier plagues in Europe, essential workers stuck around to dig graves and wash corpses. They took care of cities while the wealthier residents could leave.

Policymakers stepped up to address some of the inequality, but in spurts. The government pledged $4 billion to support unhoused populations in 2020. The Trump administration made diagnostic testing and vaccination free. President Biden enacted and extended a “child tax credit” to literally give families cash. He acknowledged the socioeconomic health disparities, and extended the eviction moratorium, until the Supreme

Court ended it. “COVID forced people to see that the inequalities that stretch throughout society are also medical inequalities,” says Manaugh.

History tells us that the actions we’ll take to keep the next pandemic at bay will skew toward the most profitable ones, rather than the most critical ones. That leaves the more profound, global action lagging behind.

Right now, the most credible threats to come are other zoonotic respiratory viruses, such as highly pathogenic avian influenza or another coronavirus. The World Health Organization also warns that the risk of insect-borne diseases, such as Zika, yellow fever, Chikungunya and dengue epidemics is increasing.

It’s far less likely that the next pandemic will be some unforeseen, mysterious threat, like a 100-million-year-old zombie virus thawed from melting permafrost. It will probably be a virus we’ve seen and faced before, one that we’ve learned how to manage.

“It’s very easy to get lost in the Michael Crichton storytelling of it,” says Carlson. “But the most likely scenario is that viruses throw us a nice easy underhand, and we completely whi ff it.”

Max G. Levy is a freelance science writer with a PhD in chemical and biological engineering based in Los Angeles. He is an editor with Grow and his work has appeared in Wired , Quanta Magazine , and Smithsonian , among other outlets.

Nicolás Ortega is a graphic designer, illustrator, and art director from Colombia, based in New York.

“The most likely scenario is that viruses throw us a nice easy underhand, and we completely whiff it.”

Affordable drugs

To me, the most impactful way to use synthetic biology would be to make safe, opensource insulin that we could continuously produce and distribute at community centers, at no or very low cost. That would open the door to other affordable drugs.

Alex Pearlman, Bioethicist & Communications Director at Concentric by Ginkgo

Microbial carbon sinks

The engineering of microbes that can feed off waste streams, such as carbon emissions, instead of sugars, could change the game. We must begin to see waste as a resource rather than a problem.

Amy Congdon, Chief Design Officer at Biofabricate

New economic models

Eventually, we need to design mechanisms that enable communities to directly benefit from biology. That will allow us to transition away from the extractive relationships that currently exist within our economy and our society.

Leon Elcock III, Researcher at Interius Biotherapeutics

2

Community labs

The tools of large industry have created significant benefits, but in my imagination, an alternative system is needed: small labs that grow things specifically for and with local communities, thus creating strong bonds and new trust.

Daniel Chan, President of Biotech Without Borders

3

Genetic sequencing

I believe that in just a few years, genetic medicine will be combined with practically every other type of medical intervention. On the non-medical side, the explosive growth of genetic datasets combined with AI-based interpretation methods will help us understand pathways and regulatory mechanisms in non-human organisms.

Rachel Hovde, Engineer at Invitae

Climate change

Extreme weather events and their vast rippling effects will steer the direction of synthetic biology.

Anab Jain, Founder of Superflux

7 New coalitions

One convergence that will be most influential in shaping the future of synthetic biology is when abolitionists and scientists begin to co-conspire at scale, with a shared culture of care.

Ayana Zaire Cotton, Artist and Cultural Worker

MORE

BIOENGINEERS

We don't have enough biomanufacturing capacity or bioengineers around the world right now to design and produce biological interventions on the timeline that we need. Expanding the commons of biotechnological production capacity will be critical to accelerating our transition to a sustainable civilization.

Isaac Larkin, Postdoctoral Scientist at Abbott Labs

SYNBIO 2050

A new carbon cycle

I’m inspired by a scaled vision of circularity where we power biology with carbon emissions rather than biomass. This would allow us to clean up the environment while growing useful ingredients for food, materials and beyond. The future won’t be about copying nature, it will be about discovering a new nature. Designed and engineered by us, we will leave the destructive exploitation of the natural world behind to embrace a regenerative, abundant, healthier future on Earth.

Suzanne Lee, CEO & Founder of Biofabricate

R iprocity

Honoring reciprocity, even at the molecular level, deepens our awareness of ourselves and our relationships with other living beings, human and non-human, both within and beyond the lab. The future success of synthetic biology depends on the ability of science to flourish alongside all species—a technology designed with and for nature.

Taylor Rayne, Undergraduate Student at Quest University

Alexa Garcia is a proud Trinbagonian, trained bioengineer, and dedicated abolitionist. They are currently the Associate Editor of Grow

Jee-ook Choi is an illustrator based in Seoul. In her work she paints worlds through the arrangement of unfamiliar things.

THE FUTURE OF THE FIELD

What development will be most influential in determining the future course of synthetic biology?

kcaB ot Fehtturu e Backtothe FutureBackt o t eh erutuF

Intertwining Indigenous knowledge with synthetic biology to restore Hawai‘i’s ecology

By Keolu Fox and Cliff Kapono

Art by Tiare Ribeaux and Qianqian Ye

Waste is a luxury. It’s an excess you can only a ord by ignoring its cost. At the societal level, that cost is an unsustainable future. As is true for many island nations occupied by industrial powers, Hawai‘i’s production of waste is growing exponentially.

Fifty generations ago, pre-contact islanders living in the most remote archipelago on Earth struggled to imagine an industrial structure that takes from one energy system without replenishing another. eir usual world of transoceanic voyaging, island-scale agriculture, and sustainable shing practices relied on resources owing cyclically. ey understood that mismanaging those nite resources, even slightly, could collapse the entire ecosystem. At least for humans.

Today in the Pu‘uloa (Pearl Harbor) region of the island of O‘ahu, U.S. military o cials are scrambling to address the sudden release of thousands of gallons of jet fuel in the drinking water system serving multiple military bases. As it turns out, 80-year-old tanks at a fuel storage facility in Kapūkak ī, known today as Red Hill, have been leaking petroleum contaminants into O‘ahu’s single most important freshwater aquifer for decades. It’s a public health crisis: Dozens of residents have reported “unexplained illness.” And though critics of the government have rightly pinned the blame on the military, they’ve yet to o er a solution.

Red Hill’s jet fuel problem dates back to the Roosevelt administration in the aftermath of World War II. O‘ahu’s above-ground fuel storage tanks at Pearl Harbor were vulnerable to attack. The administration was concerned, and in 1943 they built an even bigger underground facility that would be safe from an enemy aerial attack. The Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility holds 250 million gallons of fuel and supports the lion’s share of U.S. military operations in the Pacific. Discussion is underway to remove the fuel from these underground tanks and prevent further contamination to water sources within its proximity.

As global custodians, proponents of circular economics, and Indigenous futurists, we believe it would make more sense to reduce, reuse, recycle, and repurpose the Red Hill jet and ship fuel complex to empower climate resilience in the Pacific. Rather than leaving Red Hill as a rusting vestige, a memorial of the military industrial complex, we ask what opportunities might lie ahead for synthetic biology in the Pacific.

The history of industrial waste in Hawai‘i tells us about the problem, but the history of Hawai‘i before industrial waste can inform the solution. What happens when ancestral lessons collide with groundbreaking advances in synthetic biology? For Hawaiians to overcome the industrial structures that wreck our ecosystem, we must look to new ways of fusing technology with Indigenous futurism.

The Spoils of War

Industrial-scale pollution follows colonial violence. The first scrap of industrial pollution landing on Hawaiian soil was probably a cannon ball, or maybe a stray musket ball, discharged by a Royal Navy o cer shortly after the arrival of HMS Resolution and Discovery and Captain James Cook in 1778. Over the next few hundred years, industrial-scale pollution accumulated, threatening the health, life, and safety of one of the most biodiverse places on our planet. King Kamehameha I, the founder and first ruler of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i, was one of the f irst Indigenous futurists in Hawai‘i’s post-contact history. Kamehameha is credited with recognizing the potential of emerging technologies like steel and gunpowder. He had cannons installed on his wa‘a, or voyaging canoe. And his embracing of technology empowered the community to fulf ill the prophecy of his birth—unifying the Hawaiian Islands.

Later, in 1887, King David Kal ā kaua would be forced to sign a new treaty at gunpoint, in an attempt to undermine Native Hawaiian sovereignty. This document would be nicknamed the “Bayonet Constitution.” The guns surrounding Kal ā kaua on that fateful day belonged to members of volunteer militias nicknamed the “Honolulu Rifles,” comprising largely white settlers. Kal ā kaua’s sister and successor as monarch, Queen Lili‘uokalani, later speculated that Kal ā kaua would have been killed had he not signed the new constitution. No industrial pollution, no Bayonet Constitution, no illegal overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i.

Other heinous acts of violence on the Hawaiian islands include bombing one of Hawai‘i’s lesser-known islands, Kaho‘olawe. In 1965, the U.S. Navy conducted experiments to determine the blast resistance of ships. Three tests off the coast of Kaho‘olawe subjected the island and a target ship to massive explosions, with 500 tons of TNT repeatedly detonated on the island near the target ship. The warship was damaged, but not sunk. Kaho‘olawe, on the other hand,

Ka Wai Ola, Ola Hou envisions petroleum remediation, transformation, and restoration of water and soil at Kap ū kak ī (Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility) and Pu‘uloa (Pearl Harbor).

suffered a crack in the caprock, causing its groundwater to vanish into the ocean and making it uninhabitable to this day.

Sixty-three years after Hawai‘i’s statehood, that legacy continues. For example, the Rim of the Pacific Exercise, the world’s largest international maritime warfare exercise, leaves industrial-scale pollution in its (literal) wake during June and July every other year in the waters in and around Hawai‘i. RIMPAC decimates pristine ecosystems throughout the Pacific with anti-submarine ballistics, amphibious operations, humanitarian assistance training, missile shots, and ground force drills.

On the Big Island of Hawai‘i, non-military institutions also pollute the landscape on an enormous scale. Since 1970, elite research institutions like Harvard, the University of California system, NASA, and the Smithsonian Institution have built 13 massive observatories on top of Mauna Kea, the most sacred site in Native Hawaiian culture. Native Hawaiians have opposed each one for both cultural and environmental reasons. Today, several of those 13 telescopes are defunct, due to wear and tear, planned obsolescence, and to make space for newer, larger telescopes like the state’s planned Thirty-Meter Telescope. In the interim these vestigial technologies are dilapidated, rusting observational turrets leaching harmful heavy metal contaminants into the largest freshwater resource on the Big Island one of the most biodiverse islands on our planet.

The artillery, the war-game shrapnel, the telescopes, and the fuel tanks will all outlive their users. Their environmental footprint can’t vanish without human intervention. Red Hill’s fuel tanks offer an opportunity to rewrite the legacy of Hawai‘i’s industrial waste.

Imagine Red Hill’s industrial waste as a potential source of climate resilience. The jet fuel complex could find renewed use as a “bio-mine” to identify bacteria that have the potential to digest petroleum-based jet fuels into environmentally friendly byproducts.

This reimagining of Red Hill builds on our ancestors’ deep relationship with the ‘ā ina, or land. It’s an ancient relationship rooted in industrial

symbiosis a relationship that has yielded thousands of years of abundance and innovation, in the form of technology that is simultaneously sustainable and invisible to the casual onlooker.

2 Ahupua‘a Advice

To understand what the problem of Red Hill offers Hawai‘i, it helps to peer deeper into the island’s past. Over the course of 1,200 years, Hawaiians developed unique horticulture technology and governance strategies based on strati f ied Ahupua‘a land divisions. These divisions fed snow melt to terraced taro patches through irrigation routes. They provided valuable bacteria and phytonutrients to creatures in fish ponds and allowed those fish to populate the inner reef system and, once mature, the Pacific Ocean. These vertically integrated systems were highly organized and politically complex to produce zero waste. They supported a huge labor force and provided a sustainable supply of food for the population.

In the 15th century, Chief ‘Umi-a-L ī loa, son of the great High Chief L ī loa, disgusted by lawless governance of land, took control and began dividing it into sustainable land divisions. According to evidence from oral histories, the Chief divided the land based on natural geographical boundaries to promote order and peace. Each land division was governed by a trusted chief. These slices of the island, or ahupua‘a (named after the severed pig heads used to delineate their boundaries) generally ran from the top of the local mountain (mauka) to the shore of the ocean (makai), and followed the boundary of stream drainage.

Each level of the Ahupua‘a system was sustainably cultivated and maintained. Remains of fish were used to enhance soil as fertilizer and went to supercharge meadows of sweet potatoes waste from one realm powered another. The key was connectivity, balance, and circularity.

This concept known as “industrial symbiosis” is now a mainstay of urban planning almost everywhere in the world. Think building a Dutch cookie bakery next to the Heineken brewery byproducts such as yeast flow seamlessly

What happens when ancestral lessons collide

from one building to the next, reducing waste while enabling the creation of delicious croissants and vats of beer. In the 1950s, scarcity of resources worldwide and an increase in commodity prices resulted in demand for more circular approaches to production in Denmark. The town of Kalundborg reimagined the exchange of materials, water, and energy streams between commercial partners in its city. Today, Kalundborg has increased resilience and strengthened its economic systems, all the while reducing the environmental impact and expenses, resulting in a surplus of 24 million euros every year.

Our planet is covered by an unfathomable number of microorganisms that have colonized nearly every ecosystem. Some microbes have found ways to survive in systems that are yet to be discovered by humankind. It is here that our Hawaiian heritage and scientific training come together, for our ancestors were early practitioners of what is now called industrial symbiosis and industrial ecology.

“I ka wā ma mua, ka wā ma hope” as we take advice from our ancestors, we look to our past for solutions that couple industrial symbiosis, circular economics, and synthetic biology to promote climate resilience.

fabrics, and materials that could be engineered to receive wind and steady masts that enabled the greatest voyages in human history. Medicinal plants and gourds functioned as containers to hold fresh water, maintaining our health and well-being. Canoe plants and their genomes were shaped over time through natural selection, preservation, and domestication. They were the key components for the technology that enabled our ancestors to discover some of the most remote places on Earth. And the first thing our k ūpuna did when they arrived was introduce them in the soil to ensure our survival.

Think of Hawai‘i’s microbes as “canoe microbes.” The microbial world around us warrants the same level of care and attention as our ancestors’ canoe plants. Red Hill’s enormous fuel tanks on O‘ahu are a vestige of our islands’ colonial past, present, and future. Yet with these canoe microbes in mind, Red Hill’s failing infrastructure its waste is an opportunity. At the time of writing, 250 million-gallon fuel tanks at Kapū kak ī are being drained of jet fuel. But the next steps for the complex are unclear.

3

“Eat What Get”

It wasn’t long ago that our ancestors arrived on wa‘a, double-hulled voyaging canoes, from Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands, toting life-sustaining plants. Those “canoe plants” had edible roots, leaves, and fruits. Others could make cordage,

In the spirit of industrial symbiosis and innovation, we believe that the empty fuel tanks and soil surrounding the tanks should become what we like to think of as a series of bio-mines, like the canoes which our ancestors filled with life-changing plants. Extreme ecosystems will force microbes within the area to learn how to survive off of what is available. In modern science, we call these creatures “extremophiles.” In Hawaiian, there is a saying that we often “eat what get.” Extremophiles eat what get. They evolve to consume substances that otherwise kill most organisms elsewhere.

with groundbreaking advances in synthetic biology?

H ā nau Hou depicts growth, renewal, and resilience through honoring our ancestors, Pelehonuamea, at the foot of Pu‘u O‘o crater on Hawai‘i Island. Extremophiles for healing are embedded in the landscape.

The soil bacteria surrounding and within the Kapuk ā k ī fuel tanks likely include native extremophiles. Because bacteria are single-celled organisms that reproduce at a fast rate, they have the capacity to evolve rapidly over time, in comparison to animals. By subsisting in extreme environments and accumulating mutations in their genomes, these bacteria produce new versions of themselves that reflect the biological niches they inhabit that includes niches where jet fuel has been leaking into soil over the course of 80 years in Kapuk ā k ī .

Biologists could sequence the DNA of these microbes to identify key biological mechanisms useful for the world. For example, fuel-eating extremophiles could contain genetic secrets that help remedy large-scale oil spills around the world. Within the genomes of these highly specialized beings lie clues about how to turn our waste into viable and sustainable energy sources.

We may recognize some of the culprits from elsewhere. For example, a fungus discovered in 2020, Pisolithus arhizus (dead man’s foot), lives in a Yellowstone geyser and contains a bacterium that consumes fossil fuels. Scientists are still learning about P. arhizus and how its microbiome actually works: One theory is that microbes inside are able to consume the toxic junk, such as arsenic, inside the fungus and convert it into energy. Fungi like this offer a world of opportunities for waste remediation. However, less than 1% of the estimated 4 million fungi that exist on our planet have had their genomes characterized let alone the multitudes of bacteria that live symbiotically within them leaving us to wonder what other secrets remain undiscovered.

Hawai‘i can also benefit from characterizing native bacteria locally. Our bacteria represent a wealth of untapped information. For example, fumaroles are openings in or near volcanoes that spew out hot sulfurous gases. These ancient toxic heat vents provide an ideal heat and moisture regimen for extremophiles. On the Island of Hawai‘i, fumaroles are scattered across the southeastern portion as a result of volcanic activity from K ī lauea Crater and Pu’u ‘Ō’ō Vent. These local canoe microbes might provide valuable insights

He Wai E Mana re-envisions our water systems as they connect and give life within Lo‘i Kalo and Ahupua‘a systems, located at He‘eia, Kā ne‘ohe (Kā ko‘o ‘ Ō iwi).

into complex chemical procedures for the metabolism or digestion of harmful chemicals and waste products, like jet fuel and plastic.

Scientists recently discovered a bacterium called Ideonella sakaiensis 201-F6, an extremophile capable of metabolizing plastics like polyethylene terephthalate (PET). PET is one of the most commonly used plastics in the water bottle industry. This extremophile can metabolize it and convert it into fuel such as methane gas or other less environmentally harmful natural gases that can be used as energy resources. If we harness this genetic superpower, we can help turn wasted resources into alternative energy.

We could alter the genomes of canoe microbes that are collected in the soil surrounding the leaky tanks at the Kapuk ā k ī bio-mine. The site could enhance the hydrocarbon-eating potential to restore our aquifer, benefit other spill sites around the world, and deter capitalist bio-prospectors by simultaneously protecting the intellectual property for our community, all the while feeding our new synthetic biology based circular economy. At Red Hill, this vision of an Indigenous future could operate at an unprecedented scale.

Red Hill’s environmental crisis gives us the opportunity to dream about an enormous bioreactor the size of the fuel tank complex all 250 million gallons of it. Bioreactors are vessels that house a chemical process involving organisms or biochemically active substances derived from those organisms. Each tank in this bioreactor could stand 250 feet tall (enough volume for each to store within it the Aloha Tower) with 20 tanks total.

This scale would make it the largest bioreactor in the Pacific. We could fill it with a variety of locally sourced genome-edited canoe bacteria, similar to I. sakaiensis bacteria that consume plastics. A bioreactor of this scale could metabolize all

79,000 tonnes of plastic in the Great Paci f ic Garbage Patch in less than a year. All that mess, gone in a year.

4

An Indigenous Future

Our community has historically resisted biological technologies. Hawai‘i is home to one of the most biodiverse ecosystems on planet Earth including 10 out of 14 climate zones, the largest variety of microclimates and soil profiles in the world , and every renewable energy resource known to humankind. Native Hawaiians want to protect that biodiversity, so we are cautious about introducing genetically modi f ied organisms and extremophile bacteria.

In 1992, when Cornell University and the State of Hawai‘i genetically modified rainbow papayas on the island, the Hawaiian community protested. The moment resulted in multiple international anti-GMO campaigns and the f irst national GMO labeling law. In 2009, researchers at the University of Hawai‘i, Manoa attempted to sequence the genomes of taro, or kalo, which many in the Native Hawaiian community believe to be one of our first ancestors. That didn’t go well. Our community protested GMO crops including taro and lobbied for new laws that would have prohibited the creation of “genetically engineered and recombinant DNA taro” making it unlawful for “any person to test, propagate, cultivate, raise, plant, grow, introduce, or release genetically engineered or recombinant DNA kalo.”

Any effort to introduce genetically modified organisms to Hawai‘i must take great care to respect the cultural and historical context. But that need for caution does not negate the technology’s potential. As Native Hawaiians and biologists, we are prepared to work with our community to offer culturally sustainable options and build consensus around solutions in-line with Native Hawaiian values, community aspirations, and the mo‘oleo, or history of horticulture and the introduction of new species in the Pacific.

One way to build consensus amongst our community is to provide a platform for our community

to envision the future. What is the future they want to see? We should work with our community to center the scientific questions we would like to prioritize: How would you like to use synthetic biology to protect or maintain our ‘āina and moana? This way, we can work toward community-driven solutions to these challenges, imagining futures grounded in collaboration, decolonization, and Indigenous resurgence.

People generally imagine the future in the language of capitalism by focusing on quarterly earnings rather than forecasting the future of sustainability; prioritizing extraction, exponential growth, and optimizing every system and relationship for profit including our relationship with the natural world.

Indigenous futurism, on the other hand, offers an opportunity to imagine our future based on Indigenous value systems: trading a linear or exponential trajectory for a circular one rooted in industrial symbiosis and sustainability. Indigenous peoples are, after all, original environmental stewards with 10,000 years of experience. An Indigenous future can imagine a world without waste.

Red Hill should be only the beginning. Hawai‘i’s dilapidated sugar mills can become biodigesters. Industrial dump sites can become research labs aimed at discovering waste-reducing extremophiles. Methylacidiphilum fumariolicum , for example, is an acid-loving microbe discovered in volcanic mud; Deinococcus radiodurans is an extremophile capable of digesting uranium found in nuclear waste sites. Imagine deconstructing abandoned military bases, coastal armories, and barracks and recycling the remnants into the bedrock for artificial reef systems. O ff shore oil rigs could be repurposed for the foundation of artificial islands for climate crisis refugees to practice and revitalize their cultures and futures.

As we reimagine our relationship with the waste of war and our war with waste we have the potential to refurbish abandoned industrial infrastructure in colonized nations around the world, to live in harmony with the ‘ā ina and the moana, just like our k ūpuna did long before the military arrived.

Keolu Fox is cofounder of the Native BioData Consortium and Assistant Professor at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where he is cofounder and co-director of the UCSD Indigenous Futures Institute. He is the first Kā naka Maoli to receive a doctorate in genome sciences.

Cliff Kapono is a professional surfer, chemist, and journalist with a PhD in Chemistry. Born on the eastern shores of Hawai‘i, his life involves equal parts science and surf. While contributing several peer-reviewed publications to the field of molecular bioscience, he has also produced a handful of award-winning films that discuss Indigenous activism, ocean conservation, global food security, and virtual reality.

Tiare Ribeaux is a Kanaka ‘ Ō iwi filmmaker, artist, and writer based between Honolulu and Oakland. Her work explores the interface of our human bodies with different technologies and the environment, while imagining more regenerative futures through a Hawaiian lens.

Qianqian Ye is a Chinese artist, creative technologist, and educator based in Los Angeles. Trained as an architect, she creates digital, physical, and social spaces exploring issues around gender, immigrants, power, and technology.

A bioreactor of this scale could metabolize all 79,000 tonnes of plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in less than a year.

All that mess, gone in a year.

Some things aren’t supposed to work

By Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu Illustrations by Debora Cheyenne Cruchon

1

THE PAST

The eternal circle of gold was what first drew him to her. A golden loop, dangling large and shimmering from her left ear, beckoned him. Soon he noticed her red cowl-neck sweater, the full-blown afro he would only know later was very di cult to maintain, the tartan skirt, the light-brown skin, the curved corner of her mouth. But what had begun it all was the eternal circle of gold.

The hall was packed with hundreds of students brought together by a poster.

Do you want to build a better future? Do you want to see more tolerance in the world? We want to start a conversation. Join us! Albert Hall, Tuesday, May 24 at 2:30pm.

Such a poster could not help but attract the attention and saviorism of people in their early twenties. He was one of many, but through all those bodies, all those colors, all those languages, he still clearly made out the eternal circle of gold.

It took him some time to notice the bald head, the workman’s boots and the blue overalls made of real drill material heavy, thick, protective sitting next to her. They turned their head and watched him approach. As he returned their gaze, he felt that something was incomplete about them somehow. They seemed to be…searching.

He sat down right next to the red cowl-neck sweater, the full-blown afro, the tartan skirt, the light-brown skin, the curved corner of the mouth and introduced himself. Caught by surprise, she turned to face him, and, before she could think of doing otherwise, offered her name: Maggie. He

looked past her and pretended not to notice the mixture of provocation and resentment in her friend’s gaze. He looked back at Maggie and, from that moment on, only had eyes for her. At least that’s how he would choose to remember it.

Over the PA system, a ‘Best Folk Revival Songs’ CD played softly while the last stragglers filed in. Odetta sang Maybe She Go, Lead Belly sang The Gallis Pole , Miriam Makeba sang Qongqothwane. Maggie’s friend sang along to all the songs... all the songs...fluently tongue-clicking along to Makeba’s Xhosa in a way that made Maggie turn back to them, impressed. Mercifully, just then, the hall's stereo system was turned off and the voices faded to a murmur.

A lab coat handed out slips of paper. The slip he received read: “You are a devout Muslim male patient presenting with abdominal pain. Your doctor is female.” He understood; whoever had brought them here wanted them to act. He was a drama student; he would do well at this. He could certainly play a Muslim man; many people who saw him thought he was from the Middle East.

“What is this?” he heard Maggie’s friend say. From the corner of his eye, he watched them flip their slip of paper over. “Cultural exchanges,” they said. He turned his slip of paper over, and it also had the words Cultural Exchanges printed on it. “How is this a cultural exchange?” they asked, loud enough for the lab coats to hear.

“It’s a way of enabling future doctors to have e ffective exchanges with diverse patients,” the

nearest lab coat responded.

“Black woman. Seventeen. Unwanted pregnancy. History of abuse,” they read aloud. “You cannot make us do this. You cannot make us act out stereotypes.”

“We are not making you do anything,” another lab coat volunteered. “It would be nice if you joined us. We need more people like you. Students from developing countries are very helpful to our doctors. They teach us to better serve patients in these global times.”

“You’ve got one thing right,” they said. “You're perpetuating a history of abuse.”

During their protest, a disgruntled murmur rolled through the hall, several slips of paper were scrunched up, a few students headed for the door.

“We will, of course, compensate you for your participation,” a lab coat with dignified gray hair said in a soothing tone. Another lab coat with blond hair and honey in her voice named the price. It was a substantial amount for just talking to someone for an hour.

The disgruntled murmur quickly died down in the face of money.

Maggie’s friend stood up to leave. “I thought we were here to have a real conversation,” they said. Maggie placed a placating hand on their arm but did not stand up herself. They looked at her with disappointment, and then looked at him with that mixture of provocation and resentment, before marching out of the hall.

Maggie turned to look at him. He smiled at her and she smiled back. Someone always gets the girl, and he had known as soon as he saw that eternal circle of gold that it would be him. At least that's how he would choose to remember it.

He was with Maggie when he came across the thing that would change the course of his life. He would later wish that Maggie had not been there. Unfortunately, she had been there because, like him, she kept on being asked to come back for more conversations with future doctors. Every week other students would be culled for reasons that were hard to discern, but he and Maggie survived every cut, and he was certain that they would survive all future cuts, because he was such a great actor and she was so a ffable.

They were triumphantly walking back, hand in hand, from one of the Cultural Exchanges when a poster screamed at them: “DO YOU WANT TO LIVE FOREVER?” In that moment, with Maggie by his side, he had definitely wanted to live forever. After he tore off the first small rectangular strip of paper that had had to squeeze so much information on its tiny surface area: Live Forever Clinical Trials. Call 1-800-AGELESS he was happy to see Maggie tear one off too. He liked that she also felt the warmth of their togetherness, but, more than that, he liked how she had, in the short space of their knowing each other, started to follow his lead.

They suddenly appeared before him and Maggie, hands in the pockets of their overalls. The mixture of provocation and resentment swept over him but by the time their gaze landed on Maggie’s face it had transformed into a much softer look of deep hurt.

“Have you seen these posters anywhere else on campus?” they asked. He could not say that he had, and neither could Maggie. “And yet here, in the place where they have enticed us to do their so-called Cultural Exchanges with money they know most of us will never walk away from, as students from ‘developing countries,’ you cannot take five steps without being asked if you want to live forever.”

He knew they had been warning Maggie about this place the whole time. Now he had finally understood what they were searching for. The shaved head, the workman's boots, the blue overalls were all part of their search for a politics that could easily fit. He felt sorry for them, never considering that he too should have been searching for such a politics.

During the first day of clinical trials, the lab coat with dignified gray hair and the lab coat with blond hair and a honeyed voice told them all about cells and the things you could do to them:

reprogramming skin cells, refreshing older cells, rejuvenating old cells, flushing senescent cells out altogether. They learned that every cell contains lived experience; that this build-up could be flushed out too, rejuvenated, a blank slate ready for a new experience. It was the lab coat with the dignified gray hair that mentioned the price this time: more money than he had known what to do with at that stage of his life. The honeyed voice told the subjects that it was the least the lab coats could do given their invaluable contribution to the field of science. When the honeyed voice spoke of telomeres and teratomas, he appreciated the alliteration.

He and Maggie, along with a group of students from “developing countries,” walked past the bald head, the workman’s boots and the blue overalls every last Friday of the month, on their way to the clinical trials. They had become a one-person silent protest called B.A.R.E., which sounded very enticing until you realized that it stood for Blacks Against Racial Erasure. They made their own

placards, which were cryptic at best: “Remember Tuskegee,” “Educate Yourself About Henrietta Lacks,” “Does The Name John Quier Mean Anything To You?” “Do Not Be The Saartjie Baartman To Albert Hall’s Georges Cuvier.”

Since they never said anything, just raised their fist, bowed their head and held up their placard, they were easy to ignore. Most of the students walked past them with their heads bowed as well. He also followed suit even though he was not sure why. Maggie was di fferent. Maggie always stopped to give them and their political cause a hug. On the day the Saartjie Baartman placard appeared, Maggie may have been crying. They may have been too. He didn’t know. He would never know. He strode on and slid back into the cold embrace of Albert Hall.

Certain things are not supposed to work. Things you find at the back of magazines, things you see advertised on television at 3 a.m., things you tear off in small rectangular strips these things are not supposed to work.

2THE PRESENT

He can't get the tone right. Thirteen takes yesterday and still...The line is simple enough: “I love you, Cosette. Please remember.” The action is simple enough: he needs to gently take the waif-thin, white-as-a-sheet hand of his kept woman and give it a tender squeeze. That part he does perfectly. It’s his vocal inflection that leads to the “Cut!” every time. Why can't he get it right? Perhaps he should try switching the lines: “Please remember. I love you, Cosette.” Yes, that has a better rhythm. It’s something he can roll off his tongue with more conviction. He feels better. Relaxes.

He’s in his trailer, a makeup artist applying the right amount of shading to his jawline to give it the definition that his fans have come to love, when he receives a call from Unknown. He looks at the screen for a beat…He has never received a call from Unknown on this number…Two beats… He has another number that is handled by his PA for that…Three beats…This must be a known Unknown. He picks up.

Without verifying that it’s him, Unknown says, “Something has happened to Maggie.” He recognizes the voice immediately. The last time

he heard it, it was saying, “The problem with color-blind casting is that it has the potential to erase real histories and lived experiences. I am all for creating opportunities for Black and Brown actors, but that should be in tandem with creating spaces and places for the stories of Black and Brown people to be told. It seems rather disingenuous to tell old stories in new colors.”

He wondered then if they would have said what they had said about color-blind casting if he had not accepted the role of Dorian St. Clair or rather if the role of Dorian St. Clair had not catapulted him to fame. They are now Dr. Somebody and their thoughts on race are highly sought-after. The hand in the fisted glove now writes academic essays and opinion pieces that appear in the best journals, magazines and newspapers. He often sees them on screens wearing very elaborate Ankara head wraps. They speak in the same breath about “Mama Africa” and cultural appropriation without even a hint of irony.

“Something has happened to Maggie,” they repeat. They sound as if they are cloaked in something heavy and drapey probably kente, mudcloth or indigo-dyed cotton.

He must have said things made plans because the next thing he knows he’s sitting in a private hospital room, looking at Maggie lying on a hospital bed. It shocks him to see that there is a stray strand of gray hair on her left temple. He hasn’t even begun to think of growing old.

“Cancer,” they say from where they stand looking out of the window. He tries to connect the word to the peaceful look on Maggie’s face. He cannot. “Caught just in time, they hope.”

He watches the gentle up…down, up…down, up…down movement of Maggie’s chest. He makes its rhythm his own. Breath. Life.

“You have makeup on your face,” they say as if it is the most natural place to arrive at after delivering bad news. Their back is still turned, their eyes still looking out of the window.

Who can remain so pointedly impersonal at a time like this, he wonders.

“I was on set when I received your call,” he explains.

“Dorian St. Clair,” they scoff. “Doesn’t it bother

you just a bit that you play an aristocrat that owns slaves?” They finally turn to face him. There it is that mixture of provocation and resentment. No…No, that’s not quite right, it’s a look of utter derision and disappointment. Could it be that he has always misinterpreted that look?

“Some Blacks owned slaves,” he utters the line that has been readied for such criticism.

“Blacks did many, many things,” they say, sitting down opposite him on the other side of the hospital bed. “And yet the most popular show for the past five years has been one in which a Black actor, playing an aristocrat, owns slaves. Do you ever wonder who it’s for?”

“It’s fiction. Entertainment.” Another ready line.

“It is representation,” they say as they gently take Maggie’s hand in theirs.

There is a silence that neither of them is eager to break.

“She loved you, you know,” they eventually say, offering a rare olive branch.

“I know. I loved I love her too.”

“You completely exhausted her, left her almost good for nothing.” It has been a short-lived truce.

“It took me a while to find my feet.”

Even he knows that this is not the whole truth. Ten years is certainly not just “a while.” It had been di cult to find a job. He had the right ‘look’ tall, lean, handsome, square-jawed, his features in perfect symmetry. He had the right name it had the touch of the exotic without sounding too foreign. But he had the wrong country of origin people struggled to pronounce its name and correctly place it on the atlases they carried in their minds. Because of this casting directors worried that audiences would have diculty “connecting” with him. It didn’t seem to help that they thought he spoke English very well. Luckily for him, his agent believed that he had ‘it’ and stuck with him, sending him out for role after role until Dorian St. Clair came along.

“This is not the future we imagined, is it?” they say as they give Maggie’s hand a tender squeeze.

Was the future they had in mind ever the same one? He highly doubts it.

“You know, you look exactly like you did in university,” they say, really looking at him for the first time since he arrived.

He smiles at this and by some miracle they smile back. He is momentarily lost within their emotional landscape.

“There is that amazing portrait she did of you, you know the one,” they say, still smiling, and he realizes that the smile was never directed at him but at something beautiful that Maggie had created.

He knows the one. He loved that portrait not because it was of him as a young man but because Maggie had done amazing things with these symbols in the background. The symbols had been inspired by Vodun and Vodou iconography veve, she had called them. The portrait was not of himhim but of his shadow self, which somehow seemed more like him-him than he did. It was a nod to a very famous Harlem Renaissance artist, Maggie had explained. He no longer remembers the name of the artist.

Everyone who saw that painting loved it and those who had money in their pockets wanted to buy it, but Maggie would never part with it. When someone had offered what amounted to five years’ worth of rent for it, he had tried his best to persuade her to sell it. Understanding that he would probably never land the role that would allow them to live comfortably, he had tried to reason with her, reminding her how hard it was being a waiter when you wanted to be something else. Maggie had not liked the implication that spending her days in their loft doing what she loved in order to provide for them did not come with its own particular strain.

“You could always paint another just like it,” he had said, trying to coax and convince her but ending up doing something else instead.

“What exactly is it that you think I do?” she had asked.

“You paint...brilliantly.”

It was only when she shook her head and mirthlessly chuckled that he realized that those were not the words she had wanted to hear.

“You have no idea, do you?” she had said. “Emotional work is work!”

She had picked up the portrait and turned so sharply that one of its edges had gone through a window. She had not turned around to look at the broken pieces, and instead immediately started collecting all the belongings she had accumulated in their thirteen years together. He had left the shards of glass unexamined and uncollected until the day he moved into a much cheaper, smaller apartment. The call about Dorian St. Clair came three months later.

“You look exactly like you did in university,” they repeat, but this time there’s no smile in their voice.

He looks at the stray strand of gray hair on Maggie’s left temple before his eyes meet theirs. He was right the first time: it’s a mixture of provocation and resentment but now it is clouded by something like defeat.

“What the hell happened to Maggie,” they whisper.

He is searching for the right words but can’t find them. There was a lot of talk about cells and about doing various things to them, he remembers that. There was that moment of wonderful alliteration, he remembers that. There was his absolute conviction that the liberal compensation would bring about the perfect future for him and Maggie, he remembers that. There was the use of hormones to regenerate his thymus, an organ in the immune system if they could turn back the clock there, perhaps his aging would slow. That’s what they had done to him, but what exactly had they done to Maggie?

Certain things are not supposed to work. Things you find at the back of magazines, things you see advertised on television at 3 a.m., things you tear off in small rectangular strips these things are not supposed to work.

THE FUTURE

They will have made a daughter together Maggie and them. He will only find this out at the funeral. He will stare at Maggie’s body lying lifeless in the co n and wonder what they would have made together Maggie and him.

He will have no idea what has happened in their life over the past eighteen years because by then he will already have decided to cut ties with them, and, by extension, Maggie; because by then they will have said in one of those contentious us-versus-them, no-gray-areas debates that were the order of the day back then “Dorian St. Clair has done as much for Black performers as D.W. Gri th’s The Birth of a Nation .” It had been an extreme attack at a time when he was feeling particularly vulnerable. They had just married Maggie and he had not been invited to the wedding not that he would have gone. He had tried to take the higher road and sent them a text which expressed a magnanimity that he certainly did not feel: “Congratulations! Someone always gets the girl.” They had replied during their wedding, “Maggie was already a woman when we met her.” Who responds to a text during their wedding? he had wondered.

By the time of the funeral, it will have occurred to him that The Birth of a Nation comment had not been a response to his portrayal of Dorian St. Clair, but rather to the fact that the Post-Race International Movement (PRIM) had started not only funding his show (the entertainment industry had always had strange bedfellows) but also calling for the dismantling of positions like theirs at universities and many universities

had started heeding the call (academia, too, had always had strange bedfellows). At the time, though, he had been sure that they had said what they did because they had never forgiven him for drawing Maggie away from the bald head, the workman’s boots and the blue overalls and towards the poster with its too easily torn off fringes.

At the funeral, they will be generous enough to allow him to sit with them in front, the previously unknown daughter between them. Growing old will have had a mellowing effect on them, or maybe it will have been the being loved by Maggie for so many years.

He will be aware that, while he only has eyes for Maggie and her shocking head of white hair, most of the people in the funeral parlor only have eyes for him. There would have been a time when the people would have looked at him because he was Dorian St. Clair, but he will not have been Dorian St. Clair for almost ten years now and so they will be looking at him because he is the man who will live forever.

He will not live forever, of course. Barring any accident, the lab coats say, he could make it up to 150 years old. The lab coats suspect that he will eventually begin to show signs of aging, even though it’s unclear what those will be. The lab coats will wonder no, they will not like that word they will speculate, hypothesize, theorize about whether the aging process will manifest itself physically or mentally in him, if at all. They will watch no, that’s another word they will not like they will monitor, study, observe him

morning, noon, and night. They will check his vitals, run tests, make him do various activities and record everything: the genome and epigenome excised from samples of tissue; the levels of antioxidants and oxidants; the e cacy of methods that accelerate and decelerate the aging process; the response of his cells to physical, chemical and biological agents; the creation and presence of possible endogenous threats; the new identities of his rejuvenated cells; the accumulation (or lack) of genetic damage. To maintain this level of care, the lab coats will visit his home in shifts, trying to understand how and why he is one of the first people in the world for whom this course of gene therapy has been successful.

The lab coats will eventually outnumber his fans. No one will have said it not the network executives, not the showrunner, not his agent, not his fans, not his detractors but he will know that at some point it had become odd, too uncanny, perhaps even somewhat off-putting to watch a man not age. In an act of desperation, he will dye his hair, but that will only make the situation worse somehow.

At the funeral, he will look at them with their naturally graying hair, their still-smooth but softly sagging skin under the eyes, around the mouth, under the chin which will make everything old seem new again. He will watch as a tear travels down these gentrified parts of their face. He never will have thought them beautiful before this moment; he will think them beautiful for the rest of his life.

Something else will catch his eye. The eternal circle of gold, dangling large and shimmering from the previously unknown daughter’s left ear. An inheritance. He will remember having been drawn to that loop, drawn into Maggie. He will also remember the bald head, the workman’s boots and the overalls. He will remember Maggie

always running to give them and their political cause a hug. He will remember the searching and will wonder if it had been his all along. He will remember a warmth of which he will not be sure he was ever really a part.

“You think those clinical trials are responsible for what has happened to Maggie?” he will ask them as they both watch the co n being lowered into the ground.

“I think this is how and where we all end up,” they will say calmly as they let fresh earth fall from their hand and dust the co n. The previously unknown daughter will do likewise, and he will follow suit. The previously unknown daughter will smile at him and take his dusty hand in hers. Again, he will wonder what he and Maggie could have made together. There is a loss he will feel as a sharp pain that cuts at a very particular angle, forcing him to ask himself questions that he will never have answers to.

“You will join us at the house,” they will say. “A little gathering of those who knew and loved her.” The mixture of provocation and resentment will have gone because old eyes only carry hope in the rightness of rain.

The house will be cozy and lived-in and have an inviting smell, like whatever is cooked there has been passed down from generation to generation curried goat, jerk chicken, oxtail stew, pepperpot. It is only then, while enveloped by that comforting smell, that he’ll let himself cry. The lab coats will try to enter the home because even in that moment they will be monitoring his vitals and know that something is not quite right with him. They, the one-person protest, will deny the lab coats entry and he will be grateful.

Afterwards, when he has cried his private tears, they will allow him to stay the longest, to be the last guest to leave. They will hand him something as he walks out the door. “Maggie wanted you to have this,” they will say. It will be Maggie’s portrait of him as a young man, but not as he will have remembered it. Its background will be a plain beige, there will be no iconography. His shadowy likeness, however, will be as he remembers it, unchanged.

“She said she painted this in the style of a famous Harlem Renaissance artist,” he will say.

He will know that in the past his not remembering the name of the artist would have led to some kind of confrontation, but now they will only sigh and say, “Aaron Douglas.”

He will be thankful that they have been generous and kind to him all day, and seeing this as an opening to be fully understood, he will say, “Dorian St. Clair was just a character I played on a show on a streaming service.”

“I know, but while you were playing him, who was playing you?” they will say as they give him a hug. He will realize that it is the first time that they have touched in their long knowing of each other. Understanding travels both ways.

The lab coats will already have opened the car door as he walks away from their well-lit veranda. He will hesitate, raise his free hand, the one not carrying the misremembered portrait, and wave. They will wave back. Maggie will have come and gone and left both of them standing, one of them older and wiser, the other hopefully changing.

Before he joins the lab coats in the car, he will look back at them parent and child just in time to see the eternal circle of gold catch the light and glimmer.

“Veve,” he will hear them say to their daughter as they lead her back into the house and shut the door behind them.

Certain things are not supposed to work. Things you find at the back of magazines, things you see advertised on television at 3 a.m., things you tear off in small rectangular strips these things are not supposed to work.

But then again certain things are meant to work and they work beautifully.

Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu is a Zimbabwean writer, scholar and filmmaker. She is the author of the critically-acclaimed and award-winning novels The Theory of Flight (2018) and The History of Man (2020), as well as the forthcoming The Quality of Mercy . She is a 2022 recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize.

Debora Cheyenne Cruchon is a multidisciplinary artist based in Marseille, France. They explore themes of spirituality, philosophy, and sensuality through bold shapes and colors in their visual arts practice.

By Davian Ho Art by Alice Yuan Zhang

Down to Earth

Keeping up with climate news makes for a punishing existence. What are you supposed to do with the knowledge that each day in July sets a new temperature record, that coastal cities will become uninhabitable, and that our entrenched political parties no longer even pretend to o er hope of adequate solutions?

Hopelessness may seem like a natural response to this it might even seem radical but in the long run, on a mass scale, it just feeds the self-ful lling prophecy of climate dystopia. Succumb to it fully and you become part of the problem.

Perhaps, then, we’ve been doing it all wrong. Instead of doom-scrolling, we should be devoting our mental energies to imagining alternative outcomes. Having hope is what’s actually radical.

If this resonates with you, then the world in “Dear Alice,” the Chobani ad that recently electri ed a sci- subculture called Solarpunk, might too. After a fan edited out every brand label on the milk and yogurt products being advertised, it revealed a stunning vision for a future lying underneath: people living in a rolling, green landscape powered by renewable energy, under a new social order that successfully averted climate change.

To achieve the future it advertises, synthetic biology must reimagine itself

Adherents of Solarpunk believe that their movement could be the catalyst of such a paradigm shift. The term “Solarpunk” was coined in 2008 by a blogger suggesting a new literary genre, building on steampunk and centered around technologies like wind and solar power. It would go on to inspire a new popular aesthetic, and resonate through a growing list of art pieces, novels, and films (even ones that preceded the term’s coining, like Hayao Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky). The questions it asks “What does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there?” have grown to encompass a generation’s response to climate change. Against the pervasive cynicism and despair, Solarpunk invites us to imagine a future worth fighting for.

The first part of that invitation (“What does a sustainable civilization look like?”) is easier to imagine: humans make friends again with the natural world; fossil fuels are replaced by bountiful solar and wind energy; urban cityscapes and robotics mesh cleanly with a green and verdant world; we all become happy gardeners. The second clause (“how do we get there?”) has proven more elusive. One thing most adherents can agree on is the rejection of capitalism, the root cause of ecological cataclysm, and an embrace of anarcho-socialism and other forms of community building. There are also signs of a widespread preference for farm-to-table permaculture and handmade crafts.

The proposed transitional solutions adopting sustainable energy, urban gardening, and a general return to life before industrialization are optimistic. And still, they are simply not enough to defeat climate change and the systems that created it on their own. Solarpunk writers and artists often imagine cities rising from hills as an extension of native ecology. This kind of soft utopia leaves out what kind of technology, if any, could balance our human bioload with the ecosystem outdoors. The amount of livestock we raise currently outnumbers wildlife tenfold. Art that envisions skyscrapers intertwined with trees and gardens seems to imply that the only thing standing between us and an ecological life is better landscaping. Solarpunk starts with optimism,

justice, and post-capitalism, and ends with a radically sustainable world. The only little thing missing is a roadmap that could take us from one to the other.

Seizing on the enthusiasm surrounding Solarpunk, green technology companies have proposed their own technologies as the missing steps between climate dystopia and Solarpunk utopia. Synthetic biologists, who share the Solarpunks’ preference for the messiness of natural life, have done this with particular zeal. The CEO of the company that funds this magazine has tweeted: “Synthetic biology will give us a Solarpunk future and I’m here for it.”

This shouldn’t be seen as just a cynical ploy, but also a recognition of shared interests. Biological problems how to feed a planet, how to save the oceans, how to face ecological upheaval will certainly require biological solutions. Synthetic biology could have a lot to contribute to a radically sustainable world.

Born from genetic circuits and metaphors about programming biology, the young mega-industry is beginning to make a practical impact. In replacing fossil fuel products with eco-friendly alternatives, many of its startups champion ideas for new biotech in the f ight against climate change. And yet, on its current trajectory, synbio is not taking us to a Solarpunk destination. Practitioners in the field who are serious about contributing to a radically di fferent future one where our desires, our technology, and our reality converge on the same timeline should be doing all they can to push their industry to reevaluate its priorities. To meet the needs of the natural world, and the humans who live there, synthetic biology must modify itself.

1

What if we could grow everything?

In the early 2000’s, making cheaper biofuel was the first obvious commercial application of gene editing. Dozens of new startups dedicated themselves to creating yeast or E. coli that could turn sugar into oil. But come 2014, plummeting gas

prices drove many of these businesses into the ground. Some companies were able to survive by pivoting away to making other products, like perfume. Petroleum, of course, is more than fuel— it’s also the raw material for everything from plastics to pigments. Today, you can pack for a backcountry skiing trip with alternatives made by biology. Wonder Alpine is a new winter sports line that makes equipment from algae-based bioplastic. Thanks to genetically modified fungi, you can moisturize with vegan collagen lotion, keep warm with a parka spun from microbe “brewed” silk proteins, and grab plant-based burgers and milkshakes that taste like the real thing.

One lesson from the heyday of biofuels is the di culty of turning biological inventions into a practical product. One way for new companies to survive is to start with high-end targets, buying time and experience for how to go mainstream. Last year, UPSIDE Food’s cell-cultured chicken debuted not in freezer-aisle dino nuggets, but at Atelier Crenn, a three Michelin-star restaurant in San Francisco. Meanwhile, synbio debuts in sustainable fashion by partnering with brands on the runway. At Paris Fashion Week, you might spot an Hermes handbag made from fungi, a Sacai T-shirt containing spider silk, and a bioengineered faux leather trench coat for Balenciaga.

It remains to be seen which luxury, ecofriendly products will eventually become the default option. A 2020 McKinsey report estimated that the market for bioengineered products would exponentially grow to trillions of dollars in the

next two decades. Far beyond its early growing pains, synbio aims to supplant the fossil fuel economy by outcompeting it either with cheaper and better products, garnering more consumer demand, or by becoming the only option left.

While Solarpunk aims to overthrow capitalism to solve climate change, green startups are steeped squarely in the market, and instead serve as an argument for trimming its excesses.

2 Synbio for all

Halving greenhouse gas emissions worldwide by 2030 is the only way to keep global warming before the tipping point. But last year, global emissions still rose 6%. Once we pass the global temperature rise of 1.5°C, climate change becomes quasi-unstoppable. Ranges of plants and animals pull back from the equator; pestilence spreads; wildfires and melting permafrost release more greenhouse gasses; critical ecosystems like coral reefs completely disappear; extreme weather devastation becomes the new normal. At current trajectories, come 2050, we’ll have enough emissions to warm the planet by 2°C with 2 billion more people to feed.

Without the centuries of R&D that fossil fuels have enjoyed, it’s unlikely for synthetic biology to oust the incumbents quickly enough. While startups chip away at creating a tastier vegan burger, climate change is already, literally, setting London on fire. By the time

scientists

Art that envisions skyscrapers intertwined with trees and gardens seems to imply that the only thing standing between us and an ecological life is better landscaping.

For synthetic biology to do better, it must first reckon with its track record.

emerge with mature technology, most of the emissions we’ll ever release will already be in the atmosphere.

Surviving climate change has much less to do with what we consume on a day-to-day basis, and much more to do with the biosphere that we draw our food and lives from. Bioengineered or not, purchasing power isn’t strong enough. No matter how corporate brands try to align with the right values, only the end of capitalism can allow for a sustainable future.

In the Solarpunk counterculture, we see rebellions like guerrilla gardening, where people trespass to sow seeds in property they don’t own. They reclaim a concrete jungle with native plants, provide fresh food for the local community, and challenge who really owns the land. Meanwhile, synthetic biology strives to be in the green. In making products that look, taste, and feel like what we’re used to, scientists fastidiously build and rebuild the Ship of Theseus plank by plank. To change course, there needs to be a blueprint for an entirely new kind of vessel; navigating foreign seas requires a new culture of research motivations.

That new culture must be bigger than buying sustainable alternatives to common products. The answer won't come from within the confines of consumerism. We should instead look to biological forces that drive all life on this planet: microbes. It's a radical change in vantage point. What is it like to engineer biology where the product is not defined by what we can do for us, but by what we can do for it?

3

Invisible rewilding

While you may have heard that burping cattle are one of the largest producers of methane, the gas-generating archaea that live in their guts are really the creatures to blame. Sometimes, the symbiosis between host and microbiome is so seamless that it’s only noticeable when it breaks down. Unlike a neglected houseplant turning yellow, coral bleaching is triggered suddenly. The colorful, symbiotic algae inside coral flee during heat

waves, leaving behind white skeletons. One of the most productive ecosystems on earth could soon be a graveyard.

Where is our genetic toolbox to increase the stress tolerance of these algae, or to tweak archaea to slash methane emissions from the guts of a cow? Unfortunately, organisms that are poorly understood, or not directly profitable to study, are conspicuously absent from synthetic biology laboratories. We domesticated yeast for centuries; E. coli lives inside of us. In part because of their proximity to people, these microbes do little in the environment. If you toured the facilities of any startup fermenting products from monocultures of yeast or bacteria, their massive steel tanks would feel like a chemical factory.

Natural microbial communities are so deeply interdependendent that they can’t be separated and studied 99% of them will not grow in a Petri dish if their neighbors aren’t present. We only know that a vast majority of microbes are among us by the breadcrumbs of DNA they leave behind in soil and water. Even the upper atmosphere is rife with windborne bacteria, fungi, and viruses that become loci for water to condense on, seeding cloud formation.

Not only are these micro-communities huge participants in adding or removing carbon from the atmosphere, but they are also vulnerable to climate change. What would it take to enable the study of unconventional and critical organisms in the environment that don’t make a sellable product? In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer uses Indigenous knowledge as a lens for understanding how to look after the environment so that it can take care of us.

The very knowledge that we swim through microbial worlds should make looking at a steel tank of bacteria a great comfort. A big part of the discussion about GMOs is about how to contain them: minimizing, not maximizing, their impact on the environment.

But, compared to thirty years ago, scientists now have far better tools to design GMOs. Unfortunately, the controversies that surrounded them are still intact. For synthetic biology to do better, it must first reckon with its track record.

Down to Earth

4 Unused tools

Supermarket tomatoes taste watery and mealy because they are picked while green, then artificially ripened before hitting the shelves. In the 1990s, researchers at Calgene and UC Davis wondered if tomatoes could both sweeten on the vine and survive transportation. Thus, with an extra gene to delay fruit softening, the Flavr Savr tomato became the first commercially available GMO. When it flopped, Monsanto then a chemicals manufacturer acquired Calgene to pursue the opportunity it saw to create plants resistant to its pesticides.

Meanwhile, two German professors were developing a crop for strictly humanitarian purposes a nutrition booster that would be free for those who needed it. By inserting a gene for beta-carotene from da ffodils, they created bright yellow, vitamin A-producing rice that could prevent systemic childhood death and blindness.

While nearly all cash crops grown in America are now herbicide- and disease-resistant, the commercial production of Golden Rice just started in 2021 three years after Bayer acquired Monsanto for $63 billion. Genetic modification becomes palatable when it is hidden, like in oils and thickeners, or when it’s transformed into products, like Cheetos. Golden Rice couldn’t be concealed in the same way. It faced fierce pushback from activists, who pointed out there is no drag-and-drop solution without understanding systemic problems. Vitamin A isn’t rare, and it makes more sense to improve food systems in

their entirety, rather than change a culturally important food like rice just because we have the ability to engineer it.

And yet, what good are these tools if we don’t use them? Isn't a genuine scientific advance that helps people preferable to a hypothetical reshuffling that would come too late?

5 Heirlooms

Paolo Bacigalupi’s novel The Windup Girl dramatizes a future of genetically destroyed plants and people, caused by the unchecked creation of GMOs. This fear is far from uncommon, even though there are anthologies-worth of studies which find bioengineered foods to be safe.

However, scientific evidence fails to make GMOs feel safe, because the anxiety Bacigalupi expresses is not over having modified organisms. It’s fear for the intentions of the scientists, corporations, and governments who get to decide what to change. Callous to global warming and food shortages, agriculture companies in his novel were only interested in using gene editing to compete against each other.

Despite satires like Idiocracy and Don’t Look Up, where our preference for misinformation over truth causes our downfall, it is dangerous to assume that ignorance is what halts scientific progress. Instead of blaming lay people for not understanding science, scientists ought to consider the possibility that maybe they don't fully understand lay people's concerns. They are not

What to us is an impassable divide between the treasured past and the soulless future, to nature is a drop in the ocean.

exempted from social biases, after all, and neither is their work. The privilege and power of being a scientist should sensitize practitioners to the consequences of their work, but all-too-often that lofty disconnect has the opposite effect. This topdown approach is implicated in the public's suspicions of new technologies.

Heirloom tomatoes have everything Calgene’s Flavr Savr did not: virtue, pedigree, and personality. Coined in reaction to the commercially hybridized tomatoes appearing in supermarkets, the label highlighted cultivars that had been passed down for decades, often with unique shapes and colors, that were on the decline. Unlike fruit standardized to sell, no two homegrown heirlooms are exactly alike. Meanwhile, while the world changed, a summer-sweet heirloom tomato would taste the same as what your ancestors enjoyed long ago.

Despite the sentiment, these boundaries between tomato types are not natural. In The Windup Girl, bounty hunters searching for new, unmodified genes would be disappointed with a cultivar like “Mr. Stripey,” a giant, sweet heirloom tomato that has yellow stripes when fully ripe. Not only are these special varieties weaker and more prone to disease, but for all their fantastical shapes and colors, gene sequencing also shows that their diversity can be summed by just ten inbred genes. What to us is an impassable divide between the treasured past and the soulless future, to nature is a drop in the ocean.

6 Optimism

The most important questions in fiction that speculates about science what technology is desirable; what is permissible; who gets to decide ? These are questions that science cannot answer for itself. But Solarpunk can wager a guess. A team of animators created an entire world inside an eighty-second Chobani ad. A farmer brings together their community by providing for it, growing food with the help of robotic technology. Livestock graze cheerfully under wind and solar

farms. On a clear blue day, the press of a pump seeds rain clouds over cornfields.

Worlds like these so lucid, you can almost taste the fruit are the starting point. Just as organisms compete for limited resources, stories compete for our attention and emotion. A fictional future that resonates with what we want and believe compels us towards it. Effective synbio solutions don’t come piecemeal, one cool product at a time, but with knowledge of what to add to the grand story.

People foretold a dystopia until they lived in one. The antagonist in our lifetimes (so far) has not been an accidental lab leak, or an artificial intelligence gone rogue, or really any secret at all. Global warming has been rising agonizingly in plain sight. Against this backdrop, Solarpunk above all is the thirst for change. It gives us permission to overthrow what the world is supposed to look like, then bestows the individual agency to transform our surroundings.

The same institutions and injustices that led to climate change are also responsible for the gap between what scientists create and what people would like to have. One day, if people want to use biology by design, it may be because Solarpunk storytellers solved how it could be trusted to benefit the people and the Earth. Meaningful solutions won’t spring from corporations or ivory towers, but from what people demand from them. Democratizing synthetic biology could give the power to take back ownership of genetically modified organisms. Internally, the scientific field pushes to increase accessibility. But are people asking to use their tools?

The post-scarcity of Solarpunk is rooted in the community ownership of what sustains its people. While its ethos is radical, the majority of technologies it proposes to get there, like vertical farming, are not. Solarpunk should also have the freedom to reimagine what biology could look like. The emerging synthetic biology toolbox adds resurrecting extinct species and designing new ecologies to the arsenal of ideas. Artists can use them to explore the path between where we are now and the kind of world we want to achieve.

What beautiful and strange things would you dare to grow in a guerilla garden? When could you go snorkeling in the Great Barrier Reef to see heat-tolerant, genetically modified corals overtake the skeletons of their ancestors? How would it feel to stand on parched earth that is radiating petrichor in anticipation of rain, as engineered bacteria wicks moisture into clouds?

Neither synbio nor Solarpunk has all the right answers, but when they are joined in a symbiotic relationship, they become greater than the sum of their parts. If people could express what they needed, and if scientists could champion those desires then Solarpunk becomes a will and synbio becomes a way. It would be the kind of world where a silver bullet like Golden Rice doesn't need to be on the table. Instead, a more humble spread: lab-grown meat, living architecture, ancient microbes, food forests, and perhaps if we’re feeling spendy, a vacation to a snowcapped mountain chalet.

Davian Ho is an undergraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. His work strives towards the freedom of biological design: to challenge what is conceivable as a writer or concept artist, and then to enable it as a scientist.

Alice Yuan Zhang is a Chinese-American media artist, researcher, and educator. Her practice operates on cyclical and intergenerational time, examining technology through a lens of interspecies solidarity.

Displaced ecosystems

My dream is to dismantle industrialized agriculture and restore those billions of hectares to the natural biodiverse ecosystems that once existed in its place. I want to grow native species in abundance—what was once there and should be there now.

Torrey Sirdevan, Founder of Better Earth Bio 2

New safety models

I would like to have a selection of different organoids that perfectly recapitulate the global diversity of human metabolisms and can be used to validate the safety of compounds.

Daniel Chan, President of Biotech Without Borders 3

fast plants

I want to grow a fast-growing plant or plankton that can quickly sequester vast amounts of carbon.

Rachel Hovde, Engineer at Invitae 4

What nature produces already

I actually think we should stop thinking about what we as humans could grow, have more humility, and look at what nature already produces.

Amy Congdon,

Chief Design Officer at Biofabricate

What would you grow if you could grow anything at all?

Electric trees

I think many global problems are really just energy problems. There's a lot of sunlight that we aren't capturing, and if trees could convert that to usable energy we would make huge strides towards solving the energy crisis.

Chris Kenyon, PhD Student at Northeastern University

A ordable housing

I think we need to grow some affordable housing—growing both the components for their construction as well as the political will to use them equitably.

Leon Elcock III, Researcher at Interius Biotherapeutics

Togetherness

I would grow a cultural craving for interspecies belonging and fellowship.

Carbon sequestering building materials

I’m actually already trying to grow these things. Construction and building operations are responsible for over 35% of global CO2 emissions. I'm doing my PhD on cyanobacteria biocementation and trying to create building materials that store CO2

Andrea Ling, PhD Candidate at ETH Zurich

9

Ayana

Zaire

Cotton, Artist and Cultural Worker

7

Biosensors

I would love to grow genetically modified plants that can record data from the environment. They would be invaluable allies in our efforts to understand climate change.

Monika Seyfried, Interaction Designer

Biodegradable kitchenware

I would engineer a plant that grows cups. Instead of disposable cups, we would have plant-grown cups that could be quickly composted a er your morning coffee.

Tina Shing Li Lai, Leader of

Open Plant NYC 10

Anti-allergenic trees

I suffer quite terribly from hay fever. Pollenfree trees would be helpful to me, but I know pollen is important for other species, so perhaps there’s a way we can use synthetic biology to grow pollenous plants that don’t trigger allergic reactions.

Anab Jain, Founder of Superflux

A WHOLE NEW WORLD

A global biological system of inputs and outputs, providing clean air and restored ecosystems, accessible to all. Oh, and can I have my own pet dinosaur?

Suzanne Lee, CEO & Founder of Biofabricate

Alexa Garcia is a proud Trinbagonian, trained bioengineer, and dedicated abolitionist. They are currently the Associate Editor of Grow

Alex Valentina is a visual artist based in Milan. Nature—and all of its facets—are always central in his work.

The world’s most self-sufficient vending machine

By Grace Chuang Illustrations by Keio University

MEET HAKKO25

At Ginkgo Bioworks, we believe that imagination has a huge role in making change happen. at’s why we sponsored the Ginkgo Prize for Biological Futures at Biodesign Challenge’s 2022 Summit, which is awarded to a team that imagines a biological design alongside the future it inhabits. Envision a world that is overcoming the challenges of climate change, environmental degradation, and inequality: What designs exist in that world and how do they incorporate synthetic biology?

e Biodesign Challenge is an interdisciplinary education program that works with students to create projects that bridge art, design, and biotechnology. Every June, the competition concludes with a weeklong summit. For the winner of the Ginkgo Prize, we selected a team from Keio University that chose to reimagine a more sustainable vending machine in Japan. Here we learn more about their project, their team, and their vision for the future.

What was the rationale behind your project, PostAnthropocentric Vending Machines in Japan?

Japan has the highest density of vending machines worldwide, with slightly over 5 million in the nation. There is approximately 1 vending machine for every 31 people and they are marked by an incredible variety, selling soft drinks, coffee, tea, cigarettes, candy, soup, hot food, sake, and beer. Unfortunately, the plastic waste generated from the vending machine is immense, contributing to the salient marine pollution problem in Japan.

For our project, we concepted a vending machine called HAKKO25 that uses microbes to produce fermented foods and power. HAKKO (発酵 ) is the Japanese word for fermentation and box, and we chose the number 25 as a symbol to imagine beyond the meaning of 24/7. The vending machine is a self-sucient system that reshapes a contemporary Japanese phenomenon into a future bio-platform.

Tell us more about how the vending machine works, and the solutions you are proposing.

Our initial design of HAKKO25 uses food fermentation and microbial fuel cells to produce bioenergy. The system is conducted in two di fferent fermentation containers, one for soybeans and one for rice. The fermentation containers are connected with the production containers, where the finished products of natto (soybeans fermented with a specific bacteria) and amazake (a drink made of fermented rice) are stored. From the production containers, the natto and amazake are poured into the consumption container. In the upper part of the fermentation container, biogas is released in separate chambers. That biogas is then extracted into the microbial fuel cells, where it is used to produce electric energy that powers the machine.

In the next five years, we aim to create a vending machine that is fully self-sustained. In this machine, rainwater, food waste, and soil are mixed to create nutrient-enriched mud. Microbes in the soil release electrons as part of their respiration, which is used to charge a battery over time. Using the organic leftovers as a soil fertilizer, the vending machine’s surroundings are overgrown with greenery, moss, and edible mushrooms, creating a tiny oasis that can offer sanctuary and food for insects and local creatures.

In 2072, as we transition from the Anthropocene to the Post-Anthropocene, HAKKO25 has long been separated from human-centered production, instead serving as an energy source for diverse living beings. Extracting energy from plant roots and mycelium, the system is enveloped with a membrane that collects human sweat through touch. The healthy microbes from the sweat are separated and combined with microorganisms that initiate plant growth to fabricate a jelly. The jelly is consumed through touch and skin by both humans and animals, and used as food and shelter for various species.

We see a future where all energy is sustainable and genetic engineering is used to build everything, from products to buildings. There is enough solar energy on the planet to never use coal or petrochemicals. There is enough technology to replace toxic chemical processes with lab-grown and low-impact ones. There is a new world order and a new way to express and exchange value for people, plants, fungi, and animals of all sizes.

Left HAKKO25 as imagined in 2022. p. 120 HAKKO25 as imagined in 2072.

What future would the Keio team like to see?

Grace Chuang is a mix of all things co-disciplinary: a storyteller, designer, engineer, biologist, and photographer. She art and creative directs Grow

TO THE SHAREHOLDERS

This letter was written by our founders in advance of Ginkgo’s first shareholder’s meeting. Published on April 27th, 2022, it serves as a recap of 2021 and our goals for 2022.

Dear Shareholder, Ginkgo Bioworks made substantial progress in 2021: We launched 31 new cell programs on the platform with customers, increased Foundry revenue by 91%, and built a biosecurity business to $201 million in revenue from $17 million in revenue in 2020. Most importantly, we hit our Foundry “Knight’s Law” scaling targets of a 3x increase in output and a 50% drop in unit costs. We also established a durable foundation for our future growth, raising over $1.6 billion in our public market debut.

ENGINEERED BIOLOGY MATTERS

Our customers are looking to biology as a necessary tool to address some of the greatest challenges we face today from food security, to climate change, to global health. Biology is the native language of our environment: It manufactures 100 billion tons of carbon-negative materials every year. Today, our customers are programming cells to develop transformative technologies across food, materials, pharmaceuticals, heavy industry, and more.

Ginkgo is building a horizontal platform for programming cells across organisms in any

market. We recognize that humans did not invent biology—rather, biology invented us—so we must have humility about the current limits of our understanding. Engineers often say that technology is neutral; however, we believe that we cannot remain neutral when it comes to the use of powerful technologies—we care about how our platform is used and about the impact it has on the world. Our long-term commitment to care drives our engagement with our customers who seek positive long-term impact, our e fforts in building large-scale biosecurity technology, and our culture and modes of governance.

WE MAKE BIOLOGY EASIER TO ENGINEER FOR OUR CUSTOMERS

Ginkgo has always been driven to make biology easier to engineer for our customers. As engineers, we are very familiar with (and in our student days, were frustrated by!) the slow speed, high cost, and low probability of success of cell programming due to the status quo tools and by-hand lab work.

We expect our customers will have an endless appetite for better, faster, and cheaper cell programming. In the past year, we have continued to improve our cell programming offerings by launching a protein-production cell development kit (CDK), integrating new technologies like FGen’s high throughput screening tools into our platform, and onboarding Dutch DNA’s high

protein production fungal strains in our Codebase. We are astounded by the diversity and potential impact of the cell programs that our customers are developing, which include vaccine reagents for Aldevron, animal-free meats for Motif, cannabinoids made by fermentation for Cronos, gene therapy improvements for Biogen, and even improving the brightness of glowing petunias for Light Bio!

Our progress is reflected in our 2021 results— we exceeded all of our public targets in 2021, even after raising our outlook mid-year:

• We launched 31 new cell programs for customers—up 72% from 2020—and we generated $113 million in Foundry revenue—up 91% from 2020.

• We returned to Knight’s Law scaling in 2021 after a COVID pause in 2020.

• We had new customer product launches, including cannabigerol (CBG) from Cronos and vaccinia capping enzyme (VCE) from Aldevron, providing downstream value share to Ginkgo.

• We scaled our biosecurity business from $17 million to $201 million of revenue in one year, establishing credibility as a leading provider of K-12 COVID testing.

• And we ended the year with over $1.5 billion in cash, providing the runway needed to continue to invest for the foreseeable future as we drive towards pro f itability. This is

especially important in the current market environment, which we believe will benefit well-capitalized industry leaders.

PLATFORM SCALE

Scale drives everything we do, from the unit economics we are able to drive in our Foundry, to the breadth and value of our Codebase. We call our scaling factor Knight’s Law, after Ginkgo cofounder Tom Knight, and have roughly tripled the output of our automated labs while reducing costs by 50% every year since we started measuring it around 2015 (with the exception of 2020 during the COVID pandemic). People often miss how intensive this rate of growth is. To put it into perspective, Ginkgo completed more lab work in the last year than we did in our first 10 years combined.

To state the obvious, it is hard to maintain exponential growth like this over long periods of time, and importantly, it is impossible to do this alone. We are working across many di ff erent dimensions to innovate for scale—from acquisitions like FGen, which add new capabilities to our platform, to key relationships with suppliers such as Twist.

Most importantly, maintaining Knight’s Law and generating long-term value for the company requires a long-term orientation and a team that is organized and driven to deliver on long-term technology compounding rather than short-term

solutions. That’s why we have chosen to weight Ginkgo employee compensation towards equity in Ginkgo rather than cash and to implement a multi-class stock structure that permits all employees (current and future), not just founders, to hold high-vote common stock with 10 votes per share. Ownership is key to long-term thinking and is the first step in caring how our platform is used.

Over time you will also see Ginkgo make choices to maintain Knight’s Law regardless of external factors, including market conditions. We fundamentally believe that at each new level of scale of our platform, customers will develop new and more impactful applications for programmed cells—rewarding us for our commitment to exponential platform improvement.

GOALS FOR 2022

We are just at the beginning of the DNA Age. Ginkgo is still aggressively learning what will be the most valuable technologies to build or integrate into our platform, where our customers are most underserved by status quo technologies, and what DNA components and Codebase IP are essential to customers. Additionally, we must continue to build our brand with customers who are deciding to outsource work to Ginkgo’s platform versus using the status quo technologies of genetic engineering available in their own labs.

Some of our key goals in 2022 are:

• Continue to prove to customers that our platform is superior to in-house genetic engineering in ever more diverse areas of cell programming. This will be measured by the

number of new cell programs launched on the platform.

• Maintain Knight’s Law scaling of our platform infrastructure. This will be measured by the number of strain tests we conduct on the platform and the cost per strain test.

• Support local, national, and international stakeholders in establishing long-term biosecurity infrastructure.

• Maintain a margin of safety in our cash balance so that we can continue to invest and access capital on our terms.

The challenges to make our long-term vision a reality are several: execution and rapid scaling risks, maintaining a culture of continued technological invention, and the need for large capital investment in automated lab infrastructure, to name a few. Although the capital markets have closed the door for many biotech growth companies, we are confident that our balance sheet positions us well to move aggressively in this environment.

The journey ahead of us is long and challenging but we’ve never been more excited about the potential that our platform holds. Biology is complex but also one of the most powerful forces on the planet; it can be harnessed for so much good. We’re grateful that you are on this journey with us.

Sincerely, Barry Canton, Austin Che, Jason Kelly, Tom Knight, Reshma Shetty

YEAR IN REVIEW 2022

This timeline was last updated August of 2022. Follow us at ginkgobioworks.com for the latest news since then.

2022 was Ginkgo’s first full year as a public company. We continued to work with communities across the country and the world to provide biosecurity tools amidst a global pandemic, and worked tirelessly to make our platform available to companies and organizations growing the global bioeconomy. We couldn’t be prouder of our team and the synthetic biology community we support. Here’s a look at 2022 and beyond.

February 28, 2022

Growing startup Phyloton teams up with Ginkgo Bioworks to produce vibrant cultured food colors via yeast fermentation.

April 4, 2022

Microba Life Sciences announces a partnership with Ginkgo Bioworks to identify therapeutic candidates for autoimmune diseases within its extensive strain bank.

April 11, 2022

Elanco and Ginkgo Bioworks launch BiomEdit, a microbiome innovation company that is expected to discover, develop, and introduce novel probiotics, bioactive molecules, engineered microbial medicines, and microbial monitoring services for animal health.

April 12, 2022

Persephone Biosciences and Ginkgo Bioworks announce a partnership to develop novel therapeutics. This multi-project agreement involves engineering of anaerobic species, a critical component for microbiome medicines.

January 6, 2022

Ginkgo Bioworks announces a partnership with Optimvia to improve the manufacturing efficiency of biosynthetic heparin, an essential medicine currently produced from industrial animal agriculture.

January 10, 2022

Ginkgo Bioworks collaborates with Selecta Biosciences to develop safer and more effective next-generation gene therapies.

January 19, 2022

Ginkgo acquires Project Beacon, a Bostonbased social benefit organization focused on increasing the capacity, availability, accessibility, and affordability of COVID testing in Massachusetts.

April 13, 2022

Ginkgo Bioworks partners with FREDsense Technologies Corp to build biosensors for water quality monitoring and detection.

April 14, 2022

Light Bio teams up with Ginkgo Bioworks to engineer plants that emit light more efficiently. Ginkgo aims to help improve the luminescent output and efficiency of the enzymes within Light Bio’s glowing ornamental plants.

June 6, 2022

Ginkgo Bioworks acquires assets from Bitome, a company pioneering real-time metabolite monitoring for faster biological product development.

June 7, 2022

Novo Nordisk, a leading global healthcare company, announces that they will leverage Ginkgo’s cell programming platform to unlock the potential of expression systems. The platform may enhance the discovery and development of their biological medicines for chronic diseases.

June 9, 2022

Ginkgo Bioworks and Marcus Partners break ground at Parcel O, marking the start of construction on a 219,000 sq. . state-ofthe-art life science building, alongside Parcel P, a 9,000 sq. . amenity building for the campus.

June 16, 2022

Concentric by Ginkgo, the public health and biosecurity initiative of Ginkgo Bioworks, officially exceeds 10 million individual COVID samples tested!

July 24, 2022

Ginkgo announces that we will acquire Zymergen in the first quarter of 2023. We plan to integrate Zymergen’s core automation and so ware technologies for scaling strain engineering capacity into our Foundry, including their machine learning and data science tools for exploring known and unknown genetic design space.

August 4, 2022

Ginkgo appoints Kathy Hopinkah Hannan to its Board of Directors.

December 31, 2022

Ginkgo Bioworks looks forward to 2023, and all that the next year will bring.

Front and back cover

Harriet Parry is a floral stylist and artist based in London. She works with flowers across various artistic disciplines, producing playful pieces that reference both contemporary and historical art.

Inside front and back cover, p. 7 Dasha Plesen is a multidisciplinary artist and photographer based in Moscow. Experimenting with natural phenomena, decay processes, and life and death cycles, she creates extraterrestrial micro-landscapes, full of color and life.