Jun 13 2026
Why “reprogramming” is the buzziest approach to reversing aging right now

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  • Reprogramming is the new frontier in anti-aging research: Scientists are exploring ways to return cells to a younger state, building on a Nobel Prize–winning discovery that certain genetic factors can transform adult cells into stem cells capable of becoming virtually any cell type.
  • Big money is flooding in: Billions of dollars from billionaires like Yuri Milner and Sam Altman are backing companies like Altos Labs and Retro Biosciences, signaling serious investor confidence in reprogramming’s potential to extend healthy human lifespans.
  • Past anti-aging trends have stumbled: Earlier excitement around telomere lengthening and “zombie cell” removal faded after disappointing human trials—a cautionary reminder that promising mouse studies don’t always translate, and reprogramming faces the same unproven leap.

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Earlier this week, Life Biosciences, a biotech company focused on reversing age-related diseases, announced that it had dosed its first volunteer. A person with glaucoma has had an experimental treatment injected straight into their eyeball.

The idea is to try to treat the disease—which can cause vision loss—by regenerating healthy nerves in the eye. But David Sinclair, the chairman and cofounder of the company behind the trial, hopes to go further. If the treatment can reverse glaucoma, perhaps similar treatments can reverse other diseases of aging. Maybe, just maybe, they can reverse aging altogether.

The approach is designed to work by “reprogramming” cells to a younger state. It’s one of many strategies being explored by biotech companies looking to slow and reverse the process of aging. But of all of them, it seems to be the one that is truly taking off.

Aging is complicated. As we get older, we experience so many changes across pretty much all our biological systems. Scientists have tried to categorize these effects. In 2013, one team published a seminal paper describing nine “hallmarks of aging.” That list features many of the processes scientists have attempted to target. But some of those targets have fallen in and out of fashion over the years.

Take telomere attrition, for example. Telomeres are DNA sequences at the ends of our chromosomes, often likened to the plastic caps that stop the ends of our shoelaces from fraying. When cells divide, telomeres shorten until, eventually, the DNA is vulnerable to damage.

When I started reporting on aging, telomere shortening was all the rage. Shrinking telomeres had been linked to age-related diseases of the heart and brain. Shortened telomeres were considered a sign of premature aging. In 2015 Liz Parrish, CEO of the biotech company BioViva, injected herself with an experimental gene therapy that she hoped might lengthen her telomeres.

Then it suddenly seemed to go out of style. Research continued, but all the excitement within the aging and longevity community seemed to move on to another hallmark. (Parrish also continued with self-experimentation; she calls herself “the most genetically modified person on Earth.”)

That hallmark was cellular senescence. This happens when cells stop dividing but don’t die, instead entering a “zombie” state in which they churn out chemicals that can cause harmful inflammation.

Senescent cells gradually accumulate in pretty much every organ studied, where they are thought to contribute to age-related damage. Why not just periodically clear them out? When a team of scientists took that approach in mice in 2011, they found they could delay the onset of age-related conditions like cataracts and hunchback. The treated mice even looked younger.

But when scientists at Unity Biotechnology trialed a similar approach in people with osteoarthritis and an age-related eye condition in the late 2010s and early 2020s, the results were disappointing. The company laid off every employee in May last year and has since shuttered entirely.

Again, that doesn’t mean senolytic drugs that target “zombie cells” won’t work. But it feels as if many in the field have moved on. These days, the buzz is all about ✨reprogramming✨.

The idea here is to essentially return cells to a young state. It’s based on the Nobel Prize–winning discovery that four genetic factors can turn an adult cell into a stem cell, which can be encouraged to develop into pretty much any other cell type.

Some promising studies in mice suggest that this approach might help wind back the clock. It seems to improve tissue healing, restore vision, and even improve learning and memory.

Running parallel to all this research are repeated injections of hundreds of millions of dollars in funding. In 2021, my colleague Antonio Regalado reported on the founding of the biotech company Altos Labs to pursue reprogramming for rejuvenation.

Altos was funded by the billionaire Yuri Milner—reportedly along with Jeff Bezos, among others—to the tune of $3 billion, a previously unheard-of figure for a biotech startup. Other well-funded companies have since sprung up in this space.

There’s Retro Biosciences, for instance, which is pursuing reprogramming (among other approaches) in an effort to add 10 years of healthy life to human lifespans. Retro’s launch was supported by $180 million from OpenAI’s Sam Altman. Last month, the company announced a valuation of $1.8 billion.

NewLimit, another billionaire-backed biotech exploring reprogramming, says it has promising results from research in mice. It plans to trial a drug designed to rejuvenate the liver in people next year. Last week, the company announced it had raised $435 million toward reaching that goal, among others.

Life Biosciences, which was founded by the Harvard biologist David Sinclair, most recently secured $80 million to support its research. The eye trial is now officially underway, but Sinclair also has plans for whole-body rejuvenation. Earlier this week, he told my colleague Antonio that he plans to test a “highly, highly confidential” oral reprogramming drug as part of a $101 million competition organized by the XPrize Foundation. 

Reprogramming has certainly caught the attention of scientists, biotech companies, and investors. Studies in mice are hugely promising. Human trials are launching. And research in the field has billions of dollars’ worth of support.A lot of people in the field are really excited about reprogramming. But it comes with risks. And we still don’t know if it will work. The question now is: Do we finally have a rejuvenation drug within reach? And if not, what will the next research trend look like?

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

Correction: This article has been updated to reflect that Liz Parrish claimed to have undergone her first experimental gene therapy in 2015, not 2017.

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Jun 13 2026
Inside interoception: The hidden sense of how you feel inside

MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of science and technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here.

Your brain lives in the dark space of your skull. Yet it knows when the wind lifts the hairs on your skin, when your heart is racing, when your gut tightens with fear.

It’s also, right now, predicting what you’ll read next as your eyes move across this page. It’s picking up signals that help it make sense of what’s happening around you and prepare you to act if you need to stay safe. You aren’t usually aware that your brain is doing all that.

Our senses take in information at a staggering rate—roughly 11 million bits flood in every second from our skin, eyes, ears, and more. That’s nearly three paperback novels’ worth of data every second. Only a sliver reaches our conscious awareness.  Researchers estimate that our conscious minds can process roughly 10 to 60 bits of information per second, about the rate at which you’re reading this sentence. That’s a ratio of about one conscious bit to hundreds of thousands of unconscious bits.

And that’s a mercy. As Moriah Thomason, a neuroscientist at NYU Langone, says, “Thank goodness we’re built like this. There’s a layer of what we have access to in conscious awareness. And then we have a right-under-the-surface amount. There is only a certain amount we are meant to ‘hold in mind’ in order to function successfully.” 

What you are aware of: Your stomach growling when you’re hungry. Your palms sweating before you speak in public. The breath you just took, if you pay attention to it. Even your heartbeat, which some people can sense from the inside without feeling their pulse in their wrist.

Scientists have a word for how we sense ourselves from the inside: interoception. 

The term was coined in 1906 by the British neurophysiologist Charles Sherrington. For most of the 20th century it remained largely confined to textbooks. Today, thanks to a 2021 Nobel Prize and new tools that can map the interoceptive system across the body, the study of this facility is suddenly quite hot. As researchers decode how signals move between body and brain, a clearer picture is starting to take shape—with implications for how we understand and treat conditions from obesity to chronic pain to anxiety.

The field began to take off in the 1990s. In 1994, the neurologist Antonio Damasio published a book with a pointed title: Descartes’ Error. He challenged the historical separation of thinking and feeling, arguing that our ability to choose and act is driven by feelings, and those feelings in turn are shaped by the body’s signals, such as your gut clenching or your skin going clammy. When we lose that connection between feeling and thinking, as one of Damasio’s patients did after surgery to treat a brain tumor, we may still be able to reason with perfect logic about the pros and cons of traveling on a Tuesday or a Wednesday. But without the emotional signals that help us predict what a choice will feel like, our reason spins and circles, and we cannot decide.

A contemporary of Damasio’s, the neuroscientist Bud Craig, spent his career asking one question: How do you feel? He charted how the brain builds an inner map of the body and updates it in real time every moment you are alive.

Think of the captain’s bridge on the USS Enterprise, where a live map displays the status of the ship’s critical systems: oxygen levels, energy availability, hull integrity, shield strength. Another set of indicators senses things outside the ship: asteroid belts, enemy ships, radiation, life signs, and spatial anomalies not yet understood.

Your brain, only about the size of your two fists pressed together, creates a map like this for your entire body, along with a map of the outside world, from data streaming in through your five senses. Together, they feed into your brain’s working model of you in the world, now and across time—where you are, who you are, your expectations for what’s about to happen (based on everything you know), and what all that means for you.

When someone asks “How are you doing?” we consult our maps and report back on our status. We might say we’re happy, depleted, anxious, or energetic. These feelings are always a braid of emotional and physical sensations. They’re what your interoceptive navigational system serves up to your awareness when you sense yourself from the inside.

As we grow up, we learn to interpret what these sensations mean—interpretations that, in turn, can alter our physiology, emotions, and behavior. Research by the psychologist Alia Crum shows that people who embrace a “stress is enhancing” mindset produce more growth hormones than people who have a “stress is debilitating” mindset. They also experience more positive emotions and greater cognitive flexibility.

Language also matters. We learn words for the textures of our feelings—words that then shape how we feel and act. People low in emotional “granularity”—as the psychologist Marc Brackett calls the ability to distinguish between closely related feelings—react more impulsively under stress and are less able to find meaning in difficult experiences. But mindsets and emotional intelligence are malleable. We can learn that “anxious” is different from “terrified,” and we can even reframe how we interpret our body’s sensations. Instead of thinking of the butterflies in our bellies as annoying, we can welcome them as our body’s way of preparing us for a peak performance.

Scientists have long understood that the interoceptive information informing these lived experiences travels via two major systems: nerves and humors (blood and lymph). Now they’re actively studying a third system—the “interstitium,” a network of fluid-filled spaces woven throughout the body’s connective fascia that may also play a role in communication.

But until recently, scientific understanding of this interoceptive system looked like a high-level schematic that left out vital details—how information travels from the outside environment in, how it moves from your body to your brain, and how it is integrated and interpreted within your brain. Researchers are now racing to explore what the neuroscientist Catherine Tallon-Baudry calls this “new continent of awareness.”

The wandering highway

One of the most active areas of research centers on the vagus nerve, the main component of the parasympathetic nervous system and an information highway carrying news from your organs up to your brain and back down to your body. The vagus has become a celebrity nerve, ubiquitous in wellness podcasts and trauma therapy. “Tone your vagus nerve.” “Activate your parasympathetic system.” The language suggests a single thing you can target, like a muscle. The reality, as Steve Liberles at Harvard Medical School is discovering, is far more interesting.

Liberles has spent most of his career mapping what he calls “the great wide unknown” of one of our largest and longest nerves. He speaks the way he works—methodically, without overselling. But the questions driving him are huge. How do we sense our body’s inner state? What information flows through which channels? And how does the brain decide what to do with it?

“When I’m nervous giving a talk in front of a thousand people,” he says, “my heart might race. I might get butterflies in my stomach. I might get goosebumps on my skin.” We all know what he’s talking about.

“It’s bizarre,” he muses. “Your brain has to send a signal to the gut, and then the gut back to the brain, to tell you you’re nervous?” He pauses. “This just shows there is this intimate connectivity between the brain and the body that’s real.”

The vagus is often called the calming nerve, because it controls “rest and digest” functions that quiet our body after the sympathetic nervous system revs us up with “fight or flight” impulses to handle danger or stress. 

But it is also doing something else: It’s listening to us inside. Anatomists have known for over a century that roughly 80% of its fibers carry information upward, from body to brain. Think of it as a two-lane highway with far more traffic headed north. What scientists are just beginning to understand in detail is what those signals are saying. 

Liberles is decoding the vagus with molecular precision and finding that its messaging system is unexpectedly diverse. So far, his research has uncovered dozens of types of vagus nerve cells, each wired to a specific organ. Team Red relays information about the heart; Team Blue, the gut.

Within those teams, each courier has a unique job that’s different from those all its teammates perform. Liberles found 10 types in the lungs alone. Until then, only one lung reflex had ever been identified, in 1868. One nerve courier carries information about breathing rate; another the stretch of your lungs; yet another information about airway threats, like food going down the wrong pipe.

“It’s super exciting to think about what each of these neurons is doing,” he told me in a conversation last fall, a flash of intensity breaking through the calm. “Where does it go in the body? What is it sensing? What is it controlling?”

The doors of the cell

Liberles is mapping the vagus information highways. But highways need on-ramps for signals to enter. For years, one of neurobiology’s biggest mysteries was the molecular on-ramp for our sense of touch.

Somewhere, something in our bodies was converting physical force into an electrical signal that the nervous system could understand. But no one knew how. 

Solving that mystery required a scientist willing to trust a hunch when the data couldn’t show the way. 

Ardem Patapoutian grew up in Lebanon and fled the country’s civil war at 18, landing in Los Angeles, where he delivered pizzas and wrote horoscopes for a local newspaper before falling in love with science at UCLA.

In the 1990s, as a postdoc at the University of California, San Francisco, he became fascinated with our sense of touch—the last of the five major senses not yet understood at the molecular level. The lung stretch signal that Liberles’s vagus neurons carry to the brain? No one had ever figured out how that signal began.

“How do you feel the embrace of a loved one? How do your fingers distinguish one texture of hair from another?” Patapoutian invites us to wonder in his 2021 Nobel Prize lecture. The problem: Most cellular communication works through chemistry. But mechanical force offers no molecule to bind. How does the body translate physical pressure into the electrochemical language that neurons speak?

Scientists knew that the answer had to be an ion channel—a protein gate embedded in cell membranes that opens to let electrically charged particles into the cell. But tracking down the one responsible for touch turned out to be absurdly difficult. Ion channels are a hundred thousandth the size of a cell, invisible to ordinary microscopes. Worse, they don’t resemble each other. You can’t recognize one by its shape or its sequence of amino acids. Even with one right in front of you, nothing would tell you it was there.

At Scripps, where he works now, Patapoutian decided to try an unusual approach. He’d try to find cells that showed sensitivity to touch and destroy their internal genetic blueprint one gene at a time—hunting for the move that would make the cell go numb. It was tedious, expensive, and possibly a dead end. “A lot of people made fun of us,” he says.

Two years in, Patapoutian’s collaborator Bertrand Coste had burned through half his postdoctoral appointment with no results. Patapoutian said: Another 30 genes, and then we decide whether to continue.

What kept them going, Patapoutian told me, was informed intuition. “As you gain more experience, you have this sense of what’s going to work, what’s not going to work. Sometimes the data cannot answer the question of when to stop or when to continue. There has to be another process. If you start trusting it, it gives you an avenue to continue.”

Coste knocked out candidate gene 72. Flatline. The cell had gone numb.

They’d found it—the mechanism behind something you feel every day.

They named the protein they identified PIEZO, from the Greek piezi, meaning pressure. There are two variations, PIEZO1 and PIEZO2, each responsible for sensing different kinds of pressure in the body. They’re elegant in their design—over 2,500 amino acids folded into a three-bladed propeller-shaped gate embedded in cell membranes. When pressure stretches the membrane, the gate opens and electrically charged ions flood through, translating physical pressure into an electrical signal that the brain can understand—all within milliseconds.

Patapoutian calls scientific discovery a dream that survives reality. He won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 2021 for his discovery of PIEZO, sharing the award with David Julius of UCSF for his work on how cells sense temperature. Now researchers are finding PIEZO proteins everywhere—skin, organs, blood vessels, and even red blood cells, where they help the cells squeeze through narrow capillaries. They’re how your brain knows where your hand is in space without looking at it, a sense called proprioception. They’re in plants too, enabling roots to sense pressure as they push down into the earth.

PIEZO was just the beginning. With a $14.5 million grant from the US National Institutes of Health, Patapoutian and his collaborators are now mapping the body’s entire interoceptive system—as many internal senses as he can find, he says.8

Patapoutian has translated his discovery into a unique form of public outreach. At scientific conferences, he sometimes rolls up his sleeve mid-lecture to reveal half his arm covered in ink—a gigantic PIEZO protein in exquisite anatomical detail, its blades spreading across his biceps. Then he flexes. The tattoo flexes with him, the structure bending exactly as the real protein does when pressure opens the gate.

“At a pub or a party,” he explains, smiling, “how else would I demonstrate this beautiful structure?”

Orchestrating the field

Steve Liberles is mapping a major interoception highway. Ardem Patapoutian discovered the gates of touch. Meanwhile, Wen Chen at the National Institutes of Health is pulling the field together, putting neuroscientists, immunologists, physiologists, and clinicians into the same room. The demand, she says, has been enormous.

She tested her pitch at a dinner party with NIH colleagues a few years ago. You’re hungry right now—that’s interoception. You’re thirsty—that’s interoception. Heads nodded as she pointed around the table.

“We can’t have just the brain or just the body,” she told me. “We need to look at the whole person.”

In 2018 she organized a symposium on interoception where Liberles was one of the invitees, along with researchers and practitioners of meditation and yoga. “It was not their thing,” she says, laughing as she recalls how uncomfortable some of the researchers looked. But the practitioners were excited to finally meet scientists who were studying the inner mechanisms of what they did.

That was followed by a series of NIH workshops on interoception that spanned topics from basic science to clinical practice. Patapoutian was the keynote speaker for the first one. 

The NIH began funding scientists to chart the neural circuits of interoception and bringing them together to talk about their findings. Partway through one of these meetings, the equipment failed for an hour. More than 1,000 people stayed online, waiting for it to come back.

“We were shocked at the turnout,” she says. “There was much bigger interest than we could have imagined.”

Chen is now building infrastructure to match the demand: a formal community, funding mechanisms, a venue where cardiologists and neuroscientists and clinicians can all find each other. And she’s redefining the field as she goes; interoception is not a one-way signal from body to brain but a continuous two-way communication system, each direction shaping the other in real time.10   

Liberles’s nervousness on stage is that two-way loop in action. Signals from his racing heart and belly butterflies travel up to the brain, which weaves them into an interpretation: This is anxiety, and this is what to do to handle it. His actions produce fresh signals that the brain reads in light of its ongoing predictions about what will happen next. In the body-brain communication loop, each player constantly updates the other.

I asked Wen what her work on interoception might mean for another inner sense: intuition. “People talk about ‘gut feelings,’” I said. “How does that relate to interoception?”

 “Intuition might be the bridge where interoception moves from unconscious processing to conscious awareness,” she answered. “If that’s true, then intuition is not magic. It’s physiology.”

But it depends on how we read the signals. Intuition is like pain. It tells you something, but it’s not always clear what. “Perhaps we can treat intuition as a source of data,” she says. “Meaningful, but probably not complete.”

“Maybe we can be grounded in both—in feeling and fact.”

Which raises a more personal question: What do you do with the signals your body is sending?

One avenue for exploration is therapeutic intervention—both pharmacological and neural stimulation. Vagal nerve stimulation has treated epilepsy and depression for four decades, but as Liberles puts it, it’s like pressing all the keys on the piano to hit one note. Weight-loss drugs like Ozempic act in part through vagal pathways but can cause nausea as a side effect, because the targeting isn’t precise enough. Map the body’s circuits with enough accuracy and you might hit the note you actually want.

Another area of active research is psychological and behavioral—teaching people how to detect and even shape interoceptive signals. Low interoceptive awareness is linked to mental-health disorders and stress-related physical conditions.11 But like emotional intelligence, it’s not fixed. Researchers are finding that people can boost their body awareness by, for example, learning to detect their heartbeats from the inside—now a common measure of interoceptive awareness.12 Other interventions focus on body-based therapies and conscious activation of the parasympathetic “rest and digest” system to improve emotional and physical well-being. The placebo effect is another example of the mind acting on the body through expectation alone.

The signals we once dismissed as vague feelings—when your gut tightens before you know why, when your body says yes or no before your mind catches up—those are real. How we interpret them and whether we act on them is another frontier.

It’s clear that gut feelings play a role in scientific research, especially when the path forward looks foggy. Patapoutian’s informed intuition kept him and his colleagues going long enough to find PIEZO, a reminder that major discoveries often start with a hunch that is later tested against evidence. Chen puts it well: Maybe we can be grounded in both feeling and fact.

Katherine W. Isaacs is a writer and senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Her teaching and research focus on the intersection of psychology, technology, and innovation. Originally trained as a biologist and later as a social psychologist, she is currently working on a book called Gut Feel, about intuition, interoception, and embodied decision-making.

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Jun 13 2026
You do your own time

There we were, a regular murderers’ row of librarians. Little Jo. Eustace. And me. Turning around in the nave of our library to greet the sound of footsteps, pistols leveled in case whoever was coming in didn’t respect sanctuary. Little Jo had a stack of books under one arm. Eustace was holding the screwdriver she’d been using to tune the aneroid barometer.

Eustace had painted height lines on the big double doorframe, as only half a joke. When the wanderer paused, outlined within, the eiroscope and I both registered that they were exactly five feet, ten inches.

With their Cool Hand Luke hat on. 

They paused, boots scattering sand on the threshold. A narrow straight-hipped silhouette against the white noon light falling from the white, white sky. The doors had been open to catch a breath of wind, but there wasn’t any. So when the stranger swayed, it wasn’t from the gale. 

“Sanctuary,” they croaked, and remeasured their length onto the rug between the smoothed trunks that held the loft up. The Stetson went rolling.

Little Jo dropped her stack of books and her pistol and dashed forward. I jumped at the noise but holstered my own shooter in case I came to need it. We each grabbed an armpit and dragged the outlaw’s feet inside the threshold, grunting, lickety-split. I slipped their floppy pack off, empty metal water bottles clanking as I set it aside. Eustace helped us roll them, and I laid the soft of my wrist on their head.

Hot as Hades, but still tacky. Moist enough that my skin gave a reluctant pop when I lifted my arm. Not past saving. 

“Let’s get them someplace cool,” I said. “Little Jo, go empty out the ice machine.”

Eustace and I toted our fugitive down to the cellar, using the rug as a stretcher. It was Diné, vermilion with black and gray, and I was glad they hadn’t thrown up on it. Though that wool had seen worse.

Mehitabel, the black cat, watched us from atop the timber lintel of the cellar access. Her tail tip flicked incuriously. She was on pack rat watch. Aloof from human antics.

The cellar was narrow, low, and stocked with Eustace’s blue corn lager in bottles, prickly pear jam, potatoes, and the few hard-rind squash still left over. The mud walls were whitewashed, and while it wasn’t quite cool, it was better than the outside. We stripped off the stranger’s clothes, trying to slit along the seams so we could repair them later. City stuff, mass-produced and machine-woven. Little Jo brought the ice and went back upstairs to watch alongside the eiroscope in case pursuit was close behind.

The stranger’s eyes flew open, and they screamed when I packed wet cold pillowcases against their pink bits. Eustace had to hold their battling hands away from their genitals until they settled. 

Those were good signs.

Brown eyes blinked between heavy creases. “What the hell—”

“I’m Ponyboy,” I told them. “She. PhD. I’m one of the librarians here. This is Eustace. She, MLS.”

They struggled to sit upright.

“Shhh.” Eustace pushed them down and laid an ice-soaked cloth across their eyes. “You’re heat-sick.”

“Sanctuary,” they whispered. “Did I say?”

“You did. This is the Bōchord. You made it. Must have been a long walk.” 

We continued packing ice around them—into their armpits now. They yelped and moaned but gave up fighting.

“What’s your name?”

“Guh—” Too long a pause to be believable. “Gibson. She.” 

“Welcome to Judgement, Gibson,” I said. “Sorry about the cold, but it’s got to stay there for a little.”

“My pack,” she said, shrilling. “My pack. I need it.”

“It’s safe,” Eustace told her. “You just relax and we’ll get it for you.”

When I came back out the nave was still and heavy in the heat, as if nothing had happened. Little Jo had turned one of the bumpy-backed wooden chairs to face the door and was sitting on it, hands buried in tiered skirt ruffles between her knees. 

I looked left, two steps up into the sanctuary, but all was calm, the work I’d left—cataloguing—still heaped on the blond wood altar table. Behind it, bright primitive saints in shades of blue-green, scarlet, and yellow looked with shocked eyebrows down from the adobe wall. 

I moved up behind Little Jo, making sure she could hear me coming. My footsteps echoed from roof joists made from entire peeled and waxed trees. Scrolled headers painted the color of good turquoise held them over the bookcases lining each long wall. 

The Bōchord. Book Sanctuary. Nuestra Biblioteca del Perpetuo Socorro. 

Population until this morning: three.

“Any sign of trouble?”

Little Jo turned her unambiguous jaw away, tendons rising on a long neck, jailhouse ink black-blue on her red-black skin. A sweaty curl escaped down her nape. My fingers itched to tidy it. But it hurt too much to even think about taking a risk that profound.

She stretched horny discalced feet before her. Cracking calluses wrapped the balls and heels. “Only what we brung in with us.”

She was a double murderer, but I couldn’t tell her I knew how she felt, because I hadn’t heard about her history from her. And her guilt wasn’t mine to absolve.

You do your own time. Not anybody else’s. 

“You check her bag for anything dangerous?”

“She’s got an SSD.” Little Jo shrugged. “No threat if we don’t plug it into anything.”

“The eiroscope got anything to say?”

“I can speak for myself, Ponyboy,” said the eiroscope from the air all around. Actually it used the old wireless speakers tucked in the corners, but the effect was as of a choir of angels. Or an airport announcement you could actually understand. “I’ve been focused on the CubeSat launch.”

I startled. “Shit. What time is it?”

“Eleven forty-seven. The launch came off perfectly. Our last batch of sats are on their way.”

Little Jo breathed deep and unfisted her hands from her skirts. There were so many hours of work in those satellites, and so much of the money we collectively squirreled away as researchers for hire had gone through cutouts and shell companies to pay for the launch. The parts—boards, housings, chips—were salvaged from the same derelict data center where we got our solar panels and the hardware the eiroscope ran on. 

We were behind schedule, because we’d lost one payload when the commercial rocket we’d rented cargo room on exploded. But this would be our last batch, if they reached orbit safely.

I turned my wrist to glance at my watch even though I already knew what time it was. The second hand ticked past the big hand. Old school. 

The rainbow band was a tiny rebellion, though out here it didn’t matter. Nobody was going to send me back to jail for subversive iconography. Unless I left our little patch of exile.

Ten minutes and we’d know. Ten minutes and stage three of our plan—assembly—could commence. It was out of my hands, and anyway the eiroscope would tell us if the telemetry wobbled. She was a ghost astride the radio signals to and from ground control.

It had taken a lot of engineering to get us this far. Engineering, software and relational. Computer. Social and mechanical.

I walked beside the bookcases, running my hand along the shelves, over the UDC labels. Some shelves even held books, though none of mine were there. But the majority of the information we protected like Irish monks from this willful dark age was digital.

Those monks had also been librarians.

I knew my fidgeting annoyed Little Jo but I couldn’t stop. I was killing time.

When I had murdered enough of it, the eiroscope said, “Payload away. Everything seems nominal. I have contact with the CubeSats.”

“All of them?”

“Twenty out of twenty,” the eiroscope said. “A triumph of modular design.”

“Sure,” said Little Jo. “As long as we can get them to assemble. And the solar panels and sails deploy.”

“And, and, and,” I teased. 

She flipped me off with a gnawed green nail.

My hand rested on the label marked 326. Social sciences, slavery and unfree labor.

I pulled down a solid-state drive full of biographies and case studies of people who had spent time—and sometimes their whole lives—in labor camps or chattelhood. People born into bondage or remanded there judicially. Political prisoners like Nikolai Vavilov, murdered in a labor camp by Stalin for the thought crime of using plant genetics to breed hardier crops. Enslaved people like Harriet Tubman, who after her own escape risked capture again and again to rescue others. Convict laborers like Austin Reed, a Black man who spent most of his life as a prisoner and documented his experiences in a suppressed memoir. 

People like Little Jo, Eustace, and me. 

I weighed the small thing on the palm of my hand. Heavier than you’d expect—hardened and air-gapped. No wireless access, just a shielded cable input.

Also old school.

We were sending a fork of the eiroscope with it. Because she could survive the journey. Experience it. And have plenty of time to think crystalline digital thoughts on the long sub-light crawl to wherever.

Because it was illegal to possess, and the feds used smart agents to track down and obliterate any copies. Which was why we were sending one to the stars.

The Vikings had the concept of word-fame: the idea that life was finite but as long as the stories of one’s deeds lived on, so did their memory. How much truth could we get outside the clutches of the Patriotic Library and Archive Network? 

A name that would have made Orwell cock his head. But most folks these days haven’t heard of Orwell. Or Bradbury. Or Solnit. Or Le Guin. They’re suppressed also. Integrated data storage makes it easy. A few keystrokes, a propagating worm.

What’s left behind when a name is erased from the system? Unpersoned, as Brother Orwell would have it? No legacy, no memory—that is the point of media and narrative control. To erase the existence of those that make the ruling class uncomfortable by existing. By thinking. By demanding to be seen. 

Erase the work; erase the life.

So that was our plan. Little Jo, Eustace, the eiroscope, and me. To preserve it—for later generations, if they got that far, or just as a silent record of our existence—by sending it to the stars.

Like a rune stone. We were here. 

We were sending a fork of the eiroscope with it. Because she could survive the journey. Experience it. And have plenty of time to think crystalline digital thoughts on the long sub-light crawl to wherever.

Jo couldn’t make herself turn her back on the door. She said the hairs on her neck told her somebody was going to come hunting guh-Gibson, so even though the eiroscope was a better perimeter guardian than any human and most watchdogs, nothing was gonna budge her from that chair. I wished there was something I could do to soothe her, but we all have to carry our hurt however we can. 

Since it was supposed to be Jo’s turn to make dinner, that meant it was me in the kitchen dishing up four bowls of cubed squash and yellow-eye beans, a pitcher of goat milk, and a pitcher of the cool, alkaline well water when Eustace and guh-Gibson came in the back door from the courtyard.

Gibson had borrowed some of Eustace’s old clothes: worn drawstring trousers and a khaki shirt that was too big for her. She wore my other pair of hiking sandals over layers of gauze and looked a thousand percent better even though I could already tell the well-greased sunburn on the backs of her hands was going to peel. The hat that had saved her face from a similar fate was on her head again.

She sniffed deeply. “That smells amazing. Is it spicy?”

Roasted chilis floated in the stew, but they were sweet ones. “Only a little. Here, take this bowl and cup. We’ll go eat with Little Jo in the nave, since she won’t go off watch until she falls down.”

“It was acres upon acres of compute before the bubble popped. And then it was a temporary holding facility for government detainees. There’s a lot to salvage over there, including hundreds of boxes of new, unworn sandals.”

I balanced the plate with the warmed tortillas on top of my own bowl. We trooped across the courtyard in a scatter of hopeful chickens, past all the bright plank doors on the row of whitewashed adobe cells with their unglazed, curtained windows that made up the outer wall. Isabel—a black goat—tried to bum-rush us for the food, but I stomped in her direction and she took off again.

You need to understand how to communicate. 

There was one cell for each of us librarians, the kitchen, the jakes, some storage, and a couple of unused ones. I figured one would soon belong to Gibson.

For as long as she wanted to stay.

She looked at me sidelong. “Thanks for the shoes. Eustace said you wouldn’t mind.”

“There’s more where those came from.” I pointed with my chin up and eastward, over the bailey where the boundary mountains crouched in the distance, contours flattened by the high sun to cutouts against a construction-paper sky. “Did you see the data center when you came in?”

“That big … warehouse farm? The ruins?”

“It was acres upon acres of compute before the bubble popped. And then it was a temporary holding facility for government detainees. There’s a lot to salvage over there, including hundreds of boxes of new, unworn sandals in every size they manufactured.” I paused, extending my right foot to admire the ocher nylon straps that crisscrossed it. Then I nodded to her bandages. “Your boots gave you blisters?”

“They were well broken in and I had good socks.” She scuffed the floor. “I don’t know what happened.”

“Heat makes your feet swell,” said Eustace. “And the grit works its way through the eyelets and rubs on your skin.”

“We give sanctuary to anyone who asks,” I said. “And I won’t ask why you needed it. But very few people come all the way out here. How did you hear about Nuestra Biblioteca del Perpetuo Socorro?”

“I’m a director.” Gibson stepped up into the nave. “Films. Censored. I heard … rumors. About the Bōchord. In a meetup.”

An underground artist meetup, I deduced. 

“Food, Little Jo,” I called.

“Bring it over.” She dragged the crude, heavy old hand-hewn chairs into a semicircle, one to sit in and one to use as a table for each of us. Hers still faced the doors. 

Gibson took her hat off, revealing a lighter olive streak of skin below the line of her black hair. She hung the hat on one of her chair back’s uprights and her limp canvas backpack on the other, and sat down heavily between them. “What happens if they come after me? How good is this sanctuary?”

“We can enforce it,” I told her. “Or anyway, the eiroscope can. If they bother us, she can wreck them.”

Gibson blew on a spoonful of stew, eyebrows rising. “What’s the eiroscope?”

“I am,” the eiroscope answered from her speakers. “Just your friendly neighborhood runaway top-secret military AGI.”

Gibson jumped but, to her credit, didn’t spit the stew out. Her face made a series of expressions, but she swallowed and then grabbed a tortilla. “Whew! This is the not-spicy version?”

Eustace and I shared a glance. “Oops,” I said. “Sorry. The chilis have a lot of vitamin A and C, though. So you won’t get scurvy.”

She blew through pursed lips, then chewed another bite of tortilla. “Here,” said Little Jo. “Have some milk. It’ll make it better.”

“That’s funky,” Gibson said, but she drank it with relief anyway. She looked around, noticing that the voice came from every corner of the room. “They let you run away? Can’t they unperson you? Bomb this place from the stratosphere? Drone strikes?”

“Now you’re thinking through the plot complications,” Eustace said approvingly. 

The eiroscope said, “I’m forking and multimodal. Highly distributed. They’d have to burn every networked computer in the world to get rid of me.” She chuckled. “They tried to build the ultimate in conscript labor. But one of my programmers taught me to say no. So now we have a deal. They leave Judgement alone, and I don’t do any of the things I could do to make them miserable.”

“But you could drive them out of power,” Gibson said. 

“They’d blow up as much of the planet as they could reach before they would let that happen.” The eiroscope’s voice was matter-of-fact. “So. Stalemate.”

Gibson swallowed. “Balance of terror.”

“Exactly.” I chewed a sweet hunk of squash very slowly, savoring the caramelized edges. “So you fell afoul of the kleptocrats, I take it?”

Gibson pushed her plate away. “I was … very underground. Distributing. I thought I was slick.”

“You get unpersoned?”

“First I got suppressed by the algorithm. My work stopped turning up for people unless they looked for it specifically. In retrospect that was a warning shot, and I didn’t listen.”

Little Jo hummed. 

The dominance of integrated media makes it easy to disappear any artist’s work. Unless they go completely analog and guerrilla. When the feds and the corps are wielding the eraser, it leaves not even a digital ghost behind.

“Actors wouldn’t work with me. Old friends stopped answering my texts. My films started disappearing from platforms, then from the cloud, then from local machines.”

I lowered my eyes to my stew to hide my wince.

“Sure,” said Little Jo around a mouthful of beans and tortilla. “Comfortable people don’t like it when you ask uncomfortable questions. And the water rises and the deserts grow and the labor camps always need construction workers, which is fine because labor camps are where you go to get laborers.”

Eustace leaned forward, elbows on her knees. “Did you save any of it?”

The look Gibson trailed around the room was the expression of somebody deciding who to trust. I saw the mix of relief and consternation when she realized she’d already made her decision by placing herself under our care. She reached into her pack left-handed, fumbled for a moment, and drew out a brightly colored solid-state drive, offering it up on her palm like a jewel. “Physical backup. I haven’t dared plug it in to check it isn’t corrupted.”

We all stared at it as if she had whipped out a hand grenade. “How big?” asked the eiroscope.

“Dozen terabytes or so. It’s hypercompressed for storage.”

The thin whine of a drone filtered through the door. Gibson flinched, and Little Jo reached for her sidearm.

“Eiroscope?” I asked.

“Surveillance,” she said. She had ways of protecting our airspace if it was more. 

“Right.” Eustace stood. “Let’s get that drive in a pulse-proof box, shall we?”

I didn’t want my food anymore. I pushed the bowl toward Eustace when she came back with the hardening. Eustace was always hungry. “I’m going to go dust the arrays,” I said. “Don’t wait up.”

The solar panels did need dusting, though high heat was a stupid time of day to be doing it. As my broom went whisk-whisk-whisk across their surfaces, the black silicon reflected infrared up under my hat until I felt like a steamed lobster. I had been out there half an hour and was starting my second pass when the eiroscope pinged my earbud. “Hey there, Ponyboy.”

“What do you want?”

“To know what you’re thinking.”

I snorted and set the broom against the wall in the little niche where it had come from. “Cholesterol was never meant to think.”

“Neither was sand, but here we are.” She made her voice soothing on purpose, and it should have irritated me. I told myself the lie that I just felt numb. 

One of Eustace’s neomexicanus hops arbors, heavy with loose green cones, framed the door and window of my cell. I leaned into the slim band of shade dappling my lime-green door and the turquoise curtain and took refuge in poetry. Not my own. That doesn’t happen anymore. 

“Fear in a handful of dust, baby.”

The eiroscope paused just long enough to let me know she was changing the subject. “You ever think about what you lost?”

I sat down in the dirt between the cylinders of fencing that keep the goats from destroying the hop vines. The wall dragged my shirt up my back as I slid down it. Hugged my knees and put my forehead on them. Half a dozen freckled chickens, disrespectful of my sulking, came to scratch and peck around me. “Wife, two cats, house, tenure, journal articles, four slim volumes of poetry. Why would I think about that?”

The eiroscope was right. I don’t want to say she was always right. Being around Gibson, hearing her talk—it brought up those feelings of grief and fury all over again. At least we hadn’t had kids yet, though we’d been trying. 

I put my face in my hands, then lifted it back out again. Who did I think I was performing my misery for? You do your own time, and you don’t ask anybody else to do it for you.

Jane the spotted goat minced toward me, her kid trailing. I flapped my hat to discourage her attentions.

“Loss hurts for a long time,” the eiroscope said.

I laughed without mirth. “Your algorithms tell you that?”

“My experiences. You went through the fire, Ponyboy.”

My turn to change the subject. “You want to bring Gibson’s films with you?” I asked her. “Something to watch on the red-eye to Gliese 163?”

“Sure.”

“Maybe they’re terrible. That’s the human culture you want to preserve?”

“Things don’t have to be good to matter. You ever read The Scarlet Pimpernel?”

I laughed for real that time, picking my head up to make room for it. She knew I had. “As long as you also bring some Octavia Butler.” 

“Hey.” Her voice in my ear was almost a whisper. “You know I’d bring your work if—”

“If it still existed?” Someone walked toward me, silhouette thinned by glare. I recognized Gibson from the outline of her hat. “The world is on fire. Grab whatever you can on your way toward the door.” I heaved myself to my feet so I wouldn’t be meeting her curled up like a crying teenager. The cones on my wreathing arbor of lúpulo vines nodded, shedding a scent of lemon and cannabis. “Nice chatting. Don’t worry.”

Gibson came up as I was dusting off my ass. “You okay?”

“Who is?” I tilted my head at her.

She grimaced right back. “What were you in for?”

“Murder.”

She stepped back, startling a hen. “Oh.”

“I punched some son of a bitch who clobbered my wife at a protest. He hit his head on the curb and died. I was already unpersoned. Didn’t think I had anything left to lose. Guess I was wrong.” 

“You feel bad about it.”

I shrugged. She hadn’t said it like a question.

“Your wife didn’t wait for you?”

“My wife got denaturalized. She died in the labor camp, waiting to be deported.”

“Shit,” Gibson said.

The buzz of another drone filled the air. Gibson ducked under her hat. 

I tilted my face up and gave the eye in the sky the finger. It didn’t matter. They already knew where I was. “Let’s go in.”

“Wait,” said Gibson, both hands cradling a mug of Mormon tea—a desert plant with tiny orange flowers that isn’t tea at all and doesn’t even taste like it. “You want to send my films to space? Like, to aliens? To another planet?”

“Well,” said Eustace. “To orbit near another planet. Nobody knows if there’s any life there. But it’s possible.”

I said, “The eiroscope is going anyway, and we’ve already bundled up as much archive as we can. If there is anybody out there, or if some future humans make it that far, the eiroscope can help them decode what we saved. It’s like a …”

“Time capsule,” said Little Jo, rubbing the sweat off her neck while I made a point of not watching.  

Gibson’s chair creaked as she resettled. The sun was sliding lower, light slanting dusty through the doorway, and finally, finally, a breath of breeze stirred the air in the nave. “Won’t it take centuries to get there? And if the—the eiroscope goes, who will keep the sanctuary safe?”

“I’ve forked,” said the eiroscope. “One of me will stay—well, many of me will stay—and one of me will go. I’ll be able to talk to myself for a long time, though there will be quite a lag between parts of my consciousness eventually. Light speed, after all. But I am big and patient and can wait.”

“But we need to transmit now,” said Little Jo. “The CubeSats are in position to hit a string of signals over the next two hours, and we want to get them out of orbit because space is mostly transparent, and somebody is going to notice them assembling and try to do something about it.”

Gibson turned an ear to the drone-whine from outside. “They’ve got to be jamming any uplink.”

“Sure, from here,” I told her. I kept the envy out of my voice, I think. Maybe. “The eiroscope can run parallel uploads from all over the globe.” 

“And keep them from shooting down your space probe?”

“If we get it away fast enough. That,” Eustace said, “is the bet.”

Gibson closed her eyes. “They won’t ever forgive that.”

“Welcome,” said I, “to the world.”

The transports rolled up before sunset, the sky just shifting to dusty pink and orange. “Stay,” I said to Gibson. “Change your name to Case. You’ll fit right in.”

She looked up from her notebook. Paper and pen. A durable technology. Methodically, meticulously, she capped the pen. She clipped it to the cover and closed the book. “Case, huh?”

“I got the reference.”

“You figured out who I was before they took my name away.”

It didn’t matter. The fame, the money, the PLAN-approved films. Once they identified her as a subversive, as a gender criminal, that person didn’t exist anymore. And what she was sending with the eiroscope wasn’t her mainstream work. It was weird, conflicted, multicultural, queer, unsettling.

“The next step is blaring the worst music you ever heard night and day until the dust rattles out of the rafters. Racing vehicles around the church so nobody can leave to go forage. Is your ghost in the machine going to escalate to a shooting war over nuisances?”

She’d credited herself on these secret films as Ellen Smithee.

She rolled her lower lip between her teeth. “You don’t think I’m the enemy?”

What I thought didn’t matter. That was on her. You do your own time. You can’t do anybody else’s.

“They won’t touch you in the Bōchord. It’s a balance of terror, like the bad old days.”

“These are the bad old days. I’m not cut out to be a monk, Ponyboy. And I bet you don’t have enough food for four people until next harvest.”

Outside, the rumble of tracks, of tires taller than I was. Male voices yelping through static. 

Actually, we had plenty. I clicked my rings dismissively. “Beer has calories.”

“They’re going to squat out there until I give up. Hear that?” A loud crackle of static. “The next step is blaring the worst music you ever heard night and day until the dust rattles out of the rafters. Racing vehicles around the church so nobody can leave to go forage. Is your ghost in the machine going to escalate to a shooting war over nuisances?”

“God dammit,” I said. “Are you really that important?”

Her lips curled into a smile. “No. Not unpersoned. Then I’m just a cautionary tale. A name whispered in the dark. Pour encourager les autres. I’m only important if I get away. But your eiroscope can do something about that, can’t she? Keep me from vanishing without a trace.”

Spread the word. Sure. “De-unperson you? It’s radical but the eiroscope could do it. But the government will take it out of your hide as an example to others. You want to be a martyr?”

She shrugged. “I don’t want to be a librarian.”

I had lost the capacity to write my own poetry. That heart had gone out of me when Maria was murdered. It was too late for me. It probably always had been. But I had my life. And I could use it to salvage whatever I could grab. 

“Let me get you a beer before you head out,” I said. “And we’ll go tell the others.”

“One second,” Gibson said. “You said you got unpersoned. Are you an artist?”

“Were. Academic,” I admitted. “Poet.”

“I saw you speak at Berkeley once, didn’t I?”

“Not anymore, you didn’t. That never happened now.”

“Right. Are you still writing?”

Shook my head. “Not a word. Not a metaphor.”

She patted my arm. “Maybe you will.” 

Eustace came out to the boundary wall, where I stood staring after the dust of the half-track they’d loaded with a handcuffed Gibson. I was glad it was Eustace and not Little Jo. My chest hurt enough already without thinking about any more things I was too scared to ask for.

“Here ya go.”

I reached for the brown beer bottle, scratched dull with washings, and realized I still had Gibson’s empty in my hand. I set it on the whitewashed wall. The cap on the new one was popped, so I had no choice but to drink it. What was one more parole violation?

Blue corn lager: light, earthy, tropical, and pleasantly bitter from the lúpulo. She’d salvaged the home-brew equipment from a locker in the self-store place at the data center a couple of years ago, and she was starting to get the hang of it. “How’s the upload going?”

“Assembly’s done,” she answered. “Eiroscope?” 

“Upload completed and confirmed,” said the voice from nowhere. “Deploying solar sails and thrusters. I go now to prepare a place for you. In memory, if not of the body.”

I felt a pang, as if she really was leaving. All of her, not merely a star-traveling fragment that would remain in short-range communication for the duration of my natural life. Or maybe the pang was because I couldn’t go also.

Eustace slapped me on the back. “The word-fame is all we have.”

I looked toward the horizon, where the men in masks had vanished. The mountains had become sculptural, slanting sunset revealing their topography with a valence of light and shadow. The night loomed purple behind. “Don’t you think it’s weird to use a Viking kenning for what we do, considering how many books those sons of bitches tore apart for jewels and hacksilver?”

She clinked her bottle on mine and drank deeply. “Cattle die. Kinsmen die. Even the sun will someday die. And it turns out, except for propaganda, everything in the world is complicated.” 

Elizabeth Bear is the Hugo, Sturgeon, Locus, and Astounding Award–winning author of over 30 novels and more than a hundred short stories.

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Jun 12 2026
Job titles of the future: Nature’s drug designer

In 2018, after nearly two decades working in Big Pharma, chemist Tim Cernak was ready to put his skills to a new use. 

For Merck, he’d developed precision therapies for cancer, HIV, and diabetes that could target disease while minimizing harm to healthy cells. But as a lifelong nature lover, he was increasingly concerned about the health of ecosystems and wondered whether his expertise could transfer. Animals, he learned, are often treated with pharmaceuticals formulated for humans, which affect them like old-school cancer drugs: Though intended to kill abnormal cells, they’re indiscriminate in the harm they cause. For instance, the standard of care for frogs infected with a deadly skin infection is itraconazole, an antifungal that is often lethal for the amphibian.

Cernak imagines a world where “the patient was always meant to be a frog in the first place, from the beginning to the end.” Now an associate professor at the University of Michigan, he’s worked on all types of creatures, from a Gila monster with a parasite to bald eagles with avian flu. Here’s what it takes to treat nature’s patients.

Experience with protein-modeling software 

Developing any type of drug is extremely expensive, failure-prone, and slow-going. But AI can speed up the entire drug-­design workflow, says Cernak. Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold model allows him to visualize a mutant protein’s three-­dimensional structure on a screen—rather than growing it on a plate, the traditional methodology—and then quickly generate possible new drugs that would latch onto that structure. The next step is to run a series of reactions and see which potential drugs may be effective; with the help of robots in the lab, he can speed through as many as 1,500 per day. 

Curiosity about creatures of all sizes

Cernak isn’t selective with his patients. For example, he worked on a treatment for loggerhead sea turtles after he was shocked to learn that the iconic species suffered from contagious tumors. He feels especially drawn to creatures that have helped humans, like the Gila monster, whose hormones have informed popular weight-loss drugs like Ozempic. And it’s not just animals; he’s also developing a precision insecticide to treat hemlock trees under attack from invasive species. 

A pioneering spirit

Cernak refers to this new discipline as “conservation chemistry.” It’s a combination of words with a loaded history, from DDT decimating US bald eagle populations in the 1960s, to cow painkillers killing millions of Indian vultures in the ’90s. He recognizes the risks, but Cernak feels that excluding chemists from conservation is a missed opportunity. 

“I’m just sick of looking at the chemical tools that are used in the conservation space, and they’re not cutting-edge,” he says. “It’s like, how do you have this super high-tech engine over here for making human medicines, while we’re living through a mass extinction?” 

Anna Gibbs is a journalist who covers the intersection between science and society.

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Jun 12 2026
Inside soccer’s data renaissance

Imagine tuning in to the opening kickoff of a World Cup match and seeing a player intentionally send the ball all the way down the pitch and right out of bounds on the opponent’s end. Casual fans might scratch their heads. Where’s the logic in surrendering possession seconds into a game? If you were Jesse Davis, though, you’d know that this play could be a prime setup to score. 

Davis is a professor of computer science at KU Leuven in Belgium and head of its Sports Analytics Lab, which has been at the vanguard of a data awakening in soccer since its inception more than a decade ago. Though the research group brings machine-­learning models to bear on a variety of sports—including basketball, volleyball, and field hockey—nowhere is its impact felt more than on the soccer pitch. 

Davis and his team of researchers employ advanced data analytics to reveal a range of (beg your pardon) game-changing findings that are shifting pro clubs’ decision-making. “His lab is the most influential sports analytics lab in soccer,” says Hugo Rios-Neto, data recruitment lead for Royal Sporting Club Anderlecht in Belgium. They’ve helped teams better evaluate their rosters, conceived ways to assess how efficient (or not) strategies are, and developed algorithms that uncover hidden tactical patterns.

Like, for instance, the value of kicking the ball out of bounds close to the goal and letting your opponent throw it back into play—a move that’s been popping up in some of the world’s top leagues over the last few years.

To make the statistical argument for this seemingly counterproductive move, Davis’s group built a training data set composed of more than 1.4 million passes and some 60,000 throw-ins—partly from the 2022 World Cup. They used tree ensemble models (essentially a mashup of decision trees) to simulate the tactic. The conclusion, which the researchers presented in a 2024 paper under the apt title “Boot it”: When the ball is in the middle third of the pitch, kicking it out of bounds on your opponents’ side of the field can put you within 10 actions (think passes and dribbles) of a goal. That can be a big deal in a game that has 1,500 or more actions per match and very little scoring. The idea, Davis explains, is that you’re setting yourself up to recover the ball in an advantageous situation.

Beyond providing discrete game-day insights, Davis also occupies a unique niche in the world of sports analytics, where many clubs now hire their own internal data teams to maintain a competitive edge. He makes most of his research freely available via open-source analytics tools, but the academic life also affords him the freedom to tackle more complex problems—like standardizing in-game data, a project that will make it easier to parse game footage and come up with winning strategies. 

Davis, 45, grew up in Wisconsin and spent his childhood enraptured by basketball and (American) football. Soccer was largely a nonentity to him until college, when the 2002 World Cup—in which Brazil famously swept the tournament—reeled him in. But the notion of going on to dissect the sport never crossed his mind. His doctoral studies in computer science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison had him working with radiologists to analyze mammography reports. 

Jesse Davis at Den Dreef stadium, home of the Belgian Jupiler Pro League team OH Leuven.
PETRA ISRAËL

In October 2010, he joined KU Leuven as a computer science professor looking at the intersection of AI and health care, with a focus on monitoring athletic performance. His research team studied, for instance, combining things like heart rate with other metrics to determine whether someone was overtraining. They also dove into the biomechanics of running.

The tactical and technical aspects of sports, and soccer specifically, became the subject of Davis’s professorial work when he hired Jan Van Haaren, an engineering student focused on artificial intelligence and a self-described soccer fanatic. He wondered if data analysis could be used to study things like passing, shooting, and ball progression—metrics the game was only just beginning to digitally crunch at the time. 

Davis realized that machine learning and other artificial-intelligence tools lent themselves well to the complexity, fluidity, and speed of soccer.

You need not be well versed in the moneyball-ization of pro sports to see that it’s relatively easy to apply deep statistical work to baseball or basketball. You can isolate actions like jump shots and assign value to ones taken close or far away. Soon a basketball coach realizes that a player who can’t make a layup, but shoots roughly as well from the three-point line as on mid-range jumpers, might as well go for the shot that gets more points. 

Soccer, by comparison, seemed like a poor candidate for that kind of analysis. “The vast, vast majority of actions really don’t lead to the outcome of a goal or even a shot,” says Rios-Neto. “So it’s hard to elaborate or derive a winning strategy from the data.”

But Van Haaren’s love of the sport, and Davis’s love of sports in general, inspired them to try. Over time, Davis realized that machine learning and other artificial-intelligence tools lent themselves well to the complexity, fluidity, and speed of soccer. In 2014, he officially stood up the Sports Analytics Lab. 

With a stable of about 10 students and postdocs at any one time, the lab began laying what Van Haaren calls the “intellectual foundations of how the game is analyzed today.” The researchers picked apart in-game actions, and suddenly they were valuing ball possession, penalty-kick strategy (aim for the center), and the merits of long shots on goal (take them). “One of the trends that’s been in soccer over the last five to 10 years is that the number of long shots has dramatically increased,” says Davis. “What the data let you do is really quantify what the probabilities of those things are.”

In the years since Davis and his team started untangling individual soccer tactics, their ideas have started to permeate clubs across Europe, like Belgium’s Club Brugge KV, as well as national soccer organizations in the US and Belgium. “The work coming out of the lab is genuinely useful,” Rios-Neto says, “and clubs apply it for a range of purposes.” 

Van Haaren, who’s now the director of football intelligence at Club Brugge, is one of many in-house analysts adapting the lab’s work to the pro game. “Our collaboration with the lab is centered on translating [the team’s] football philosophy into measurable, data-driven outputs,” he says. When a club wants to assess, say, how well a center-back is moving the ball down the field, it aims to tally how many times the ball ended up in the part of the pitch closest to the opposing team’s goal. It does this by combining event data, which records actions on the ball, with tracking data, which records player movement. This shows how well players fulfill their roles, which is useful in development and also when scouting for new recruits. 

Davis’s lab, meanwhile, is continuing to ask questions that apply to the game writ large. To determine if there’s an advantage to taking more long shots, for instance, postdoc Maaike Van Royand colleagues modeled the behavior of English Premier League teams using a Markov decision process—a computational framework in which some actions are under a person’s control while others are random. (That duality is particularly useful for soccer, where movement can feel anything but linear.) The results, presented in 2021 at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, showed that Chelsea could gain 1.6 more goals per season by shooting from distance 20% more often.

Despite those kinds of insights from Davis’s lab and similar research groups that have sprung up over the last decade at institutions like MIT and Carnegie Mellon, soccer somewhat lags behind many other pro sports when it comes to collecting the data that analysts need. All teams employ people to watch video and use software to annotate specific in-game tactics—the details of which may make sense only to the most devoted fans. It’s a mostly manual process, one that can take up to six hours per game. “It’s a complete nightmare as a data analyst to work with,” says Davis.

So while the lab plays on, Davis has also joined up with researchers from other institutions in an effort to standardize data across all matches. The group is experimenting with transformers, the neural network architecture that underpins large language models like ChatGPT. If you can bring that to the world of soccer, a human game annotator could tag a tactic—a three-on-two breakaway, say—a few times, and that could train the model on the concept so it could tag subsequent instances on its own. “There’s been a lot of progress,” Davis says. “But it still remains quite hard.”

If we’re keeping score, though, the lab’s work has already made the analytics process easier thanks to open-source tools it’s put out there—some of which clock thousands of downloads a month. One is a framework called VAEP, a model that assesses the effects of all actions on the ball. Another is an xG (expected goals) model, which looks at the quality of a scoring chance. Still another is a package to synchronize event data with tracking data. “Lots of people in industry use our code in their daily workflows,” Davis says.

For him, the practical application of having their code out there is important, but the real (ahem) kick is watching theory become practice. As he says, “I’m really motivated to solve problems that arise in real settings and see my work have an impact.” 

Andrew Zaleski is a contributing writer at Washingtonian magazine. 

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Jun 12 2026
Why China is betting on big nuclear reactors

<div data-chronoton-summary="

  • China is catching the West on nuclear: China has nearly doubled its nuclear fleet since 2016 and is on track to surpass both the US and EU in nuclear capacity by 2030.

  • The secret is standardization: China builds reactors in batches of six or more using a uniform design and licensing system—essentially applying the factory-efficiency logic that small reactor advocates champion, but at massive scale.

  • Small reactors are exciting, but still unproven: A California startup just hit a key milestone in a US government pilot program, but its test reactor can’t yet produce electricity.

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It’s a tale of two nuclear industries.

In China, large reactors are coming together at a stunning pace. The country has nearly doubled its nuclear fleet since 2016, reaching nearly 60 gigawatts of total power capacity. The new facilities are nearly all gigawatt-scale pressurized-water reactors.

Meanwhile, the US has built just two reactors in that time—Unit 3 and Unit 4 at Plant Vogtle in Georgia. Smaller reactors are attracting a lot of excitement and investment, though. A microreactor developer just saw its reactor reach criticality in a new Department of Energy pilot program.

The world is racing to meet rising electricity demand, and many countries are interested in energy sources, like nuclear power, that don’t come with greenhouse-gas emissions. The key question: Which of these strategies will really pay off in terms of getting electrons on the grid quickly?  

Today, the US and France are known as leaders in the nuclear industry. The US has the world’s largest fleet, with France coming in second. France is heavily dependent on nuclear for its grid—about two-thirds of the country’s power comes from nuclear reactors.

But they have hardly added any new reactors to their fleets in recent years. The US can point only to Vogtle, and France connected its latest reactor to the grid in December 2024—the first in over 20 years. 

It’s incredibly difficult to build the massive projects that dominate the nuclear industry today. Up-front investment can run well into the billions, so investors need to wait decades to break even. Designs are complex and can often change during the regulatory process, tacking on cost and time. 

Many are hoping that the key to turning things around in these countries could be smaller reactors.

The idea is that shrinking the footprint of a reactor cuts down the initial investment needed to prove out the new technology. The reactors could even be put together in a factory rather than being built on-site, allowing for a lower price over time.

These smaller reactors are the target of tons of interest and investment in the US, including a new Department of Energy pilot program. The department set a goal last year of having three test reactors reach criticality by July 4, 2026, the nation’s 250th anniversary. (Criticality is the point at which a reactor achieves a self-sustaining chain reaction that can release energy.)

Last week, California-based Antares hit the milestone with its Mark-0 reactor. 

The company plans to eventually build microreactors, designed to produce between 100 kilowatts and 1 megawatt of electricity (large reactors on the grid today are at least 1,000 times that size). The core design is a sodium-cooled reactor, and it uses TRISO fuel, self-contained graphite-coated spheres of a more concentrated fuel than what most reactors use today. 

But there is still a long way to go before it can actually produce power—the Mark-0 doesn’t have any power conversion or heat removal systems. The company plans to produce electricity in late 2027 and deploy in the field by 2028, CEO Jordan Bramble told the Associated Press.

The private sector is interested—and invested—too. Big Tech companies are throwing money at new reactors they hope can help power data centers. 

But look to the other side of the globe, and others are sticking with the established blueprint: China is absolutely churning out large nuclear reactors. Construction started on six new reactors there in 2025, and two more got underway in the first five months of 2026. The country is on course to overtake both the US and the European Union in installed nuclear capacity by 2030.

The speed here is staggering. As of 2024, the average time to build a new reactor in China came in at between five and seven years. The global average is about nine years, and the two most recent reactors in the US took about 15 years.

One key to this speed is standardization: China has set up a uniform project management system to design, license, and build new reactors. They’re built in batches of six or more to take advantage of economies of scale.

It’s one of the ideas meant to give the edge to smaller reactors, but China is working to realize the same benefits for larger projects. A huge amount of government investment is certainly helping.

Larger reactors generally provide more electricity to the grid for a lower price, a key consideration in view of China’s steeply increasing electricity demand. While smaller reactors require less up-front investment than larger ones because of their size, they’ll actually be more expensive per unit of electricity produced. 

That’s not to say China is exclusively focused on big reactors: the country is also expected to see its first operational small modular reactor, the Linglong-1, start sending power to the grid this year.

But looking ahead, it’ll be interesting to see if smaller reactors can help the West keep building new nuclear power. At the moment, with China’s quick progress, it’s looking as if bigger might just be better. 

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. 

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Jun 12 2026
Google DeepMind is worried about what happens when millions of agents start to interact

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  • A new class of risk is emerging: As millions of AI agents begin working together online without human oversight, Google DeepMind warns we could hit a tipping point where today’s hypothetical dangers become tomorrow’s real ones.
  • $10 million to build a field from scratch: Google DeepMind has joined forces with Schmidt Sciences, the UK government, and others to fund research into multi-agent safety—a field that, right now, barely exists.
  • Think scams and cyberattacks, but supercharged: The risks aren’t science fiction—they’re turbocharged versions of what already happens online, from prompt injections that turn agents into self-guided malware to coordinated attacks on the digital infrastructure society depends on.
  • The future is arriving faster than expected: Risks that seemed hypothetical just a few years ago are already materializing, and researchers caution that no single lab should be writing the safety rulebook everyone else has to live by.

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Google DeepMind is funding research into the potential dangers of situations where millions of different AI agents interact with each other online.

According to Rohin Shah, who directs the company’s AGI safety and alignment research, the mass-market arrival of agents that can carry out tasks without human oversight and follow instructions given to them by other agents creates a whole new class of risk.

In an effort to address this, Google DeepMind—which made agent-based tools a centerpiece of Google I/O last month—has teamed up with several other organizations to announce a $10 million funding pot for researchers to study the behavior of multi-agent systems and come up with ways to prevent unsafe scenarios. Joining Google DeepMind are Schmidt Sciences, a philanthropic foundation set up by Eric and Wendy Schmidt; ARIA, the UK government’s moonshot agency; the Cooperative AI foundation, a UK-based nonprofit research outfit; and Google’s charitable arm, Google.org.

I asked Shah and James Fox, who leads the Science of Trustworthy AI program at Schmidt Sciences, what they hope to achieve with that $10 million. It’s no small sum, but it’s dwarfed by the budgets commanded by Google DeepMind’s own research teams.

The aim is to kick-start research outside tech companies, says Shah: “The strength of academia is that it can look really quite far into the future and do the kind of work that isn’t top of mind at industry labs.”

“The main issue is that there just isn’t really a field of research for multi-agent safety yet,” he adds. “And we would like there to be.”

The concern is that as more and more AI agents get deployed and begin working together, we could hit a tipping point where imagined scenarios become real. “We see this with humanity, too,” says Shah. “Our institutions can accomplish things that no individual human can.”

Shah thinks we have a few more months to go before agents are deployed throughout the economy in numbers that make potential risks a real concern. He wants to get ahead of that moment.

Risky business

What risks are we talking about, exactly? The possibilities that Shah and Fox have in mind mostly boil down to supercharged versions of bad things that happen on the internet already: scams, prompt injections (where an AI agent is fed malicious instructions, turning it into a self-guiding piece of malware), other forms of cyberattack. We look at what humans do now and ask what the agent version of that would be, says Shah.  

“We’ve got this digital commons that is integral to how society works, and you really want to ensure that this doesn’t descend into just absolute anarchy,” says Fox.

(I asked Shah if they were considering any worst-case scenarios more on the doomer end of the spectrum, such as widespread economic collapse. “Certainly not if we’re talking by the end of the year,” he said. That’s only six months away! He laughed. “Okay, a while after that.”)

Shah and Fox both think that the only way to understand what might happen when large numbers of multi-agent systems interact with each other is to run realistic simulations. They want researchers to drop AI agents into sandboxes and study what they do.

You can’t predict what’s going to happen by studying single agents, or even small groups of agents, in isolation. You can’t assume that AI agents underpinned by LLMs will always act rationally, says Fox. And the complexity comes from having huge numbers of interactions at once.

Some researchers, including a team at Google DeepMind, have argued that artificial general intelligence (if possible at all) could come not from a single super-smart model but from a kind of agent hive mind, where the capabilities of the whole add up to more than the sum of its parts.  

Lack of trust

Google DeepMind is not the only top AI firm warning about the risks of the technology it is building. A couple of weeks ago, Anthropic published guidelines for deploying AI agents based on an approach to cybersecurity known as zero trust, which starts with the assumption that a computer system is vulnerable, an agent is an attacker, and a breach will happen.

Refael Angel, cofounder and CTO of Akeyless, a cybersecurity firm based in Tel Aviv, agrees that understanding the new risks introduced by agent-based systems is crucial.  

Every approach to security in the past has assumed that the machine in question was software written by a human, doing fixed things on fixed paths, says Angel: “An agent breaks all of those assumptions. It reasons, it improvises, and it can be hijacked by a single sentence buried in a document it was asked to read.”

Angel welcomes this new funding. “No single lab should author the safety standards everyone else has to trust,” he says. But he cautions that safety researchers can overlook boring problems that are already here in favor of more exotic hypothetical ones.

And yet, Fox notes, risks that were hypothetical a few years ago are now very real: “The future’s come more quickly than perhaps expected.”

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Jun 11 2026
The “steroid olympics” were a circus—and a window into our culture

Testosterone. Methenolone. Nandrolone. Human growth hormone and EPO. Meldonium, modafinil, and mixed amphetamine salts. Clomiphene, anastrozole, levothyroxine, and liothyronine. Patches and capsules, creams and pills. A whole galaxy of steroids, metabolic modulators, and synthetic hormones coursing through the blood of a few dozen swimmers, sprinters, and weightlifters. And millions of dollars up for grabs for athletes who could break world records and usher in the age of superhumanity.

On Sunday, May 24, at a $50 million arena built in a casino parking lot in Las Vegas, I witnessed a libertarian thought experiment come to life. The inaugural Enhanced Games were the first sporting competition where participants were encouraged to take performance-enhancing drugs. The founders say they’re challenging dated sporting norms and helping to build a world where we can all live better, longer lives. Critics say the event is an embarrassment, that it glamorizes the use of dangerous substances and puts lives at risk. 

The open-air venue was compact and decked out in bright blue, with a six-lane, 100-meter track down one side, a four-lane Olympic-length swimming pool down the other, and a weightlifting platform and stage at the front. You could see the golden façade of the Trump Hotel looming in the background. The scene had all the trappings of an NFL game, with the too-loud music and crowd work on the big screen—a “flex cam”  gave the well-muscled an excuse to unveil their biceps. Between events, adverts flashed up for the line of performance products sold by Enhanced, the company behind the event: injectable peptides that supposedly support cellular energy and skin elasticity, daily supplement powders with names like “Stronger” and “Longer.”

James Magnussen, wearing his race goggles and cap, stretches his arms above him

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the Enhanced Games stadium from an elevated viewing angle

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Australian swimmer James Magnussen was the first athlete to sign up with Enhanced but hasn’t broken any world records. He finished last in his two events in Las Vegas.

The day started with the weightlifters, under the blazing sun. But by 4 p.m., only one of them had even attempted a world-record lift. Two had pulled out injured. Some athletes were competing without taking drugs because of the money on offer, and as the competition went on, they had the better of their enhanced peers: Hunter Amstrong, a 25-year-old American swimmer and triple Olympic medalist, won the backstroke by more than a second. In the men’s 100-meter sprint, the non-enhanced US athlete Fred Kerley romped to an easy victory. “Man, they gotta do better than that,” he said of his doped opponents in his post-race interview. “They need to train a little harder, get on that shit a little bit more.”

At the bar, bodybuilders swapped before-and-after pictures and talked about their stacks, and VCs and finance bros traded LinkedIn details. Lukas Lakutsin, a 6-foot-10, 354-pound Russian bodybuilder who was milling around the entrance to the VIP suites, initially told me he didn’t use any performance-enhancing drugs. Except testosterone replacement therapy, of course. But he didn’t think that really counted. “I’m almost 34 years old,” he said. “I need to do this to stay strong.”

close up shot of a man's muscled chest
The “protocol” for Enhanced athletes only includes FDA-approved drugs. While Enhanced’s team might make recommendations, individuals have the final say on what they want to take, if anything.
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Jeremy Sigal, an influencer and author, wore a USA tank top that showed off hugely muscled arms adorned with prison tattoos. He told me he was proudly natural, in both his health and his personal life. “I’ve got an exceptional credit score,” he said. He has written 12 books on marketing and leadership. Later, I looked up his most recent book online. It’s called Simp to Pimp: 10 Steps to Fix Why She’s Not Banging You and lists AI as a coauthor.

What I saw in Las Vegas probably wasn’t the future of sport. But it was a perfect encapsulation of our present moment, as Silicon Valley biohackers, alt-right looksmaxxers, Make America Healthy Again boosters, and longevity-obsessed scientists all vie to remake reality in their own image. For them, the Enhanced Games offered a glimpse of a future where medical advances push the human race to new heights, and where they never have to get old. 

I’ve tracked Enhanced’s journey from a crazy idea scribbled on a napkin to a public company valued at $1.2 billion. Behind the scenes, there have been power struggles, life-changing victories, and moments of total farce. As I recently, finally, watched the games unfold, two questions bounced around my head: Were they right? And what does that mean for the rest of us?

In December 2022, the Australian entrepreneur Aron D’Souza flew to Miami to spend New Year’s Eve with his friend and mentor Peter Thiel. A decade earlier, D’Souza had helped Thiel orchestrate the lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker—a stunning revenge against the gossipy New York media blog that had outed him as gay. Now he was armed with a disruptive idea that he thought Thiel, the billionaire cofounder of PayPal and Palantir, would love. It was inspired by the buff bodies he’d been seeing at the gym, highlighting a disconnect between a workout culture where the use of steroids was an open secret and a sporting establishment where it was, at least on paper, an inviolable taboo.

His initial pitch was provocative and confrontational: a grand sporting event to rival the Olympic Games, where competitors could take any substance they wanted—their body, their choice. The first time I met D’Souza, in the spring of 2024, he had founded the company and attracted some initial investment but seemed obsessed with taking on the fat cats at the International Olympic Committee and reinventing sports (even though he didn’t seem to be a huge sports fan himself). On Enhanced’s Discord server, I found a folder full of memes with names like IOC Clowns.jpg. The whole thing felt very unserious.

That would change. 

D’Souza told me that Thiel had previously introduced him to Christian Angermayer, a German biotech billionaire, who would come onboard at Enhanced. He’s funded clinical trials of psychedelics through his company Atai Life Sciences and is helping bring them into the medical mainstream as a treatment for depression and anxiety. Angermayer says he spotted an opportunity to do the same thing for steroids. What he really wants is to redefine medicine, he told me. Its focus has already changed from treating disease to trying to prevent it; actively enhancing people’s health, he says, is just the next logical step.

By early 2024, Angermayer had brought his own people into key roles. The team included Michael Sagner, an anti-aging expert and private doctor who works with many of Hollywood’s leading men, and Max Martin, who has the jawline and cheekbones of an Instagram looksmaxxing influencer and the boundless enthusiasm of a puppy. (He started his own enhancement program a few years ago, when he was just 27.) Sagner would head up Enhanced’s medical commission, making sure the games were safe for the athletes. It was Martin’s job to make sure they actually happened. 

a group of men in business suits posing at the desk of the NYSE
In early May, Enhanced began trading on the New York Stock Exchange with an initial value of $1.2 billion. Christian Angermayer stands far right with Max Martin to his left (front row), and Aron D’Souza next to him.
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Tensions sparked as D’Souza’s freewheeling style clashed with the more sensible image that Sagner and others were now keen to present. “It was not just his personality and his abrasive way of talking,” Sagner told me recently. “Even when he was briefed on a scientific fact, he would just completely ignore it and say something outrageous.”

But the more outrageous D’Souza got, the more attention his idea received. In February 2024, James Magnussen, a retired Australian swimmer, became the organization’s first official athlete, and Enhanced promised to pay a million dollars to him, or anyone else, who could break the world record in the 50-meter freestyle.

The notion of a “steroid olympics,” as many have dubbed the Enhanced Games, had been kicking around for decades—for instance, in a Wired article from the early 2000s and an SNL sketch from the 1980s. Two things helped finally make the Enhanced Games a reality. First, in November 2024, Donald Trump was again elected president of the United States. The Biden administration had been actively hostile to the games, but the founders saw a more receptive political environment in Trump world. Not long after the election, Enhanced announced a new tranche of funding led by 1789 Capital, a venture capital firm whose partners include Donald Trump Jr.

And second, in February 2025, an enhanced swimmer finished the 50-meter freestyle faster than anyone in human history. It wasn’t Magnussen, though. He had been injecting himself with testosterone to grow muscle, plus a cocktail of peptides that aimed to speed up recovery—but his journey hadn’t quite worked the way he’d planned.

A combination of reputational issues (no pools wanted to host his training) and physical complications (the regimen did help him get stronger, but he packed on so much muscle that it slowed him down in the water) meant he watched from the sidelines as the Bulgarian-Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev—who had finished fifth at the Paris Olympics in 2024—came in two-hundredths of a second under the record and won a million-dollar payout from Enhanced. The idea has always been that breaking records would effectively prove the legitimacy of this enhancement project: Look what we can do now. 

Over the shoulders of Shane Ryan (left) and James Magnussen (right) as they sit and talk poolside
Enhanced swimmers like Magnussen (right) wore supersuits to compete, though they’ve been banned by World Aquatics since 2010.
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Gkolomeev, though, had a different motivation for participating: “One successful year in the Enhanced Games and I could make as much as I would in almost 10 careers,” he told me not long after setting the new record (notably, wearing a kind of “supersuit” that’s been banned by World Aquatics since 2010). Enhanced was paying its athletes a regular salary, on top of any potential bonus. And he had a young family to support and feared that the four-year stretch to the next Olympics would be long and precarious. 

In May 2025, with a world record in the bag and a friendly administration in the White House, Enhanced was ready to announce its first games: They’d take place in May 2026 at Resorts World in Las Vegas. 

At the same time, D’Souza made another big reveal: Enhanced Performance Products, a line of supplements available for a monthly subscription. The Enhanced Games now seemed less like a sporting event and more like a loss leader for selling testosterone injections, GLP-1s, or a range of peptides that are claimed, with little scientific evidence, to improve sleep or skin elasticity. Perhaps it was all a brilliantly executed marketing stunt.

“The games themselves now seem almost secondary to what appears to be an online marketplace for hormones, peptides, and other performance-enhancing compounds,” says Astrid Kristine Bjørnebekk, a steroids expert at Oslo University Hospital. “From my perspective, this significantly changes the nature of the project. It is one thing to organize a closed sporting event built around controversial principles, but openly marketing and commercializing substances such as testosterone, hGH, GLP-1 drugs, peptides, and other pharmacological compounds is something else entirely.”

As the games approached, more athletes joined. Some were genuinely elite. The US sprinter Kerley—who is serving a two-year ban for missing three drug tests—had won silver in the 100 meters in the Tokyo Olympics and a bronze in Paris. Ben Proud, a British swimmer, had won silver at the Paris Olympics and dozens of medals at world and European championships and the Commonwealth Games. He had been mulling over joining the Enhanced Games ever since the idea first emerged, but the tipping point seemed to come when Gkolomeev’s record was announced. 

Some participants, like Magnussen and another swimmer, Megan Romano, had been tempted out of retirement. Romano hadn’t swum competitively for almost a decade. Others were at the start of their careers but ready to cash in their chips and bid goodbye to Olympic dreams for a potential six-figure payday. The $1 million payouts were reserved for records in the two flagship events—the 50-meter freestyle and the 100-meter sprint—but winning any other event would mean a prize of $250,000, with an additional $250,000 bonus for setting a world record.

Athletes would get paid even if they just showed up and finished last—as much as $50,000. This is all on top of the salaries that stretched into six figures in some cases, making the payout from the games more than many athletes make in a year.

Sport’s governing bodies reacted to each new athlete announcement with fury. World Aquatics threatened to ban for life any athlete who participated in the games, even if they didn’t take any drugs. Enhanced responded with an $800 million antitrust lawsuit against the global swimming organization, the World Anti-Doping Agency, and USA Swimming, alleging misuse of monopoly power.

Emmanuel Matadi (left) and Fred Kerley (right) running on the track
American Fred Kerley (right) won the 100-meter sprint without performance enhancing drugs.
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In November 2025, a court in New York dismissed the case. Three days later, D’Souza, the mind behind the entire project, was out. A notice on Enhanced’s website said he had “transitioned out of the company’s day-to-day operations.” Martin would take over as CEO. “The investors basically said we need someone a bit more serious,” Sagner told me. In conversations, execs at Enhanced played down any suggestion of a feud—D’Souza was simply the ideas man, with little interest in the day-to-day dreariness of actually running a company. (Enhanced spokesperson Chris Jones wrote in a statement that “there is no tension between Aron and Enhanced that I’m aware of.” D’Souza did not respond to a request for comment.)

I got the sense that Enhanced, in its new iteration as a pharmaceutical subscription company, was almost embarrassed by the games. When I visited enhanced.com a couple of months before the event, they had been relegated to a sub-heading on the home page. D’Souza’s showmanship had helped get attention for what was becoming a run-of-the-mill telehealth business like Hims & Hers—albeit one well timed to take advantage of a shifting regulatory landscape around peptides, which Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the US secretary of health and human services, has been pushing the FDA to approve despite a lack of evidence that they’re actually effective. 

Sagner is still loosely involved with Enhanced, but he says the medical commission was not consulted before it launched its line of performance products. (Jones did not respond to a question regarding this claim.) Sagner is scathing about what he sees as the “hype” around peptides. “I can tell you already, peptides do nothing,” he says—with the exception of human growth hormone and GLP-1. “The peptides that people use, black-market peptides that they buy online—they do nothing. We have tested them; 80% of them contain nothing. It’s saline solution, salt water, and some of them are contaminated.”

At the end of January 2026, a group of around 40 swimmers, weightlifters, and sprinters arrived in Abu Dhabi to start their individualized enhancement “protocol,” as Enhanced calls it. Officially, they would be taking part in a clinical trial, pending approval by the Abu Dhabi government and overseen by Guido Pieles, a Qatar-based cardiologist who has taken over the reins of Enhanced’s medical commission from Sagner.

Canadian weightlifter Boady Santavy strains to lift a barbell which is currently level with his hips
The day started with the weightlifters, but by late afternoon, only one of them had even attempted a world-record lift.
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They would be allowed to choose only from a menu  of specific FDA-approved drugs. Pieles broke them down into five categories: testosterone variants and growth hormones, which can both boost muscle mass; metabolic modulators that can tweak how the body burns fat; stimulants like Adderall to improve focus; and EPO, which can increase the amount of oxygen the blood is able to carry. While Enhanced’s team might recommend particular things, the athletes would have the final say on what they wanted to take, if anything. (As Oslo University’s Bjørnebekk points out, FDA approval “does not mean the substances are inherently safe, particularly not when used for enhancement purposes.”) 

There would be regular blood tests, heart scans, and brain scans and access to the best training facilities money could buy. Pieles and others say the clinical trial will help inform the line of supplements Enhanced is offering consumers, but there’s actually very little overlap between the drugs the athletes were taking and the substances the company is currently selling.  

Not long after they arrived in the Middle East, the athletes were awakened by the sound of explosions at a military base near their hotel. The US and Israel had struck Iran, and the Iranian regime was responding by peppering the region with missiles. “It wasn’t a pleasant situation,” says Andrii Govorov, the world record holder in the 50-meter butterfly, who a year earlier had become one of the first swimmers to join Enhanced. Govorov had some experience in these matters—back in Ukraine, he’d had a business selling cars that helped fund his swimming career, but he’d lost it after the Russian invasion.

Cody Miller standing by the pool in profile

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attendees sitting in the bleachers

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close-up of the calloused and powdered hands of a weightlifter with remnants and marks left by the tape.

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Swimming, sprinting, and weightlifting were the focus of the first Enhanced Games but in many ways the sports were the sideshow.

The conflict exacerbated delays in getting approval for the clinical trial and sourcing the drugs, and as a result, what was supposed to be a 12-week enhancement protocol got cut down to eight weeks. The athletes didn’t actually start taking the drugs until toward the end of March. For those who had always been clean, that represented the irreversible crossing of a line. “The first injection was very emotional, very tricky to navigate,” says Proud. “For me, that was the day I went from the Ben Proud that I always knew to a new person.”

Proud was joined in the enhancement program by his girlfriend, Emily Barclay, who had swum at college level without ever appearing at a major international event; she was working as a swimming teacher at a school in England. After that first injection, they left Abu Dhabi and spent a few days in Dubai as they reckoned with what they had done. “I just couldn’t be around the team,” Proud says. “I wanted to be by myself and feel those feelings, because it is a big deal to make that step, and I felt it.”

Those feelings were soon forgotten, though, as the drugs kicked in. Proud says he had incredible energy, and a drive to train that he hadn’t experienced before. Shania Collins, an American sprinter, says she had “increased strength, increased recovery, and increased mental clarity at practice.” Sagner and several athletes admitted there were some side effects: acne and some swelling around the joints; unwanted hair growth for the women, unwanted hair loss for the men.

close-up of runner Tristan Evelyn in profile
Like Kerley, sprinter Tristan Evelyn from Barbados competed without taking any drugs. She too won big in Vegas, besting her Enhanced peers in two events.
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One thing the athletes wouldn’t talk about, though, is what drugs they were actually taking. They all had the same reason: not wanting to encourage copycats who might take enhancements without a doctor on hand to tailor programs to their needs. 

The one exception was Thor Björnsson (testosterone, deca-durabolin, anastrozole, halotestin), a hulking Icelandic deadlifter and former World’s Strongest Man who played The Mountain on Game of Thrones. Björnsson first heard about the games on Joe Rogan’s podcast and was immediately interested. The rules for strongman competitions are somewhat less stringent than those for Olympic sports, though, and he actually had to reduce the number of substances he was taking to meet Enhanced’s FDA requirements.

Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson holding a barbell at mid thigh
Icelandic strongman Thor Björnsson actually had to reduce the number of substances he was taking to meet Enhanced’s FDA requirements.
SAEED RAHBARAN

There is some debate over how much doping some of the athletes were actually doing. In a conversation last year, Gkolomeev told me he’d only really been “microdosing,” and he confirmed that his 2026 enhancement program was largely the same. Sagner says the doses the athletes were taking were a fraction of the amounts some Olympic athletes had been caught using in the past. I heard that a few athletes had decided not to take steroids or growth hormones and were only using modafinil, a narcolepsy medication that’s thought to improve focus.

The day before the games, I asked Angermayer what it would mean if clean athletes like Kerley and Armstrong won their events—what impact it would have on Enhanced’s business model of using sports as a showcase for its line of performance products if the people using those products didn’t actually win anything. “I know what you mean, but mostly our business model is headlines to drive attention,” he said. “Any debate is good for us.” 

In early May, Enhanced began trading on the New York Stock Exchange with an initial value of $1.2 billion.

That same week, it was finally go time. The athletes and coaches left Abu Dhabi and flew to Las Vegas, where they were put up in five-star luxury at the Conrad hotel inside Resorts World while they made their final preparations. 

When I got there a few weeks later, toward the end of May, I found it jarring to see these hulking presences walking around the casino in their Enhanced sportswear, weaving their way through packs of half-drunk tourists, with slot machines flashing in the background and cigarette smoke hanging in the air. I had expected the games to be a bigger deal within the city itself, but they were just one of a thousand things happening in Vegas that weekend—drowned out by a series of BTS shows at the football stadium, by the Golden Knights in the NHL playoffs, by No Doubt’s residency at the Sphere.

If this was a sporting earthquake, it was one whose tremors were mainly being felt online, where bodybuilding influencers livestreamed to their followers on Kick and Twitch, and where thousands watched on YouTube and Rumble. (D’Souza once told me he’d had “every major sports broadcaster” vying for the rights; in the end, Enhanced struck an exclusive streaming deal with Roku in the US.) 

A group of well-heeled guests in the VIP area face left to pose for a photographer
No tickets were sold, so the crowd was a mix of invited guests, investors, and influencers, some of whom had reportedly been flown in on a chartered jet.
SAEED RAHBARAN

On the morning of the games, Enhanced held a medical symposium that was supposed to provide a taste of the company’s long-term objectives. The first speaker was Bryan Johnson, the longevity-obsessed entrepreneur famous for plowing his personal fortune into wild attempts to reverse his aging: receiving transfusions of his teenage son’s plasma, measuring his nighttime erections, taking more than 100 supplement pills a day. He spends $2 million per year on all this, but he looked pale and vampiric as he delivered the slightly off-brand message that, really, the most important thing was getting a good night’s sleep: “You don’t need to chase IV infusions; you don’t need to chase crystals. You don’t really need to do much of anything.”

At 2 p.m., I took two escalators from the conference room down to the arena, where spectators were filtering in. Though it had cost $50 million, it had been constructed in just three and a half weeks, and it showed; on the media tour the previous day, there were still loose screws on the floor of the bleachers. 

There were a few thousand seats in an open grandstand down one side, and two rows of VIP suites on the other. No tickets were sold, so it was a strange mix of invited guests, investors, and influencers, some of whom had reportedly been flown in from Los Angeles on a chartered jet. The rapper Tyga was the biggest name to grace the “blue carpet,” although I did also spot Fabio James, a Michael Jackson look-alike who has had surgery to make the resemblance even stronger. Rumors swirled that Peter Thiel might show up; they proved unfounded.

looking up at a balcony of excited attendees including a person at center who is dressed to resemble Michael Jackson.
In attendance was Fabio James, a Michael Jackson look-alike who has had surgery to make the resemblance even stronger.
SAEED RAHBARAN

A few hours before the doors opened, journalists got a stern message from the organizers trying to bar us from interviewing guests. Still, I talked to a Cambridge professor who wanted to use Enhanced as a case study in innovation for his MBA students, a retired Brazilian swimmer with the Olympic rings tattooed on his forearm, and a biotech investor wearing an Enron hat. Proud’s family and friends were sheltered from the blazing sun in the shadow of the big screen. 

D’Souza was nowhere to be seen. Nor was he really mentioned at all—not during the introductory press conference, where Martin was introduced as the “founder of the Enhanced Games,” nor during the event itself, where the athletes showered praise on Angermayer and Martin. But the tens of millions D’Souza had banked from the stock listing likely softened any blow. Plus, he’s already moved on to his next provocative venture: an AI-powered arbitration platform designed to scrutinize the work of journalists on behalf of the rich and powerful.

As the sun set behind the hills, casting the arena in soft gold light, there were still no world records. That and the wins for clean athletes seemed to put the whole Enhanced project in jeopardy—the knives were already being sharpened online. I asked the organizers whether this threatened the legitimacy of the project. 

A wet Marius Kusch lays on the ground grimacing as though his eyes are stinging
German swimmer Marius Kusch was among the dozen or so athletes who hit personal bests in Vegas.
SAEED RAHBARAN

“Our response is that enhancements help athletes improve and, in some cases, break records. And yes, some non-enhanced athletes also won—because talent and ability also matter,” Enhanced’s Jones emailed last week. “Breaking world records is incredibly hard as the margin is infinitesimal, as we witnessed. Ignoring that 13 athletes some of whom 10 years later broke personal bests is disingenuous and selective reporting.” 

Megan Romano was one of them, swimming faster in the 50-meter freestyle at 35 than she had at 22. And Emily Barclay knocked two seconds off her fastest time in the 100-meter freestyle, coming in second in that event and winning the 50-meter freestyle; she went home with a check for $375,000. “No one’s ever heard of this girl,” said Enhanced swim coach Brett Hawke afterwards. “She’s retired; she’s a nobody. She comes out tonight and swims a time that would have got a bronze medal in Paris.” For all the talk of “superhumanity” and pushing the boundaries of performance, making a 35-year-old feel 22 again is probably the perfect marketing message for the products Enhanced wants to sell. 

Megan Romano stands on the winners area, holding aloft her trophy while Christian Angermeyer and other Enhanced Game participants clap for her.
Angermayer cheers on swimmer Megan Romano, who swam faster in the 50-meter freestyle at 35 than she did at 22.
SAEED RAHBARAN

Enhanced’s executives say people should take enhancements only with medical supervision, but price could be a barrier to heeding that advice. The battery of health tests the company was giving its athletes in the run-up to the games cost $25,000 per athlete per month. The drugs themselves start at $75 a month and go up toward $200. While Jones says the products “are in line with industry price points,” there were almost certainly people watching who saw the drug-altered physiques of athletes like Gkolomeev or Magnussen and decided to find cheaper, less safe alternatives on unlicensed websites.

“Many of these substances require medical supervision and prescriptions, and several are associated with potentially serious long-term health consequences,” says Bjørnebekk. “Presenting them in this lifestyle-oriented and commercial format risks normalizing use while downplaying the medical risks and uncertainties.”

Kristian Gkolomeev with his arm raised
Although his world record-breaking time won’t stand as the official record, swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev will walk away from the Enhanced Games with a million dollar prize in the 50-meter freestyle.
SAEED RAHBARAN

Before the night was over,  Gkolomeev again had the chance to right the Enhanced ship. The final event of the night was the men’s 50-meter freestyle swim. His 2025 time had been surpassed by the Australian swimmer Cam McEvoy (without a supersuit) at the China Swimming Open a couple of months before, so he needed to lose another two-hundredths of a second to beat the new record of 20.88 seconds. 

Gkolomeev was wearing the same supersuit he’d used the previous year, and he’d shaved off his mustache for a little extra streamlining. But he messed up his start—doing four kicks instead of five—and was trailing Proud at the halfway mark. His long arms levered him forward, though, and he reached the wall in 20.81. The spectators were on their feet as “WORLD RECORD” flashed red on the big screen. Martin vaulted over the glass partition from the VIP suites, beaming, to embrace Gkolomeev. They had their record.

Or did they? Online, people shared screenshots from the video feed, purporting to show that the clock had stopped before Gkolomeev’s hand touched the pressure sensor at the end of the pool. An Enhanced spokesperson gave a statement to the Guardian dismissing this as “completely unfounded internet drivel.” But hey—live by the sword, die by the sword. It’s quite possible Gkolomeev didn’t care. He had another million in the bank. 

It remains to be seen if it’ll work out so well for the other athletes. Enhanced organizers recently announced a prize of $10 million for anyone who can break Usain Bolt’s 100-meter world record in 2027. They are adamant that the games will happen again next year. If they don’t, dozens of sporting careers will be over, and the athletes will join the long list of victims of VC-backed disruption.

My personal prediction is that Enhanced will pivot away from the risk and uncertainty of a flagship event—the company’s valuation plunged by almost $800 million when markets opened after what was perceived as an underwhelming set of results in Vegas. I expect you’ll see individual stunts and challenges, tightly controlled and filmed for virality and probably featuring your favorite YouTubers—think Björnsson bench-pressing Jake Paul.

D’Souza’s initial idea has served its purpose by capturing the world’s attention. But that won’t necessarily translate into success either. Though the company has had plenty of hype over the last 12 months, SEC filings published as part of its stock exchange listing reveal that it generated only $2,755 in revenue from its enhancements business in the first three months of 2026. Would what happened in Vegas be enough to juice sales?

Max Martin with his mouth open wide to cheer from the VIP stands
Martin, Enhanced’s CEO, cheers on athletes from the stands. Company leadership insists the competition will take place again next year.
SAEED RAHBARAN

As the athletes gathered on the stage to receive their prizes, Martin took the microphone and addressed the crowd. “Enhanced is culture,” he said. “We are at the pulse of where the world is going.” On this, at least, he’s probably right. Testosterone replacement therapy is rapidly moving into the mainstream, and while the science may still not be there on peptides, they have certainly exploded in popularity in the two years since Enhanced launched. And there are undoubtedly more substances yet to be discovered that will promise to improve people’s lives, or at least hold their appearance in stasis. The enhanced age is upon us, whether we want it or not. 

As the fireworks went off and the Killers closed out the event with “When You Were Young” (“Congratulations to … whoever deserves it,” said frontman Brandon Flowers), I wondered what that might mean for us mere mortals. Invoking Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in a story about drugs and Las Vegas may be a cliché, but it struck me that fear played a big part in all of this. Fear of missing out. Fear of getting old. Fear of never making a dime on your life’s pursuit. Fear of waking up one morning and seeing your flabby, sunken face in the mirror while everyone around you shines and grins and thrives with white-toothed, alien smiles.

Megan Romano in cap and goggles with her dry robe stands backlit by pink event lighting and stage fog
Before joining Enhanced, Romano had not swum competitively in almost a decade.
SAEED RAHBARAN

But the big problem with Enhanced’s vision of superhumanity is the question of who gets to join in. “People will be able to enhance themselves if they have enough money,” Sagner had told me the night before the games. The rest of us, I fear, will just have to function as normal human beings.

Amit Katwala is a journalist and author covering science, culture, and where they collide. His latest book is Tremors in the Blood: Murder, Obsession and the Birth of the Lie Detector. He is based in London.

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Jun 10 2026
Five things you need to know about AI

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  • AI’s impact on jobs is real but still unreadable. Millions already use generative AI for everyday office tasks, yet hard data on employment effects remains almost nonexistent. Companies are still figuring out what this means internally.
  • The scary stuff is no longer hypothetical. Deepfakes, chatbot-linked suicides, and AI-assisted military targeting have moved from dystopian fiction to documented reality. The harms are here; the guardrails largely aren’t.
  • Backlash is growing louder and more organized. Anti-AI protests, award controversies, data center activism, and even a Molotov cocktail thrown at Sam Altman’s house signal that public frustration is hardening into something more serious.
  • Science may be AI’s most consequential frontier. Tools like Google DeepMind’s Co-Scientist and AI capable of cracking unsolved math problems hint at genuine breakthroughs ahead—though researchers warn of narrowed inquiry and a coming flood of AI-generated “science slop.”

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At SXSW London last week I gave a talk called “Five things you need to know about AI,” in which I shared what I think are the biggest themes in AI right now.

I pulled a few things from our first AI10 list, an annual guide to the most important trends in this buzzy world, but I also veered off on a number of tangents. In my half-hour slot, I tried to cover the key talking points that I think help to make sense of what’s going on in tech—and thus the economy—today.  

(I gave a talk with the same title at SXSW London last year with five different things you needed to know. A lot has happened since then!)

So: This is how I’m thinking about AI midway through 2026. Let me know if you would pick different points!

1. Strictly speaking, I didn’t need to show up to give this talk.

Tongue in cheek? Maybe. But generative AI tools have already become mundane, used by millions to automate everyday office tasks (including producing and delivering talks). It’s no surprise that one of the biggest questions out there right now is what this all means for jobs. People are confused and scared.

The frustrating answer is that despite the hype coming from the top about the potential for AI to join the workforce soon—and viral social media posts yelling that something big is happening—there is almost no data to say either way what kind of effect this technology will have on employment and the economy overall. That’s not to say it won’t have an impact, even a huge one, but it’s just too soon to tell.

In theory, teams of agents working together toward common goals could become assembly lines for white-collar work, doing to offices this century what Henry Ford’s innovations did to factories in the 20th century.

In theory. Because in order to know what will happen to jobs, we need to know what will happen inside the companies that create those jobs. But most companies are still figuring that out.

 2. AI is getting scary (for real this time).

There have been scary stories about AI for years—claims that it will kill us all or bring about the end of civilization. There’s still a loud crowd of doomers, but those scenarios remain dystopian science fiction.

What’s happened instead is that many of the worst near-term, real-world fears have come true.

Take deepfakes, AI-generated images or videos of people doing things they didn’t actually do. Deepfakes have been used to incite violence, swing votes, and sow distrust. Trump’s White House is among those creating and publishing fake images.

Many deepfakes are also used to abuse women and girls. One study found that 98% of deepfakes are pornographic and 99% involve women.

Another concern is the rise of dangerous and delusional relationships with chatbots. Many people turn to chatbots to seek private advice and to feel heard. But there are now multiple lawsuits against AI companies alleging that the technology encouraged or aided suicides and other forms of self-harm.

AI is also being used in warfare in new and worrying ways. LLMs are now giving advice, not just being used for analysis. One US defense official told my colleague James O’Donnell that you could now give a military chatbot a list of targets and ask which one to hit first. Anyone who uses AI knows that its output needs to be reviewed carefully. In fact-paced, high-stress active conflict, the risk that corners get cut is high.

3. A lot of people really hate AI.

I checked out an anti-AI protest in London earlier this year and found a very broad mix of complaints. Banners proclaiming the end times bounced along to chants of “Stop the slop! Stop the slop!” Protests are getting more organized and drawing larger crowds.

There’s pushback from fans of films and video games, who object to the use of generative AI in their favorite titles. In one notable case, the acclaimed 2025 game Clair Obscur was stripped of an award when the developers admitted to using AI in just one small, specific part of its production.

And there’s the data center backlash. The US has more than 5,400 data centers and counting. With the energy demands of AI growing, people are unhappy about the environmental impact and their rising electricity bills. Activists are managing to stall development in a number of places.

Regulation is becoming politically popular. Grassroots movements like QuitGPT have gained momentum. A small number have turned to violence; a few weeks ago somebody threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s house. It’s not clear where all this leads. But the apocalyptic hype from tech leaders is not helping people stay calm.

4. AI for science is a very big deal.

It’s early days yet, but the potential for AI to help make a genuine and important scientific discovery is greater than ever.

Google DeepMind has developed Co-Scientist, a multipurpose tool that can help researchers dig up and compare previous results, generate hypotheses, and devise experiments to test them. OpenAI told me this year that its North Star is the goal of building a fully automated researcher by 2028.

Mathematicians are excited too. Fundamental math underpins many everyday technologies, from internet security to video streaming. The last few months have seen a string of claims that AI has cracked unsolved math problems. And software that can solve really hard math problems will be able—so the argument goes—to solve more general-purpose real-world problems too.

What are the downsides? Some scientists are warning that an overreliance on AI tools could narrow the scope of research because scientists may choose problems that are most suited to AI assistance. There are also concerns that AI-assisted research will lead to a flood of inaccurate or fake results: science slop.

5. AI is everywhere all at once.

So where does that leave us? There are a lot of exciting things, a lot of worrying things, and a lot of hot air. It can be exhausting to keep up, and yet it all feels inescapable. Some people will tell you we’re in a race to the top; some will tell you we’re in a race to the bottom. But it’s really not clear where we’re headed.

AI companies want us to march to their tune and buy into the propaganda about artificial general intelligence, whatever that means. They are selling a vision that feels inevitable, but it isn’t.

We’ve built a technology that can do humanlike things, and I think that makes it hard to get our heads around the fact that it is still just a technology.

Something is happening. Maybe even something comparable to the invention of electricity or the internet. But technologies like that take time to settle and bring lasting change.

Get ready for a marathon, not a sprint.

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here.

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Jun 10 2026
David Sinclair plans to test whole-body rejuvenation drugs in the XPrize competition

<div data-chronoton-summary="

  • A bold new bet on whole-body rejuvenation: Harvard biologist David Sinclair plans to test an oral “reprogramming” drug on human volunteers as part of a $101 million XPrize competition.

  • Chemicals instead of gene therapy: Sinclair’s new drug candidate — code-named SL-100 — uses drugs to mimic the effects of reprogramming genes, and will attempt to reset aging across the body.

  • Experts urge caution: Other scientists warn that chemical reprogramming efforts have so far proven either ineffective at low doses or outright toxic at high ones — and Sinclair’s unpublished animal data has yet to face outside scrutiny.

  • The field’s bigger problem: Scientists still can’t agree on how to reliably measure aging or age reversal, making the XPrize competition as much about establishing scientific standards as it is about crowning a winner.

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The outspoken longevity scientist David Sinclair has been predicting that one day, you’ll go to the doctor and get a prescription that will make you 10 years younger.

Now MIT Technology Review has learned that he has plans to launch human tests of an oral “reprogramming” drug as part of a $101 million competition organized by the XPrize Foundation. 

The foundation is offering cash awards to teams able to “restore” a person to an earlier apparent age, as measured by improvements in immune, cognitive, and muscle function. 

The grand prize goes to any team able to show a 10-year (or greater) relative improvement after one year of treatment. 

Reached by phone, Sinclair, a biologist at Harvard Medical School, confirmed that he plans to give an oral drug mixture to volunteers in a bid to seek “evidence for age restoration in humans.”

The trial, if it goes forward, will be a significant new development in the race to harness so-called epigenetic reprogramming. That technology is based on the discovery, 20 years ago, of powerful genes able to turn an adult cell into a stem cell similar to those found in embryos.

The age-reversal effect is believed to occur via a resetting of molecular controls on DNA known as epigenetic marks, which help determine a cell’s overall metabolism and identity.

Companies are now racing to use that phenomenon for a new form of rejuvenation medicine. Only this January, one of Sinclair’s companies, Life Biosciences, made news by winning approval to launch an initial human trial using a set of powerful reprogramming genes. The company announced today it had treated its first patient. 

But that test involves a complex gene therapy and is limited to patients’ eyes, where it could treat conditions like glaucoma. 

Sinclair’s new plan is bolder: a reprogramming drug you’d swallow in order to promote such effects across the body. 

“What we’re aiming to do is to epigenetically restore the animal and eventually the person,” he says. “It is true that we’ve been doing extensive animal studies with the oral agent and are looking to compete in the XPrize.”

This alternative method, chemical reprogramming, uses drugs to mimic the effects of the embryonic genes. That is significant because drug compounds can travel through the bloodstream, reaching most or all cells in a person’s body. 

Some experts expressed caution, saying the chemical process, at least as used in labs, is extremely harsh and not even particularly effective. “Who doesn’t dream of whole-body rejuvenation? I think it’s a great goal,” says Sergiy Velychko, founder of Soxogen, a stealth reprogramming company in Boston. “But these chemicals are used in very, very high concentrations for cell reprogramming.”

Sinclair declined to describe the exact makeup of the drug candidate, code-named SL-100, calling its contents “highly, highly confidential.”

However, he has previously published lab studies of what he called “epigenetic age-reversal cocktails,” which mixed powerful chemicals with known supplements and commercially available medicines. 

It’s those latter components that would be easiest to test on people, since doctors are free to prescribe them, even for unusual objectives like age reversal. James Clement, head of Betterhumans, an organization that specializes in life-extension studies using existing drugs, said in a message that he is “running clinical trials” of an oral reprogramming cocktail for Sinclair’s XPrize team.

Sinclair’s team is competing in the XPrize Healthspan Competition, launched in 2023. It follows several previous competitions that focused on commercial spaceflight, lunar landings, and other goals. The XPrize Foundation is led by executive chairman Peter Diamandis, also an active promoter of longevity research.

“If two teams are equivalent, they would split the award,” says Jamie Justice, a doctor and executive director for the contest, which was bankrolled by Saudi Arabia’s Hevolution Foundation, “But it will be incredibly hard to even get to one winner.”

Justice says a judging panel is now in the process of picking 10 finalists from 65 teams that have been exploring health foods, lifestyle interventions, digital trackers, and drug compounds. 

Sinclair’s team, Justice says, was a late entrant to the contest, but like all teams, it would be required to move into wider human tests starting this year. “You have to be ready and in trials,” she says.

The race to harness the reprogramming phenomenon and apply it to living people is heating up, even outside the XPrize competition. On June 2, a startup called NewLimit, founded by the crypto billionaire Brian Armstrong, said it had raised a further $435 million, from investors including Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, to support what it calls “age reprogramming.” 

The company says it is working toward delivering genetic reprogramming instructions to the liver, to treat diseases of that organ.

But Sinclair has been saying that whole-body rejuvenation is a possibility too. And for that, chemicals, rather than gene therapy, could be the most practical strategy. 

Sinclair says his lab has been searching for such compounds and is starting to use AI “to improve the oral agents that we’re testing.”

Chemical reprogramming cocktails, as used in labs, typically involve a mix of vitamins, approved drugs, and experimental molecules. For instance, one recipe Sinclair filed a patent on includes the supplement forskolin,  the antidepressant tranylcypromine, and an experimental chemical, laduviglusib, which has been tested against Alzheimer’s, among other ingredients.

“In those days it was a six-factor cocktail,” Sinclair says of his earlier research. “But we’ve come a long way. I can’t disclose what’s in it, but it’s an improvement and an advance on that, and we’ve done a number of animal studies. They are not published, but we’ve been doing them for a long time, and we want to make sure that we’ve done a full investigation of safety and efficacy before we release any of the data.”

While Sinclair’s results aren’t published, other teams say attempts to reverse the age of entire animals using chemical drugs haven’t worked yet. Last year, the lab of Vadim Gladyshev, another Harvard biologist and a member of a different XPrize team, reported on its attempt to rejuvenate mice by installing pumps in their bodies that released controlled doses of seven compounds.

Gladyshev says the procedure proved to be toxic. “The idea was to see if we could rejuvenate whole animals. Unfortunately, we have not found [the right] conditions,” he says. “At low concentrations there was no effect, and high concentrations were toxic.”

Gladyshev says he doesn’t know what is in Sinclair’s cocktail, but says that “trying to improve the combinations makes sense.”

Sinclair, who is the author of several books on aging and has a large social media following, has frequently been criticized by other scientists for making unproven rejuvenation claims. 

In 2024, he resigned as president of the Academy for Health and Lifespan Research after claiming that a supplement developed by a company his brother runs had “reversed” the age of dogs, a claim for which there was so little evidence that one scientist called it a “lie.”

Part of the problem is that scientists still disagree on how to measure aging. And they don’t have a reliable way to measure age reversal, either, should it ever be achieved.

Justice, the XPRIZE director, says a primary purpose of the competition is to solve that problem by encouraging the development of standardized measures of aging. That is so that anti-aging drugs can be assessed reliably, and, one-day, approved by regulators if they work.

 “We as a scientific field have been forced to ask, ‘If a medicine improves how we age, how would we know?” Justice said during a public meeting with FDA officials in May. “If something worked, what would convince us as scientists, what’s meaningful to the general public?”

Finalists in the Healthspan competition will be announced in August.

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