Since the Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui was released from prison in 2022, he has sought to make a scientific comeback and to repair his reputation after a three-year incarceration for illegally creating the world’s first gene-edited children.
While he has bounced between cities, jobs, and meetings with investors, one area of visible success on his comeback trail has been his X.com account, @Jiankui_He, which has become his main way of spreading his ideas to the world. Starting in September 2022, when he joined the platform, the account stuck to the scientist’s main themes, including promisinga more careful approach to his dream of creating more gene-edited children. “I will do it, only after society has accepted it,” he posted in August 2024. He also shared mundane images of his daily life, including golf games and his family.
Last month, in reply to MIT Technology Review’s questions about who was responsible for the account’s transformation into a font of clever memes, He emailed us back: “It’s thanks to Cathy Tie.”
You may not be familiar with Tie, but she’s no stranger to the public spotlight. A former Thiel fellow, she is a partner in the attention-grabbing Los Angeles Project, which promised to create glow-in-the-dark pets. Over the past several weeks, though, the 29-year-old Canadian entrepreneur has started to get more and more attention as the new wife to (and apparent social media mastermind behind) He Jiankui. On April 15, He announced a new venture, Cathy Medicine, that would take up his mission of editing human embryos to create people resistant to diseases like Alzheimer’s or cancer. Just a few days later, on April 18, He and Tie announced that they had married, posting pictures of themselves in traditional Chinese wedding attire.
But now Tie says that just a month after she married “the most controversial scientist in the world,” her plans to relocate from Los Angeles to Beijing to be with He are in disarray; she says she’s been denied entry to China and the two “may never see each other again,” as He’s passport is being held by Chinese authorities and he can’t leave the country.
Reached by phone in Manila, Tie said authorities in the Philippines had intercepted her during a layover on May 17 and told her she couldn’t board a plane to China, where she was born and where she says she has a valid 10-year visa. She claims they didn’t say why but told her she is likely “on a watch list.” (MIT Technology Review could not independently confirm Tie’s account.)
“While I’m concerned about my marriage, I am more concerned about what this means for humanity and the future of science,” Tie posted to her own X account.
A match made in gene-editing heaven
The romance between He and Tie has been playing out in public over the past several weeks through a series of reveals on He’s X feed, which had already started going viral late last year thanks to his style of posting awkward selfies alongside maxims about the untapped potential of heritable gene editing, which involves changing people’s DNA when they’re just embryos in an IVF dish.
“Human [sic] will no longer be controlled by Darwin’s evolution,” He wrote in March. That post, which showed him standing in an empty lab, gazing into the distance, garnered 9.7 million views. And then, a week later, he collected 13.3 million for this one: “Ethics is holding back scientific innovation and progress.”
In April, the feed started to change even more drastically.
This shift coincided with the development of his romance with Tie. Tie told us she has visited China three times this year, including a three-week stint in April when she and He got married after a whirlwind romance. She bought him a silver wedding ring made up of intertwined DNA strands.
The odd behavior on He’s X feed and the sudden marriage have left followers wondering if they are watching a love story, a new kind of business venture, or performance art. It might be all three.
A wedding photo posted by Tie on the Chinese social media platform Rednote shows the couple sitting at a table in a banquet hall, with a small number of guests. MIT Technology Review has been able to identify several people who attended: Cai Xilei, He’s criminal attorney; Liu Haiyan, an investor and former business partner of He; and Darren Zhu, an artist and Thiel fellow who is making a “speculative” documentary about the biophysicist that will blur the boundaries of fiction and reality.
In the phone interview, Tie declined to say if she and He are legally married. She also confirmed she celebrated a wedding less than one year ago with someone else in California, in July of 2024, but said they broke up after a few months; she also declined to describe the legal status of that marriage. In the phone call, Tie emphasized that her relationship with He is genuine: “I wouldn’t marry him if I wasn’t in love with him.”
An up-and-comer
Years before Tie got into a relationship with He, she was getting plenty of attention in her own right.She became a Thiel fellow in 2015, when she was just 18. That program, started by the billionaire Peter Thiel, gave her a grant of $100,000 to drop out of the University of Toronto and start a gene testing company, Ranomics.
Soon, she began appearing on the entrepreneur circuit as a “wunderkind” who was featured on a Forbes “30 Under 30” list in 2018 and presented as an up-and-coming venture capitalist on CNN that same year. In 2020, she started her second company, Locke Bio, which focuses on online telemedicine.
Like Thiel, Tie has staked out contrarian positions. She’s called mainstream genomics a scam and described entrepreneurship as a way to escape the hidebound practices of academia and bioethics. “Starting companies is my preferred form of art,” she posted in 2022, linking to an interview on CNBC.
By February 2025, Tie was ready to announce another new venture: the Los Angeles Project, a stealth company she had incorporated in 2023 under her legal name, Cheng Cheng Tie. The company, started with the Texas-based biohacker and artist Josie Zayner, says it will try to modify animal embryos; one goal is to make fluorescent glow-in-the-dark rabbits as pets.
The Los Angeles Project revels in explicitly transgressive aims for embryo editing, including a plan to add horn genes to horse embryos to make a unicorn. That’s consistent with Zayner’s past stunts, which include injecting herself with CRISPR during a livestream. “This is a company that should not exist,” Zayner said in announcing the newly public project.
Although the Los Angeles Project has only a tiny staff with uncertain qualifications, it did raise $1 million from the 1517 Fund, a venture group that supports “dropouts” and whose managers previously ran the Thiel Fellowship.
Asked for his assessment of Tie, Michael Gibson, a 1517 partner, said in an email that he thinks Tie is “not just exceptional, but profoundly exceptional.” He sent along a list of observations he’d jotted down about Tie before funding her company, which approvingly noted her “hyper-fluent competence” and “low need for social approval,” adding: “Thoughts & actions routinely unconventional.”
A comeback story
He first gained notoriety in 2018, when he and coworkers at the Southern University of Science & Technology in Shenzhen injected the CRISPR gene editor into several viable human embryos and then transferred these into volunteers, leading to the birth of three girls who he claimed would be resistant to HIV. A subsequent Chinese investigation found he’d practiced medicine illegally while “pursuing fame and fortune.” A court later sentenced him to three years in prison.
He has never apologized for his experiments, except to say he acted “too quickly” and to express regret for the trouble he’d caused his former wife and two daughters. (According to a leaked WeChat post by his ex-wife, she divorced him in 2024 “because of a major fault on his side.”)
Since his release from prison, He has sought to restart his research and convince people that he should be recognized as the “Chinese Darwin,” not “China’sFrankenstein,” as the press once dubbed him.
But his comeback has been bumpy. He lost a position at Wuchang University of Technology, a small private university in Hubei province, after some negative press. In February 2024, He posted that his application for funding from the Muscular Dystrophy Association was rejected. Last September, he even posted pictures of his torn shirt—which he said was the result of an assault by jealous rivals.
One area of clear success, though, was the growing reach of his X profile, which today has ballooned to more than 130,000 followers. And as his public profile rose, some started encouraging He to find ways to cash in. Andrew Hessel, a futurist and synthetic biologist active in US ethics debates, says he tried to get He invited to give a TED Talk. “His story is unique, and I wanted to see his story get more widespread attention, if only as a cautionary tale,” Hessel says. “I think he is a lightning rod for a generation of people working in life sciences.”
Later, Hessel says, he sent him information on how to join X’s revenue-sharing program. “I said, ‘You have a powerful voice. Have you looked into monetization?’” Hessel says.
By last fall, He was also welcoming visitors to what he called a new lab in Beijing. One person who took him up on the offer was Steve Hsu, a Michigan State physics professor who has started several genetics companies and was visiting Beijing.
They ended up talking for hours. Hsu says that He expressed a desire to move to the US and start a company, and that he shared his idea for conducting a clinical trial of embryo editing in South Africa, possibly for the prevention of HIV.
Hsu says he later arranged an invitation for He to give a lecture in the United States. “You are a little radioactive, but things are opening up,” Hsu told him. But He declined the offer because the Chinese government is holding his passport—a common tactic it uses to restrict the movement of sensitive or high-profile figures—and won’t return it to him. “He doesn’t even know why. He literally doesn’t know,” says Hsu. “According to the law, they should give it back to him.”
A curious triangle
Despite any plans by He and Tie to advance the idea, creating designer babies is currently illegal in most of the world, including China and the US. Some experts, however, fret that forbidding the technology will only drive it underground and make it attractive to biohackers or scientists outside the mainstream.
That’s one reason Tie’s simultaneous connection to two notable biotech renegades—He and Zayner—is worth watching. “There is clearly a triangle forming in some way,” says Hessel.
With Tie stuck outside China and He being kept inside the country, their new gene-editing venture, Cathy Medicine, faces an uncertain future. Tie posted previously on Rednote that she was “helping Dr. He open up the U.S. market” and was planning to return to the US with him for scientific research. But when we spoke on the phone, she declined to disclose their next steps and said their predicament means the project is “out of the window now.”
Even as the couple remain separated, their social media game is stronger than ever. As she waited in Manila, Tie sought help from friends, followers, and the entire internet. She blasted out a tweet to “crypto people,” calling them “too pussy to stand up for things when it matters.” Within hours, someone had created a memecoin called $GENE as a way for the public to support the couple.
Eske Willerslev was on a tour of Montreal’s Redpath Museum, a Victorian-era natural history collection of 700,000 objects, many displayed in wood and glass cabinets. The collection—“very, very eclectic,” a curator explained—reflects the taste in souvenirs of 19th-century travelers and geology buffs. A visitor can see a leg bone from an extinct Steller’s sea cow, a suit of samurai armor, a stuffed cougar, and two human mummies.
Willerslev, a well-known specialist in obtaining DNA from old bones and objects, saw potential biological samples throughout this hodgepodge of artifacts. Glancing at a small Egyptian cooking pot, he asked the tour leader, “Do you ever find any grain in these?” After studying a dinosaur skeleton that proved to be a cast, not actual bone, he said: “Too bad. There can be proteins on the teeth.”
“I am always thinking, ‘Is there something interesting to take DNA from?’” he said, glancing at the curators. “But they don’t like it, because …” Willerslev, who until recently traveled with a small power saw, made a back-and-forth slicing motion with his hand.
Willerslev was visiting Montreal to receive a science prize from the World Cultural Council—one previously given to the string theorist Edward Witten and the astrophysicist Margaret Burbidge, for her work on quasars. Willerslev won it for “numerous breakthroughs in evolutionary genetics.” These include recovering the first more or less complete genome of an ancient man, in 2010, and setting a record for the oldest genetic material ever retrieved: 2.4-million-year-old genes from a frozen mound in Greenland, which revealed that the Arctic desert was once a forest, complete with poplar, birch, and roaming mastodons.
These findings are only part of a wave of discoveries from what’s being called an “ancient-DNA revolution,” in which the same high-speed equipment used to study the DNA of living things is being turned on specimens from the past. At the Globe Institute, part of the University of Copenhagen, where Willerslev works, there’s a freezer full of human molars and ear bones cut from skeletons previously unearthed by archaeologists. Another holds sediment cores drilled from lake bottoms, in which his group is finding traces of entire ecosystems that no longer exist.
“We’re literally walking on DNA, both from the present and from the past.”
Eske Willerslev
Thanks to a few well-funded labs like the one in Copenhagen, the gene time machine has never been so busy. There are genetic maps of saber-toothed cats, cave bears, and thousands of ancient humans, including Vikings, Polynesian navigators, and numerous Neanderthals. The total number of ancient humans studied is more than 10,000 and rising fast, according to a December 2024 tally that appeared in Nature. The sources of DNA are increasing too. Researchers managed to retrieve an Ice Age woman’s genome from a carved reindeer tooth, whose surface had absorbed her DNA. Others are digging at cave floors and coming up with records of people and animals that lived there.
“We’re literally walking on DNA, both from the present and from the past,” Willerslev says.
Eske Willerslev leads one of a handful of laboratories pioneering the extraction and sequencing of ancient DNA from humans, animals, and the environment. His group’s main competition is at Harvard University and at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
JONAS PRYNER ANDERSEN
The old genes have already revealed remarkable stories of human migrations around the globe. But researchers are hoping ancient DNA will be more than a telescope on the past—they hope it will have concrete practical use in the present. Some have already started mining the DNA of our ancestors for clues to the origin of modern diseases, like diabetes and autoimmune conditions. Others aspire to use the old genetic data to modify organisms that exist today.
At Willerslev’s center, for example, a grant of 500 million kroner ($69 million) from the foundation that owns the Danish drug company Novo Nordisk is underwriting a project whose aims include incorporating DNA variation from plants that lived in ancient climates into the genomes of food crops like barley, wheat, and rice. The plan is to redesign crops and even entire ecosystems to resist rising temperatures or unpredictable weather, and it is already underway—last year, barley shoots bearing genetic information from plants that lived in Greenland 2 million years ago, when temperatures there were far higher than today, started springing up in experimental greenhouses.
Willerslev, who started out looking for genetic material in ice cores, is leaning into this possibility as the next frontier of ancient-DNA research, a way to turn it from historical curiosity to potential planet-saver. If nothing is done to help food crops adapt to climate change, “people will starve,” he says. “But if we go back into the past in different climate regimes around the world, then we should be able to find genetic adaptations that are useful. It’s nature’s own response to a climate event. And can we get that? Yes, I believe we can.”
Shreds and traces
In 1993, just a day before the release of the blockbuster Steven Spielberg film Jurassic Park, scientists claimed in a paper that they had extracted DNA from a 120-million-year-old weevil preserved in amber. The discovery seemed to bring the film’s premise of a cloned T. rex closer to reality. “Sooner or later,” a scientist said at the time, “we’re going to find amber containing some biting insect that filled its stomach with blood from a dinosaur.”
But those results turned out to be false—likely the result of contamination by modern DNA. The problem is that modern DNA is much more abundant than what’s left in an old tooth or sample of dirt. That’s because the genetic molecule is constantly chomped on by microbes and broken up by water and radiation. Over time, the fragments get smaller and smaller, until most are so short that no one can tell whether they belonged to a person or a saber-toothed cat.
“Imagine an ancient genome as a big old book, and that all the pages have been torn out, put through a shredder, and tossed into the air to be lost with the wind. Only a few shreds of paper remain. Even worse, they are mixed with shreds of paper from other books, old and new,” says Elizabeth Jones, a science historian. Her 2022 book, Ancient DNA: The Making of a Celebrity Science, details researchers’ overwhelming fear of contamination—both literal, from modern DNA, and of the more figurative sort that can occur when scientists are so tempted by the prospect of fame and being first that they risk spinning sparse data into far-fetched stories.
“When I entered the field, my supervisor said this is a very, very dodgy path to take,” says Willerslev.
But the problem of mixed-up and fragmented old genes was largely solved beginning in 2005, when US companies first introduced ultra-fast next-generation machinery for analyzing genomes. These machines, meant for medical research, required short fragments for fast performance. And ancient-DNA researchers found they could use them to brute-force their way through even poorly preserved samples. Almost immediately, they started recovering large parts of the genomes of cave bears and woolly mammoths.
Ancient humans were not far behind. Willerslev, who was not yet famous, didn’t have access to human bones, and definitely not the bones of Neanderthals (the best ones had been corralled by the scientist Svante Pääbo, who was already analyzing them with next-gen sequencers in Germany). But Willerslev did learn about a six-inch-long tuft of hair collected from a 4,000-year-old midden, or trash heap, on Greenland’s coast. The hair had been stored in a plastic bag in Denmark’s National Museum for years. When he asked about it, curators told him they thought it was human but couldn’t be sure.
“Well, I mean, do you know any other animal in Greenland with straight black hair?” he says. “Not really, right?”
The hair turned out to contain well-preserved DNA, and in 2010, Willerslev published a paper in Nature describing the genome of “an extinct Paleo-Eskimo.” It was the first more or less complete human genome from the deep past. What it showed was a man with type A+ blood, probably brown eyes and thick dark hair, and—most tellingly—no descendants. His DNA code had unique patterns not found in the Inuit who occupy Greenland today.
“Give the archaeologists credit … because they have the hypothesis. But we can nail it and say, ‘Yes, this is what happened.’”
Lasse Vinner
The hair had come from a site once occupied by a group called the Saqqaq, who first reached Greenland around 4,500 years ago. Archaeologists already knew that the Saqqaq’s particular style of making bird darts and spears had vanished suddenly, but perhaps that was because they’d merged with another group or moved away. Now the man’s genome, with specific features pointing to a genetic dead end, suggested they really had died out, very possibly because extreme isolation, and inbreeding, had left them vulnerable. Maybe there was a bad year when the migrating reindeer did not appear.
“Give the archaeologists credit … because they have the hypothesis. But we can nail it and say, ‘Yes, this is what happened,’” says Lasse Vinner, who oversees daily operations at the Copenhagen ancient-DNA lab. “We’ve substantiated or falsified a number of archaeological hypotheses.”
In November, Vinner, zipped into head-to-toe white coveralls, led a tour through the Copenhagen labs, located in the basement of the city’s Natural History Museum. Samples are processed there in a series of cleanrooms under positive air pressure. In one, the floors were still wet with bleach—just one of the elaborate measures taken to prevent modern DNA from getting in, whether from a researcher’s shoes or from floating pollen. It’s partly because of the costly technologies, cleanrooms, and analytical expertise required for the work that research on ancient human DNA is dominated by a few powerful labs—in Copenhagen, at Harvard University, and in Leipzig, Germany—that engage in fierce competition for valuable samples and discoveries. A 2019 New York Times Magazine investigation described the field as an “oligopoly,” rife with perverse incentives and a smash-and-grab culture—in other words, artifact chasing straight out of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
To get his share, Willerslev has relied on his growing celebrity, projecting the image of a modern-day explorer who is always ready to trade his tweeds for muck boots and venture to some frozen landscape or Native American cave. Add to that a tale of redemption. Willerslev often recounts his struggles in school and as a would-be mink hunter in Siberia (“I’m not only a bad student—I’m also a tremendously bad trapper,” he says) before his luck changed once he found science.
This narrative has made him a favorite on television programs like Nova and secured lavish funding from Danish corporations. His first autobiography was titled From Fur Hunter to Professor. A more recent one is called simply It’s a Fucking Adventure.
Peering into the past
The scramble for old bones has produced a parade of headlines about the peopling of the planet, and especially of western Eurasia—from Iceland to Tehran, roughly. That’s where most ancient DNA samples originate, thanks to colder weather, centuries of archaeology, and active research programs. At the National Museum in Copenhagen, some skeletons on display to the public have missing teeth—teeth that ended up in the Globe Institute’s ancient-DNA lab as part of a project to analyze 5,000 sets of remains from Eurasia, touted as the largest single trove of old genomes yet.
What ancient DNA uncovered in Europe is a broad-brush story of three population waves of modern humans. First to come out of Africa were hunter-gatherers who dispersed around the continent, followed by farmers who spread out of Anatolia starting 11,000 years ago. That wave saw the establishment of agriculture and ceramics and brought new stone tools. Last came a sweeping incursion of people (and genes) from the plains of modern Ukraine and Russia—animal herders known as the Yamnaya, who surged into Western Europe spreading the roots of the Indo-European languages now spoken from Dublin to Bombay.
Mixed history
The DNA in ancient human skeletons reveals prehistoric migrations.
The genetic background of Europeans was shaped by three major migrations starting about 45,000 years ago. First came hunter-gatherers. Next came farmers from Anatolia, bringing crops and new ways of living. Lastly, mobile herders called the Yamnaya spread from the steppes of modern Russia and Ukraine. The DNA in ancient skeletons holds a record of these dramatic population changes.
Adapted from “100 ancient genomes show repeated population turnovers in Neolithic Denmark,” Nature, January 10, 2024, and “Tracing the peopling of the world through genomics,” Nature, January 18, 2017
Archaeologists had already pieced together an outline of this history through material culture, examining shifts in pottery styles and burial methods, the switch from stone axes to metal ones. Some attributed those changes to cultural transmission of knowledge rather than population movements, a view encapsulated in the phrase “pots, not people.” However, ancient DNA showed that much of the change was, in fact, the result of large-scale migration, not all of which looks peaceful. Indeed, in Denmark, the hunter-gatherer DNA signature all but vanishes within just two generations after the arrival of farmers during the late Stone Age. To Willerslev, the rapid population replacement “looks like some kind of genocide, to be honest.” It’s a guess, of course, but how else to explain the “limited genetic contribution” to subsequent generations of the blue-eyed, dark-haired locals who’d fished and hunted around Denmark’s islands for nearly 5,000 years? Certainly, the bodies in Copenhagen’s museums suggest violence—some have head injuries, and one still has arrows in it.
In other cases, it’s obvious that populations met and mixed; the average ethnic European today shares some genetic contribution from all three founding groups—hunter, farmer, and herder—and a little bit from Neanderthals, too.“We had the idea that people stay put, and if things change, it’s because people learned to do something new, through movements of ideas,” says Willerslev. “Ancient DNA showed that is not the case—that the transitions from hunter-gatherers to farming, from bronze to iron, from iron to Viking, [are] actually due to people coming and going, mixing up and bringing new knowledge.” It means the world that we observe today, with Poles in Poland and Greeks in Greece, “is very, very young.”
With an increasing number of old bodies giving up their DNA secrets, researchers have started to search for evidence of genetic adaptation that has occurred in humans since the last ice age (which ended about 12,000 years ago), a period that the Copenhagen group noted, in a January 2024 report, “involved some of the most dramatic changes in diet, health, and social organization experienced during recent human evolution.”
Every human gene typically comes in a few different possible versions, and by studying old bodies, it’s possible to see which of these versions became more common or less so with time—potentially an indicator that they’re “under selection,” meaning they influenced the odds that a person stayed alive to reproduce. These pressures are often closely tied to the environment. One clear signal that pops out of ancient European genes is a trend toward lighter skin—which makes it easier to produce vitamin D in the face of diminished sunlight and a diet based on grains.
DNA from ancient human skeletons could help us understand the origins of modern diseases, like multiple sclerosis.
MIKAL SCHLOSSER/UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN
New technology and changing lifestyles—like agriculture and living in proximity to herd animals (and their diseases)—were also potent forces. Last fall, when Harvard University scientists scanned DNA from skeletons, they said they’d detected “rampant” evidence of evolutionary action. The shifts appeared especially in immune system genes and in a definite trend toward less body fat, the genetic markers of which they found had decreased significantly “over ten millennia.” That finding, they said, was consistent with the “thrifty gene” hypothesis, a feast-or-famine theory developed in the 1960s, which states that before the development of farming, people needed to store up more food energy, but doing so became less of an advantage as food became more abundant.
Many of the same genes that put people at risk for multiple sclerosis today almost certainly had some benefit in the past.
Such discoveries could start to explain some modern disease mysteries, such as why multiple sclerosis is unusually common in Nordic countries, a pattern that has perplexed doctors.
The condition seems to be a “latitudinal disease,” becoming more prevalent the farther north you go; theories have pointed to factors including the relative lack of sunlight. In January of last year, the Copenhagen team, along with colleagues, claimed that ancient DNA had solved the riddle, saying the increased risk could be explained in part by the very high amount of Yamnaya ancestry among people in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.
When they looked at modern people, they found that mutations known to increase the risk of multiple sclerosis were far more likely to occur in stretches of DNA people had inherited from these Yamnaya ancestors than in parts of their genomes originating elsewhere.
There’s a twist to the story: Many of the same genes that put people at risk for multiple sclerosis today almost certainly had some benefit in the past. In fact, there’s a clear signal these gene versions were once strongly favored and on the increase. Will Barrie, a postdoc at Cambridge University who collaborated on the research, says the benefit could have been related to germs and infections that these pastoralists were getting from animals. But if modern people don’t face the same exposures, their immune system might still try to box at shadows, resulting in autoimmune disease. That aligns with evidence that children who aren’t exposed to enough pathogens may be more likely to develop allergies and other problems later in life.
“I think the whole sort of lesson of this work is, like, we are living with immune systems that we have inherited from our past,” says Barrie. “And we’ve plunged it into a completely new, modern environment, which is often, you know, sanitary.”
Telling stories about human evolution often involves substantial guesswork—findings are frequently reversed. But the researchers in Copenhagen say they will be trying to more systematically scan the past for health clues. In addition to the DNA of ancient peoples, they’re adding genetic information on what pathogens these people were infected with (germs based on DNA, like plague bacteria, can also get picked up by the sequencers), as well as environmental data, such as average temperatures at points in the past, or the amount of tree cover, which can give an idea of how much animal herding was going on. The resulting “panels”—of people, pathogens, and environments—could help scientists reach stronger conclusions about cause and effect.
Some see in this research the promise of a new kind of “evolutionary medicine”—drugs tailored to your ancestry. However, the research is not far enough along to propose a solution for multiple sclerosis.
For now, it’s just interesting. Barrie says several multiple sclerosis patients have written him and said they were comforted to think their affliction had an explanation. “We know that [the genetic variants] were helpful in the past. They’re there for a reason, a good reason—they really did help your ancestors survive,” he says. “I hope that’s helpful to people in some sense.”
Bringing things back
In Jurassic Park, which was the highest-grossing movie of all time until Titanic came out in 1997, scientists don’t just get hold of old DNA. They also use it to bring dinosaurs back to life, a development that leads to action-packed and deadly consequences.
The idea seemed like fantasy when the film debuted. But Jurassic Park presaged current ambitions to bring past genes into the present. Some of these efforts are small in scale. In 2021, for instance, researchers added a Neanderthal gene to human cells and turned those into brain organoids, which they reported were smaller and lumpier than expected. Others are aiming for living animals. Texas-based Colossal Biosciences, which calls itself the “first de-extinction company,” says it will be trying to use a combination of gene editing, cloning, and artificial wombs to re-create extinct species such as mammoths and the Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine.
Colossal recently recruited a well-known paleogenomics expert, Beth Shapiro, to be its chief scientist. In 2022, Shapiro, previously an advisor to the company, said that she had sequenced the genome of an extinct dodo bird from a skull kept in a museum. “The past, by its nature, is different from anything that exists today,” says Shapiro, explaining that Colossal is “reaching into the past to discover evolutionary innovations that we might use to help species and ecosystems thrive today and into the future.”
The idea of bringing extinct animals back to life seemed like fantasy when Jurassic Park debuted. But the film presaged current ambitions to bring past genes into the present.
It’s not yet clear how realistic the company’s plan to reintroduce missing species and restore nature’s balance really is, although the public would likely buy tickets to see even a poor copy of an extinct animal. Some similar practical questions surround the large grant Willerslev won last year from the philanthropic foundation of Novo Nordisk, whose anti-obesity drugs have turned it into Denmark’s most valuable company.
The project’s concept is to read the blueprints of long-gone ecosystems and look for genetic information that might help major food crops succeed in shorter or hotter growing seasons. Willerslev says he’s concerned that climate change will be unpredictable—it’s hard to say if it will be too wet in any particular area or too dry. But the past could offer a data bank of plausible solutions, which he thinks needs to be prepared now.
The prototype project is already underway using unusual mutations in plant DNA found in the 2-million-year-old dirt samples from Greenland. Some of these have been introduced into modern barley plants by the Carlsberg Group, a brewer that is among the world’s largest beer companies and operates an extensive crop lab in Copenhagen.
Eske Willerslev collects samples in the Canadian Arctic during a summer 2024 field trip. DNA preserved in soil could help determine how megafauna, like the woolly mammoth, went extinct.
RYAN WILKES/UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN
One gene being studied is for a blue-light receptor, a protein that helps plants decide when to flower—a trait also of interest to modern breeders. Two and a half million years ago, the world was warm, and parts of Greenland particularly so—more than 10 °C hotter than today. That is why vegetation could grow there. But Greenland hasn’t moved, so the plants must have also been specially adapted to the stress of a months-long dusk followed by weeks of 24-hour sunlight. Willerslev says barley plants with the mutation are already being grown under different artificial light conditions, to see the effects.
“Our hypothesis is that you could use ancient DNA to identify new traits and as a blueprint for modern crop breeding,” says Birgitte Skadhauge, who leads the Carlsberg Research Laboratory. The immediate question is whether barley can grow in the high north—say, in Greenland or upper Norway, something that could be important on a warming planet. The research is considered exploratory and separate from Carlsberg’s usual commercial efforts to discover useful traits that cut costs—of interest since it brews 10 billion liters of beer a year, or enough to fill the Empire State Building nine times.
Scientists often try hit-or-miss strategies to change plant traits. But Skadhauge says plants from unusual environments, like a warm Greenland during the Pleistocene era, will have incorporated the DNA changes that are important already. “Nature, you know, actually adapted the plants,” she says. “It already picked the mutation that was useful to it. And if nature has adapted to climate change over so many thousands of years, why not reuse some of that genetic information?”
Many of the lake cores being tapped by the Copenhagen researchers cover more recent times, only 3,000 to 10,000 years ago. But the researchers can also use those to search for ideas—say, by tracing the genetic changes humans imposed on barley as they bred it to become one of humanity’s “founder crops.” Among the earliest changes people chose were those leading to “naked” seeds, since seeds with a sticky husk, while good for making beer, tend to be less edible. Skadhauge says the team may be able to reconstruct barley’s domestication, step by step.
There isn’t much precedent for causing genetic information to time-travel forward. To avoid any Jurassic Park–type mishaps, Willerslev says, he’s building a substantial ethics team “for dealing with questions about what does it mean if you’re introducing ancient traits into the world.” The team will have to think about the possibility that those plants could outcompete today’s varieties, or that the benefits would be unevenly distributed—helping northern countries, for example, and not those closer to the equator.
Willerslev says his lab’s evolution away from human bones toward much older DNA is intentional. He strongly hints that the team has already beat its own record for the oldest genes, going back even more than 2.4 million years. And as the first to look further back in time, he’s certain to make big discoveries—and more headlines. “It’s a blue ocean,” he says—one that no one has ever seen.
A new adventure, he says, is practically guaranteed.
Back in 2017, Facebook unveiled plans for a brain-reading hat that you could use to text just by thinking. “We’re working on a system that will let you type straight from your brain,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared in a post that year.
Now the company, since renamed Meta, has actually done it. Except it weighs a half a ton, costs $2 million, and won’t ever leave the lab.
Still, it’s pretty cool that neuroscience and AI researchers working for Meta have managed to analyze people’s brains as they type and determine what keys they are pressing, just from their thoughts.
The research, described in two papers posted by the company (here and here), as well as a blog post, is particularly impressive because the thoughts of the subjects were measured from outside their skulls using a magnetic scanner, and then processed using a deep neural network.
“As we’ve seen time and again, deep neural networks can uncover remarkable insights when paired with robust data,” says Sumner Norman, founder of Forest Neurotech, who wasn’t involved in the research but credits Meta with going “to great lengths to collect high-quality data.”
According to Jean-Rémi King, leader of Meta’s “Brain & AI” research team, the system is able to determine what letter a skilled typist has pressed as much as 80% of the time, an accuracy high enough to reconstruct full sentences from the brain signals.
But Meta never stopped supporting basic research on neuroscience, something it now sees as an important pathway to more powerful AIs that learn and reason like humans. King says his group, based in Paris, is specifically tasked with figuring out “the principles of intelligence” from the human brain.
“Trying to understand the precise architecture or principles of the human brain could be a way to inform the development of machine intelligence,” says King. “That’s the path.”
The typing system is definitely not a commercial product, nor is it on the way to becoming one. The magnetoencephalography scanner used in the new research collects magnetic signals produced in the cortex as brain neurons fire. But it is large and expensive and needs to be operated in a shielded room, since Earth’s magnetic field is a trillion times stronger than the one in your brain.
Norman likens the device to “an MRI machine tipped on its side and suspended above the user’s head.”
What’s more, says King, the second a subject’s head moves, the signal is lost. “Our effort is not at all toward products,” he says. “In fact, my message is always to say I don’t think there is a path for products because it’s too difficult.”
The typing project was carried out with 35 volunteers at a research site in Spain, the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language. Each spent around 20 hours inside the scanner typing phrases like “el procesador ejecuta la instrucción” (the processor executes the instruction) while their brain signals were fed into a deep-learning system that Meta is calling Brain2Qwerty, in a reference to the layout of letters on a keyboard.
The job of that deep-learning system is to figure out which brain signals mean someone is typing an a, which mean z, and so on. Eventually, after it sees an individual volunteer type several thousand characters, the model can guess what key people were actually pressing on.
In the first preprint, Meta researchers report that the average error rate was about 32%—or nearly one out of three letters wrong. Still, according to Meta, its results are most accurate yet for brain typing using a full alphabet keyboard and signals collected outside the skull.
Research on brain reading has been advancing quickly, although the most effective approaches use electrodes implanted into the brain, or directly on its surface. These are known as “invasive” brain computer interfaces. Although they require brain surgery, they can very accurately gather electrical information from small groups of neurons.
In 2023, for instance, a person who lost her voice from ALS was able to speak via brain-reading software connected to a voice synthesizer. Neuralink, founded by Elon Musk, is testing its own brain implant that gives paralyzed people control over a cursor.
Meta says its own efforts remain oriented toward basic research into the nature of intelligence.
And that is where the big magnetic scanner can help. Even though it isn’t practical for patients and doesn’t measure individual neurons, it is able to look at the whole brain, broadly, and all at once.
The Meta scientists say that in a second research effort, using the same typing data, they used this broader view to amass evidence that the brain produces language information in a top-down fashion, with an initial signal for a sentence kicking off separate signals for words, syllables, and finally typed letters.
“The core claim is that the brain structures language production hierarchically,” says Norman. That’s not a new idea, but Meta’s report highlights “how these different levels interact as a system,” says Norman.
Those types of insights could eventually shape the design of artificial-intelligence systems. Some of these, like chatbots, already rely extensively on language in order to process information and reason, just as people do.
“Language has become a foundation of AI,” King says. “So the computational principles that allow the brain, or any system, to acquire such ability is the key motivation behind this work.”
Correction: Meta posted two papers describing its brain-typing results on its website. An earlier version of this story incorrectly said they had been published at arXiv.org.
In June 2024, results from a trial of a new medicine to prevent HIV were announced—and they were jaw-dropping. Lenacapavir, a treatment injected once every six months, protected over 5,000 girls and women in Uganda and South Africa from getting HIV. And it was 100% effective.
The drug, which is produced by Gilead, has other advantages. We’ve had effective pre-exposure prophylactic (PrEP) drugs for HIV since 2012, but these must be taken either daily or in advance of each time a person is exposed to the virus. That’s a big ask for healthy people. And because these medicines also treat infections, there’s stigma attached to taking them. For some, the drugs are expensive or hard to access. In the lenacapavir trial, researchers found that injections of the new drug were more effective than a daily PrEP pill, probably because participants didn’t manage to take the pills every day.
In 2021, the US Food and Drug Administration approved another long-acting injectable drug that protects against HIV. That drug, cabotegravir, is manufactured by ViiV Healthcare (which is largely owned by GSK) and needs to be injected every two months. But despite huge demand, rollout has been slow.
Scientists and activists hope that the story will be different for lenacapavir. So far, the FDA has approved the drug only for people who already have HIV that’s resistant to other treatments. But Gilead has signed licensing agreements with manufacturers to produce generic versions for HIV prevention in 120 low-income countries.
In October, Gilead announced more trial results for lenacapavir, finding it 96% effective at preventing HIV infection in just over 3,200 cisgender gay, bisexual, and other men, as well as transgender men, transgender women, and nonbinary people who have sex with people assigned male at birth.
California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, Neurona Therapeutics, Vertex Pharmaceuticals
WHEN
5 years
A quarter-century ago, researchers isolated powerful stem cells from embryos created through in vitro fertilization. These cells, theoretically able to morph into any tissue in the human body, promised a medical revolution. Think: replacement parts for whatever ails you.
But stem-cell science didn’t go smoothly. Not at first. Even though scientists soon learned to create these make-anything cells without embryos, coaxing them to become truly functional adult tissue proved harder than anyone guessed.
Now, though, stem cells are finally on the brink of delivering. Take the case of Justin Graves, a man with debilitating epilepsy who received a transplant of lab-made neurons, engineered to quell the electrical misfires in his brain that cause epileptic attacks.
Since the procedure, carried out in 2023 at the University of California, San Diego, Graves has reported having seizures about once a week, rather than once per day as he used to. “It’s just been an incredible, complete change,” he says. “I am pretty much a stem-cell evangelist now.”
The epilepsy trial, from a company called Neurona Therapeutics, is at an early stage—only 15 patients have been treated. But the preliminary results are remarkable.
Last June, a different stem-cell study delivered dramatic results. This time it was in type 1 diabetes, the autoimmune condition formerly called juvenile diabetes, in which a person’s body attacks the beta islet cells in the pancreas. Without working beta cells to control their blood sugar levels, people with type 1 diabetes rely on daily blood glucose monitoring and insulin injections or infusions to stay alive.
In this ongoing study, carried out by Vertex Pharmaceuticals in Boston, some patients who got transfusions of lab-made beta cells have been able to stop taking insulin. Instead, their new cells make it when it’s needed.
No more seizures. No more insulin injections. Those are the words patients have always wanted to hear. And it means stem-cell researchers are close to achieving functional cures—when patients can get on with life because their bodies are able to self-regulate.
US doctors write billions of prescriptions each year. During 2024, though, one type of drug stood out—“wonder drugs” known as GLP-1 agonists.
As of September, one of every 20 prescriptions written for adults was for one of these drugs, according to the health data company Truveta.
The drugs, which include Wegovy, Mounjaro, and Victoza, are used to treat diabetes, since they help generate insulin. But their popularity exploded after scientists determined the drugs tell your brain you’re not hungry. Without those hunger cues, people find they can lose 10% of their body weight, or even more.
During 2024, the drugs’ popularity hit an all-time high, according to Tricia Rodriguez, a principal applied scientist at Truveta, which studies medical records of 120 million Americans, or about a third of the population.
“Among adults, 5.4% of all prescriptions in September 2024 were for GLP-1s,” Rodriguez says. That is up from 3.5% a year earlier, in 2023, and 1% at the start of 2021.
According to Truveta’s data, people who get prescriptions for these drugs are younger, whiter, and more likely to be female. In fact, women are twice as likely as men to get a prescription.
Yet not everyone who’s prescribed the drugs ends up taking them. In fact, Rodriguez says, half the new prescriptions for obesity are going unfilled.
That’s very unusual, she says, and could be due to shortages or sticker shock over the cost of the treatment. Many insurers don ’t cover weight-loss drugs, and the out-of-pocket price can be $1,300 a month, according toUSA Today.
“For most medications, prescribing rates and dispensing rates are pretty much identical,” says Rodriguez. “But for GLP-1s, we see this gap, which is really unique. It’s suggestive that people are really interested in getting these medications, but for whatever reason, they are not always able to.”
It also means the number of people taking these drugs could go higher—maybe much higher—if insurers would pay. “I don’t think that we are at the saturation point, or necessarily nearing the saturation point,” says Rodriguez, noting that around 70% of Americans are overweight or obese.
Use of the drugs may also grow dramatically if new applications are found. Companies are already exploring whether they can treat addiction, or even Alzheimer’s.
Many of the clues about those potential uses are coming directly out of people’s medical records. Because so many people are on the drugs, it means researchers like Rodriguez have a gold mine to sift through for signs of how use of the drugs is affecting other health problems.
“Because we have so many patients that are on these medications, you’re certainly likely to have a good number that also have all of these other conditions,” she says. “One of the things we’re excited about is: How can real-world data help accelerate how quickly we can understand those?”
Here are some of the new uses of GLP-1 drugs that are being explored, based on hints from real-world patient records.
Alzheimer’s disease
This year, researchers poking through records of a million people found that taking semaglutide (sold as Wegovy and Ozempic) was associated with a 40% to 70% lower chance of an Alzheimer’s diagnosis.
It’s still a guess why the drugs might be helping (or whether they really do), but large international studies are underway to follow up on the lead. Doctors are recruiting people with early Alzheimer’s in more than 30 countries who will take either a placebo or semaglutide for two years. Then we’ll see how much their dementia has progressed.
Those are the types of clues Eli Lilly’s CEO, David Ricks, says his company will pursue next year, testing whether its GLP-1 drug, tirzepatide (called Mounjaro for diabetes treatment, and Zepbound for weight loss), could help with addiction to alcohol, nicotine, and “other things we don’t think about [as being] connected to weight.”
In comments he made in December, Ricks said the drugs might be “anti-hedonics”—meaning they counteract our hedonistic pursuit of pleasure, be it from food, alcohol, or drugs. A study this year mining digital health records found that opioid addicts taking the drugs were about half as likely to have had an overdose.
Sleep apnea
This idea goes back a ways, including to a 2015 case study of a 260-pound man with diabetes and sleep apnea. When he went on the drug liraglutide, doctors noticed that his sleeping improved.
In sleep apnea, a person gasps for air at night—it’s annoying and, with time, causes health problems. This year, Eli Lilly published a study in the New England Journal of Medicine on its drug tirzepatide , finding that it caused a 50% decrease in breathing interruption in overweight patients with sleep apnea.
Longevity
This year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Wegovy as a cardiovascular medicine, after researchers showed the drugs could reduce heart attack and stroke in overweight people.
But that wasn’t all. The study, involving 17,000 people, found that the drug reduced the overall chance someone would die for any reason (known as “all-cause mortality”) by 19%.
That now has aging researchers paying attention. This year they named Wegovy, and drugs like it, among their the top four candidates for a general life-extension drug.
They say you learn more from failure than success. If so, this is the story for you: MIT Technology Review’s annual roll call of the biggest flops, flimflams, and fiascos in all domains of technology.
Some of the foul-ups were funny, like the “woke” AI which got Google in trouble after it drew Black Nazis. Some caused lawsuits, like a computer error by CrowdStrike that left thousands of Delta passengers stranded. We also reaped failures among startups that raced to expand from 2020 to 2022, a period of ultra-low interest rates. But then the economic winds shifted. Money wasn’t free anymore. The result? Bankruptcy and dissolution for companies whose ambitious technological projects, from vertical farms to carbon credits, hadn’t yet turned a profit and might never do so.
Read on.
Woke AI blunder
GOOGLE GEMINI VIA X.COM/END WOKENESS
People worry about bias creeping into AI. But what if you add bias on purpose? Thanks to Google, we know where that leads: Black Vikings and female popes.
Google’s Gemini AI image feature, launched last February, had been tuned to zealously showcase diversity, damn the history books. Ask Google for a picture of German soldiers from World War II, and it would create a Benetton ad in Wehrmacht uniforms.
Critics pounced and Google beat an embarrassed retreat. It paused Gemini’s ability to draw people and agreed its well-intentioned effort to be inclusive had “missed the mark.”
The free version of Gemini still won’t create images of people. But paid versions will. When we asked for an image of 12 CEOs of public biotech companies, the software produced a photographic-quality image of middle-aged white men. Less than ideal. But closer to the truth.
Boeing, we have a problem. And it’s your long-delayed reusable spaceship, the Starliner, which stranded NASA astronauts Sunita “Suni” Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore on the International Space Station.
The June mission was meant to be a quick eight-day round trip to test Starliner before it embarked on longer missions. But, plagued by helium leaks and thruster problems, it had to come back empty.
Now Butch and Suni won’t return to Earth until 2025, when a craft from Boeing competitor SpaceX is scheduled to bring them home.
Credit Boeing and NASA with putting safety first. But this wasn’t Boeing’s only malfunction during 2024. The company began the year with a door blowing off one of its planes midflight, faced a worker strike, agreed to a major fine for misleading the government about the safety of its 737 Max airplane (which made our 2019 list of worst technologies), and saw its CEO step down in March.
After the Starliner fiasco, Boeing fired the chief of its space and defense unit. “At this critical juncture, our priority is to restore the trust of our customers and meet the high standards they expect of us to enable their critical missions around the world,” Boeing’s new CEO, Kelly Ortberg, said in a memo.
The motto of the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike is “We stop breaches.” And it’s true: No one can breach your computer if you can’t turn it on.
That’s exactly what happened to many people on July 19, when thousands of Windows computers at airlines, TV stations, and hospitals started displaying the “blue screen of death.”
The cause wasn’t hackers or ransomware. Instead, those computers were stuck in a boot loop because of a bad update shipped by CrowdStrike itself. CEO George Kurtz jumped on X to say the “issue” had been identified as a “defect” in a single computer file.
So who is liable? CrowdStrike customer Delta Airlines, which canceled 7,000 flights, is suing for $500 million. It alleges that the security firm caused a “global catastrophe” when it took “uncertified and untested shortcuts.”
CrowdStrike countersued. It says Delta’s management is to blame for its troubles and that the airline is due little more than a refund.
Grow lettuce in buildings using robots, hydroponics, and LED lights. That’s what Bowery, a “vertical farming” startup, raised over $700 million to do. But in November, Bowery went bust, making it the biggest startup failure of the year, according to the business analytics firm CB Insights.
Bowery claimed that vertical farms were “100 times more productive” per square foot than traditional farms, since racks of plants could be stacked 40 feet high. In reality, the company’s lettuce was more expensive, and when a stubborn plant infection spread through its East Coast facilities, Bowery had trouble delivering the green stuff at any price.
The deadly attack was diabolically clever. Israel set up shell companies that sold thousands of pagers packed with explosives to the Islamic faction, which was already worried that its phones were being spied on.
A coup for Israel’s spies. But was it a war crime? A 1996 treaty prohibits intentionally manufacturing “apparently harmless objects” designed to explode. The New York Times says nine-year-old Fatima Abdullah died when her father’s booby-trapped beeper chimed and she raced to take it to him.
The company that pioneered direct-to-consumer gene testing is sinking fast. Its stock price is going toward zero, and a plan to create valuable drugs is kaput after that team got pink slips this November.
23andMe always had a celebrity aura, bathing in good press. Now, though, the press is all bad. It’s a troubled company in the grip of a controlling founder, Anne Wojcicki, after its independent directors resigned en masse this September. Customers are starting to worry about what’s going to happen to their DNA data if 23andMe goes under.
23andMe says it created “the world’s largest crowdsourced platform for genetic research.” That’s true. It just never figured out how to turn a profit.
Slop is the scraps and leftovers that pigs eat. “AI slop” is what you and I are increasingly consuming online now that people are flooding the internet with computer-generated text and pictures.
AI slop is “dubious,” says the New York Times, and “dadaist,” according to Wired. It’s frequently weird, like Shrimp Jesus (don’t ask if you don’t know), or deceptive, like the picture of a shivering girl in a rowboat, supposedly showing the US government’s poor response to Hurricane Helene.
AI slop is often entertaining. AI slop is usually a waste of your time. AI slop is not fact-checked. AI slop exists mostly to get clicks. AI slop is that blue-check account on X posting 10-part threads on how great AI is—threads that were written by AI.
Most of all, AI slop is very, very common. This year, researchers claimed that about half the long posts on LinkedIn and Medium were partly AI-generated.
Your business creates emissions that contribute to global warming. So why not pay to have some trees planted or buy a more efficient cookstove for someone in Central America? Then you could reach net-zero emissions and help save the planet.
Neat idea, but good intentions aren’t enough. This year the carbon marketplace Nori shut down, and so did Running Tide, a firm trying to sink carbon into the ocean. “The problem is the voluntary carbon market is voluntary,” Running Tide’s CEO wrote in a farewell post, citing a lack of demand.
While companies like to blame low demand, it’s not the only issue. Sketchy technology, questionable credits, and make-believe offsets have created a credibility problem in carbon markets. In October, US prosecutors charged two men in a $100 million scheme involving the sale of nonexistent emissions savings.
Under a slice-of-heaven sky, 150 acres of rolling green hills stretch off into the distance. About a dozen people—tree enthusiasts, conservationists, research biologists, biotech entrepreneurs, and a venture capitalist in long socks and a floppy hat—have driven to this rural spot in New York state on a perfect late-July day.
We are here to see more than 2,500 transgenic chestnut seedlings at a seed farm belonging to American Castanea, a new biotech startup. The sprouts, no higher than our knees, are samples of likely the first genetically modified trees to be considered for federal regulatory approval as a tool for ecological restoration. American Castanea’s founders, and all the others here today, hope that the American chestnut (Castanea dentata) will be the first tree species ever brought back from functional extinction—but, ideally, not the last.
Living as long as a thousand years, the American chestnut tree once dominated parts of the Eastern forest canopy, with many Native American nations relying on them for food. But by 1950, the tree had largely succumbed to a fungal blight probably introduced by Japanese chestnuts. “Now after hard work, great ideas, and decades of innovation, we have a tree and a science platform designed to make restoration possible,” American Castanea cofounder Michael Bloom told the people squinting in the sun.
As recently as last year, it seemed the 35-year effort to revive the American chestnut might grind to a halt. Now, federal regulatory approval is expected soon. And there’s millions of dollars in new funding coming in from private investors and the federal government. One conservation nonprofit is in discussions with American Castanea to plant up to a million of its chestnuts per year as soon as they’re ready and approved.
Nothing like this has ever been tried before. But the self-proclaimed “nutheads” believe the reintroduction of a GMO, blight-resistant American chestnut at scale could also become a model for how environmentalists can redeploy trees in general: restoring forests and shifting food production, all to combat climate change and biodiversity loss.
“It’s a hard time to be a tree,” says Leigh Greenwood, director of the forest pest and pathogen program at the Nature Conservancy, which has been supportive of the GMO chestnut’s regulatory application. “But there’s some really interesting promise and hope.”
Four billion trees dead
“Charismatic megafauna” is the scientific term for species, like pandas and blue whales, that draw a disproportionate amount of love and, thus, resources. The nearly vanished American chestnut may be the most charismatic tree east of the Rockies. Because of its historical importance, fast growth, and abundant productivity of both nuts and timber, it’s drawn an exceptional amount of interest among biologists, conservationists, and a new crop of farmers.
Trees that die back from blight occasionally resprout. Volunteer groups like the American Chestnut Cooperators’ Foundation have been working for decades to gather and crossbreed wild trees in the hopes of nudging along natural resistance to the blight. Meanwhile, the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF), with the support of a different group, the American Chestnut Foundation (TACF), has been pursuing genetic engineering in its labs and on its 44 wooded acres outside Syracuse.
When ESF biologist Bill Powell and his colleagues began working with chestnut embryonic cells in 1989, it took them a decade just to optimize the growing process to make research practical. After that, researchers in the small lab inserted a wheat gene in embryos that inactivated oxalic acid, the toxin produced by the blight fungus. Gathering results on these transgenic trees takes time, because each generation has to grow for a few years before it produces the most useful data. But they eventually created a promising line, named Darling-58 after Herb Darling, a New York construction magnate who funded this research through TACF. Darling-58 was not perfect, and results varied from tree to tree and site to site. But eventually, the data showed slower infections and smaller cankers, the bulbous growths produced by the blight.
In 2020, Darling-58 became, in all likelihood, the first genetically modified forest tree to be submitted for federal regulatory approval to the US Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, the EPA, and the FDA to determine the safety of introducing it in the wild.
“It’s a hard time to be a tree. But there’s some really interesting promise and hope.”
It is this genetically engineered strain of chestnut that American Castanea, too, is now planting and propagating in New York state, under a nonexclusive commercial license from ESF. They want to sell these trees, pending approval. And then they want to keep going, engineering ever-better chestnuts, and selling them first to enthusiasts, then to farmers, and finally to conservationists for timber, reforestation, maybe even carbon capture.
To aid the effort, the company is looking for extraordinary wild specimens. In early 2024, it purchased an orchard that had been lovingly cultivated for three decades by a conservationist. The windy hilltop spot houses hundreds of trees, collected like stray kittens from a dozen states throughout the chestnut’s natural range.
Most of the trees are homely and sickly with blight. They have bulging cankers, “flagging” branches sporting yellow and brown leaves, or green shoots that burst each season from their large root systems only to flop over and die back. “They make me a little sad,” admits Andrew Serazin, cofounder of American Castanea. But a few have shot up as tall as 40 feet, with only a few cankers. All these specimens have been sampled and are being analyzed. They will become the basis of a chestnut gene database that’s as complete as American Castanea can make it.
From there, the plan is: Apply bioinformatics and AI techniques to correlate genetic signatures with specific traits. Borrow techniques developed in the cannabis industry for seedling production, cloning, and growth acceleration in high-intensity light chambers—none of which have yet been yet applied at this scale to forest trees. Develop several diverse, improved new strains of chestnut that are blight-resistant and optimized for different uses like forest restoration, nut production, and timber. Then produce seedlings at a scale previously unknown. The hope is to accelerate restoration, cutting down the time it would take resistant strains of the tree to propagate in the wild. “Tree growth takes a long time. We need to bend the curve of something that’s like a 30-year problem,” says Serazin.
The breadtree revival
The chestnut has not disappeared from the US: In fact, Americans eat some 33 million pounds of the nuts a year. These are European and Asian varieties, mostly imported. But some companies are looking to expand the cultivation of the nuts domestically.
Among those leading the quest is a company called Breadtree Farms in upstate New York, named for a traditional nickname for the chestnut. In March, it won a $2 million grant from the USDA to build the largest organic chestnut processing facility in the US. It will be up to eight times larger than needed for its own 250 acres of trees. The company is dedicated to scaling the regional industry. “We have a list of over 100 growers that are, and will be, planting chestnut trees,” says Russell Wallack, Breadtree’s young cofounder.
Chestnuts have a nutritional profile similar to brown rice; they’re high in carbohydrates and lower in fat than other nuts. And unlike other nut trees, the chestnut “masts”—produces a large crop—every year, making it far more prolific.
That makes it a good candidate for an alternative form of agriculture dubbed agroforestry, which incorporates more trees into food cultivation. Food, agriculture, and land use together account for about one-quarter of greenhouse-gas emissions. Adding trees, whether as windbreaks between fields or as crops, could lower the sector’s carbon footprint.
Many different trees can be used this way. But Joe Fargione, science director for the Nature Conservancy’s North America region, says the chestnut is a standout candidate. “It’s great from a climate perspective, and there’s a lot of farmers that are excited about it,” he says. “Chestnuts end up being big trees that store a lot of CO2 and have a product that can be very prolific. They have the potential to pay for themselves. We want not just environmental sustainability but economic sustainability.”
The passion for chestnut revival connects the foresters and the farmers. Farmers aren’t waiting for the GMO trees to get federal approval. They are planting existing Chinese varieties, and hybrids between American and Chinese chestnuts, which thrive in the East. Still, Fargione says that if nut cultivation is going to scale up, farmers will need reliable seed stock of genetically improved trees.
A Tennessee family poses at the base of a chestnut tree, circa 1920. A deadly fungus nearly drove the once mighty species extinct by 1940.
NEGATIVES OF GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS NATIONAL PARK
On the other hand, those foreign orchard varieties would be considered invasives if planted in the wild. And they wouldn’t feed wildlife in the same way, says Sara Fern Fitzsimmons, chief conservation officer of the American Chestnut Foundation. “Wild turkeys prefer American chestnuts,” she says. “And the blue jay—since the American chestnut is smaller, he can fit more in his crop,” a food storage area inside a bird’s throat. For forest restoration you need American chestnuts or something as close to them as possible. That’s where the genetic engineering and crossbreeding projects will be crucial. But that path has been full of pitfalls.
Switched at birth
In late 2023, a biologist at the University of New England discovered evidence that Darling-58 was not what people thought it was. For nearly 10 years, all the data that ESF had painstakingly gathered on the strain actually pertained to a different line, Darling-54, which has its wheat gene in a different place on the genome. The promising results were all still there. The trees had simply been mislabeled that entire time.
A few weeks later, in December 2023, the American Chestnut Foundation suddenly announced it was withdrawing its support of ESF’s Darling tree research, citing the 54-58 mix-up, as well as what it called “disappointing performance results” for 54.
But Andy Newhouse, director of the American Chestnut Project at SUNY ESF, says the mislabeling is not a deal-breaker. The research doesn’t “need to start from scratch,” he says. “This is correcting the record, making sure we have the appropriate label on it, and moving forward.” Newhouse says the regulatory application is ongoing (the USDA and FDA declined to comment on a pending regulatory application; the EPA did not respond to requests for comment).
Newhouse defends the documented blight response of the trees that, we now know, are actually Darling-54.
And besides, he says, they’ve got a potentially better strain coming: the DarWin. The “Win” stands for “wound-inducible.” In these trees, the anti-blight action turns on—is induced—only when the tree’s bark is wounded, working something like an animal’s immune response. This could be more efficient than continuously expressing the anti-blight gene, the way Darling-54 does. So DarWin trees might reserve more of their energy to grow and produce nuts.
The DarWin trees are about three years old, meaning data is still being collected. And if the Darling trees are approved for safety, it should smooth the path for a much faster approval of the DarWin trees, Newhouse says.
There was another reason, though, that TACF dropped its support of the Darling regulatory petition. In a FAQ on its website, the foundation said it was “surprised and concerned” that ESF had made a licensing deal for the Darling and DarWin trees—potentially worth millions—with a for-profit company: American Castanea.
TACF said it had been supporting the project under the assumption that the results would be available, for free, to anyone, in the “public commons.” Commercialization, it says, could make the trees more expensive for anyone who might want to plant them. Fitzsimmons wouldn’t comment further.
The biotech boys
American Castanea’s Andrew Serazin is a Rhodes scholar whose scientific background is in tropical disease research. He rose in the ranks in global philanthropy, running million-dollar grant competitions for the Gates Foundation, funding projects like vitamin-enhanced “golden rice” and HIV vaccines.
He was president of the Templeton World Charity Foundation in 2020 when it gave a “transformational” $3.2 million grant to SUNY ESF’s chestnut project. Serazin became convinced that the chestnut could be the seed of something much, much bigger. It didn’t hurt that he had a sentimental chestnut connection through his wife’s family farm in West Virginia, which dates back to the time of George Washington.
With pests and pathogens threatening so many different species, “there’s a huge potential for there to be precision management of forests using all of the same capabilities we’ve used in human medicine,” he says.
For that, Serazin was convinced, they needed money. Real money. Venture capital money. “I mean, really, there’s only one system that we know about that works the best for this kind of innovation, and that’s using incentives for companies to bring together these resources,” he says.
Serazin teamed up with his friend Michael Bloom, an entrepreneur who’s sold two previous companies. They incorporated American Castanea for certification as a public benefit corporation in Delaware, pledging to balance profit with purpose and adhere to a high degree of transparency on social and environmental impact. They went to “impact investors” to sell the vision. That was part of what was going on at the seed farm on that July day; the company has $4 million in seed financing and wants to raise $7 million to $10 million more next year.
What he’s offering investors, Serazin says, isn’t quick returns but a chance to “participate in the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to bring back a tree species from functional extinction, and participate in this great American story.”
What they’re proposing, over the next several decades or more, is no less than replanting the entire Eastern forest with a variety of genetically superior breeds, on the scale of millions of trees.
It sounds, at first blush, like a sci-fi terraforming scenario. On the other hand, Leigh Greenwood, at the Nature Conservancy, says every species group of tree in the woods is threatened by climate change. Pathogens are emerging in new territories, trees are stressed by extreme weather, and the coldest winter temperatures, which used to reliably kill off all manner of forest insects and diseases at the edges of their habitats, are getting milder.
Besides chestnut blight, there’s Dutch elm disease, the emerald ash borer, butternut canker, oak wilt, and white pine blister rust. The southern pine beetle now ranges as far north as Massachusetts because of milder winters. The spongy (formerly gypsy) moth is a champion defoliator, munching enough leaves “to make an entire forest look naked in June,” says Greenwood. A new nematode that attacks leaves and buds, previously unknown to science, has emerged near the Great Lakes in the last decade. Sick and dying trees stop sequestering carbon and storing water, are prone to wildfire, and can take entire ecosystems down with them.
“Invasive species are moving faster than biological time,” Greenwood says. “What we have to do is speed up the host trees, their natural selection. And that is an enormous task that only in very recent times have we really developed the tools in order to figure out how the heck we’re going to do that.”
By “recent tools,” Greenwood means, more or less, what American Castanea is trying: genetic analysis and advanced horticultural techniques that allow resistant trees to be propagated and introduced into the wild more quickly.
Greenwood is quick to say that the Nature Conservancy also supports the American Chestnut Cooperators’ Foundation, which crossbreeds wild American chestnuts for blight resistance. They are a small, all-volunteer organization with no university affiliation. They mail their crossbred chestnuts out to hobbyist landowners all over the country, and president Ed Greenwell tells me they don’t really know exactly how many are growing out there—maybe 5,000, maybe more. He has seen some that are big and healthy, he says. “We have many trees of 40-plus years of age.”
What they don’t have is a sense of urgency. “We’re self-funded, so we could do our breeding as we choose,” says Greenwell. “Our method is tried and true, and we have no pressure to take shortcuts, like genetic modification, which theoretically could have shortened the time to get trees back in the woods.”
The whole idea of a GMO forest tests our concept of what “nature” is. And that may just be a marker of where we are at this point in the Anthropocene.
Greenwell is not the only one to object to GMO chestnuts. In 2023, Joey Owle, then the secretary of agriculture and natural resources for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, told Grist magazine that while the group was open to introducing transgenic trees on its land if necessary, it was the “last option that we would like to pursue.”
Greenwood led the writing of an expert letter, something like an amicus brief, in support of SUNY ESF’s regulatory petition for the Darling tree. She takes such objections seriously. “If we do not address the human dimensions of change, no matter how good the biological, chemical designs are,” she says, “those changes will fail.”
That July day out at the seed farm, sitting under a tent with plates of pork barbecue, the scientists, conservationists, and businesspeople started debating how deep these GMO objections really run. Serazin said he believes that what people really hate is corporate monopoly, not the technology per se. “It’s really about the exertion of power and capital,” he said. He’s hoping that by incorporating as a public benefit corporation and making the trees widely available to conservation groups and responsible forest product and nut producers, he can convince people that American Castanea’s heart is in the right place.
Still, others pointed out, the whole idea of a GMO forest tests our concept of what “nature” is. And that may just be a marker of where we are at this point in the Anthropocene—it’s hard to envision a future where any living creature in the ecological web can remain untouched by humans.
That responsibility may connect us more to the past than we realize. For centuries, Native people like the Haudenosaunee Nation practiced intentional land management to improve habitat for the chestnut. When the Europeans began clearing land for farming and timber, the fast-growing tree was able to claim proportionately even more space for itself. It turns out the forest those colonists embraced—the forest dominated by chestnut trees—was no true accident of nature. It was a product of a relationship between people and chestnuts. One that continues to evolve today.
Anya Kamenetz is a freelance reporter who writes the Substack newsletter The Golden Hour.
Dried cells—it’s what’s for dinner. At least that’s what a new crop of biotech startups, armed with carbon-guzzling bacteria and plenty of capital, are hoping to convince us. Their claims sound too good to be true: They say they can make food out of thin air.
But that’s exactly how certain soil-dwelling bacteria work. In nature, these “autotrophic” microbes survive on a meager diet of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and water vapor drawn directly from the atmosphere. In the lab, they do the same, eating up waste carbon and reproducing so enthusiastically that their populations swell to fill massive fermentation tanks. Siphoned off and dehydrated, that bacterial biomass becomes a protein-rich powder that’s chock-full of nutrients and essentially infinitely renewable.
Lisa Dyson is the founder of one of these startups, Air Protein. When she talks about the inspiration for her company, she often cites NASA research from the 1960s. Back then the agency, hoping to keep astronauts satiated on long-haul space journeys, explored the idea of growing bacterial cuisine on board before concluding, ultimately, that astronauts might not find it psychologically palatable. “Earth is actually like a spaceship,” Dyson explained in a 2016 TED Talk. “We have limited space and limited resources, and on Earth, we really do need to figure out how to recycle our carbon better.” Could these bacteria be the answer?
For now, the answer is a definite maybe. Some 25 companies worldwide have already taken up the challenge, hoping to turn abundant carbon dioxide into nutritious “air protein.” The ultimate goal of the people who work at these companies is to engineer a food source far lower in emissions than conventional farming—perhaps even one that could disrupt agriculture altogether. To do that, they’ll need to overcome some very real challenges. They’ll need to scale up production of their protein to compete commercially, and do it in a way that doesn’t create more emissions or other environmental issues. Even trickier: They’ll need to surmount the ick people may experience when contemplating a bacteria-based meal.
Some of these companies are focused on industrial animal feed, fish meal, and pet food—products with slimmer profit margins but less exacting consumers and fewer regulatory hurdles. Human food, however, is where the real money—and impact—is. That’s why several companies, like Dyson’s Air Protein, are focused on it. In 2023 Air Protein opened its first “air farm” in San Leandro, California, a hub for the commercial food production industry, and announced a strategic development agreement with one of the largest agricultural commodity traders in the world, ADM, to collaborate on research and development and build an even larger, commercial-scale plant. The company’s “Air Chicken” (which, to be clear, is not actual chicken) is slowly making its way toward grocery store shelves and dinner tables. But that’s only the beginning. Other companies are making progress at harnessing bacteria to spin air into protein, too—and someday soon, these microbial protein patties could be as common as veggie burgers.
An alternative to alternative proteins
The environmental case for microbial protein is clear enough; it’s a simple calculus of arable land, energy, and mouths to feed. The global demand for protein is already at an all-time high, and with the population expected to grow to 9.7 billion by 2050, traditional agriculture will have a hard time keeping up, especially as it battles climate change, soil degradation, and disease. A growing global middle class is expected to raise levels of meat consumption, but factory-farmed meat is one of the leading drivers of greenhouse-gas emissions. Although protein-rich alternatives like soy are far more sustainable, most of the soy grown in the world is destined for use as animal feed—not for human consumption.
In contrast, bacterial “crops” convert carbon dioxide directly into protein, in a process that uses much less land and water. Microbial protein “farms” could operate year-round anywhere renewable electricity is cheap—even in places like Chile’s Atacama Desert, where farming is nearly impossible. That would take the strain off agricultural land—and potentially even give us the chance to return it to the wild.
“We are liberating food production from the constraints of agriculture,” Juha-Pekka Pitkänen, cofounder and CTO of the Finnish startup Solar Foods, explained in a recent company video. In April 2024 Solar Foods opened a demonstration factory in Vantaa, a short train ride from the Helsinki airport. It’s here, at Factory 01, that the company hopes to produce enough of its goldenrod-yellow protein powder, Solein, to prove itself viable—some 160 metric tons a year.
Like Air Protein, Solar Foods begins its production process with naturally occurring hydrogen-oxidizing bacteria that metabolize carbon dioxide, the way plants do. In sterile bioreactors similar to the fermentation vats used in the brewing industry, the bacteria flourish in water on a steady diet of CO2, hydrogen, and a few additional nutrients, like nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, and potassium. As they multiply, the bacteria thicken the water into a slurry, which is continuously siphoned off and dehydrated, creating a protein-rich powder that can be used as an ingredient in alternative meats, dairy products, and snacks.
“We are liberating food production from the constraints of agriculture.”
Juha-Pekka Pitkänen, Solar Foods
As Pitkänen explains, his research team at Finland’s state-owned VTT Technical Research Centre knew these microorganisms existed in the wild. To find a viable candidate, they narrowed down the natural conditions where one might be found, and then—as is the Finnish way—put on some hiking boots and got out there. “In Finland, you don’t have to go very far to find nature,” he says, shrugging. “You can find something useful in a ditch.”
Still, not just any old ditch bacteria would do. Their target needed to both consume carbon dioxide and continue to thrive even after it was isolated from the microbial community it coexisted with, or competed against, in nature. “We were looking for a pacifist microorganism,” Pitkänen says. “It’s quite rare.” In a wet soil-dwelling bacterium of the genus Xanthobacter,they found their match: a nontoxic, lab-friendly microbe palatable enoughto slip into myriad food preparations.
At Solar Foods’ annual summer company party this year, their in-house chef served a bright-yellow lasagna made with Solein. The powder, Pitkänen says, makes an excellent flour for fresh pasta dough and works surprisingly well as a cream replacement in ice cream. It’s rich in carotenoids, so it can taste “carroty,” and it’s full of B12 and bioavailable iron, which makes it great for vegetarians. But the product isn’t a plug-and-play replacement for milk, eggs, or even meat. Rather, it’s an ingredient like any other, competing on nutritional value, cost, and texture. The company’s main competition, Pitkänen told me, isn’t other novel proteins—it’s soy meal.
“In the last 10 years, the whole alternative-protein landscape has changed dramatically,” says Hannah Lester, an EU-based regulatory consultant to the novel-food industry. Soy patties and bean burgers are now ubiquitous to the point of being passé; today’s cutting-edge alternative proteins are cultivated from animal cells and coaxed from specially designed microorganisms using techniques originally developed to produce vaccines and other pharmaceuticals. “Molecular farmers” tend fields of bright-pink soybeans whose genetic makeup has been doctored so that they contain proteins identical to ones pigs make. “It’s really coming to the point where companies are utilizing the most incredible technology to produce food,” she says.
A fermentation process by any other name
The space Air Protein and Solar Foods occupy is so new that language hasn’t quite coalesced around it. Some in the alternative-protein industry evocatively call it “cellular agriculture,” but it’s also referred to as “gas fermentation,” emphasizing the process, and “biomass fermentation,” emphasizing the end product. These terms are distinct from “precision fermentation,” which refers to another buzzy bioprocess that employs genetically modified yeasts, other fungi, and bacteria to produce proteins indistinguishable from their animal-derived counterparts. Precision fermentation isn’t a new technique: The US Food and Drug Administration approved its use to produce insulin in 1982, and 80% of the rennet used in cheese is now made this way, avoiding the need to harvest the enzymes from the stomach lining of calves.
Rather than coaxing microorganisms to produce the animal-derived proteins we’re already familiar with, companies like Air Protein and Solar Foods are proposing that we skip the intermediary and simply eat the microbes themselves, dried into a powder. Microbial biomass made with these new fermentation technologies is fibrous, vitamin-rich, and versatile. More important, these bacteria eat carbon, require very little land and water, and need no fossil-fuel-derived fertilizers. According to a life-cycle analysis produced by the University of Helsinki and the Natural Resources Institute Finland, microbial protein is between 53% and 100% more efficient to produce than animal protein.
Of course, that’s a wide range. Finland’s electricity mix favors renewables like hydropower and wind; in a country more reliant on fossil fuels, the environmental impact of making Solein, or any microbial protein, could be much higher. Growing microbes in bulk means creating the perfect conditions for them to thrive—and, as with any industrial production process, that requires factories, equipment, and power to run the entire system. It also requires a generous supply of elements like carbon dioxide and hydrogen.
ERIC MONGEON/MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
Nearly all the world’s human-made hydrogen, a key element in the bacterial diet, comes from fossil-fuel production, and “green” hydrogen, which Solar Foods uses in its demonstration factory, comes from using renewable-powered electrolysis to split water, still an uncommon process. According to David Tze, CEO of the microbial-protein company NovoNutrients, which is currently working to branch out from industrial fish meal to human food, the segment of the microbial-protein industry powered by hydrogen is likely to set up shop wherever hydrogen is cheapest.
Carbon sources for this technology are likewise varied. If a company wants to use captured waste carbon, it will need to broker relationships with industries to connect its protein factories with those sources. Another alternative, sourcing carbon drawn from the atmosphere using direct air capture, or DAC, is still new, energy intensive, and expensive. For the time being, Air Protein uses the same commercially available carbon dioxide used in sparkling water, and while Solar Foods uses DAC for about 15% of the carbon it needs at its demonstration factory, the rest is sourced commercially. Both companies hope to adjust their carbon sources as they scale, and as DAC becomes more commercially available.
Even if the bacteria were fed a diet of entirely captured carbon, they wouldn’t be permanently removing it from the atmosphere, since we release carbon when we digest food. Still, Tze says, “we’re giving a second life to CO2, and allowing it to add so much more positive value to the economy.” More important, the bacteria-based products drastically reduce the emissions footprint of protein. According to a 2016 study by the World Resources Institute, producing a single ton of beef creates around 2,400 metric tons of greenhouse-gas emissions. For plant-based sources of protein, like pulses, the number is much less than 300—but for microbial proteins it may ultimately be in the single digits. “If someone can eat a bite of our product instead of a bite of anything else,” Tze says, “it could be one or three orders of magnitude difference.”
Of course, none of this works if microbial protein remains a niche industry, or if the product is too expensive for the average consumer. Even running at capacity, Solar Foods’ demonstration factory can only produce enough protein to provide the entire population of Finland with one meal a year. From a business standpoint, Pitkänen says, that’s good news: There’s plenty of room to grow. But if they hope to make a dent in the long-term sustainability of our food systems, companies like Solar Foods and Air Protein will need to scale up by orders of magnitude too. It remains to be seen if they will be able to meet that challenge—and if consumers will be ready.
Even though both the process (fermentation) and the material (living microorganisms) are as natural as the world and as old as time, the idea of whipping air and microbes together to make dinner will strike many people as unthinkably weird. Food is cultural, after all—and especially in the US, protein is political. In interviews, Dyson takes pains to call the bacteria behind Air Protein’s process “cultures,” emphasizing the connection to traditional fermented foods like yogurt, beer, or miso. On the Solar Foods website, chic people drink yellow Solein smoothies at tasteful Nordic tables. No bacteria are pictured.
Solar Foods is still awaiting final regulatory approval in the EU and the US, but Solein is already for sale in Singapore, where it’s been whipped into chocolate gelato and hazelnut-strawberry snack bars. If Singaporeans took issue with eating powdered bacteria, they made little show of it. When it comes to food biotechnology, the most progressive countries in the world are those with the least arable land. Singapore, which imports nearly everything, hopes to meet 30% of its own nutritional needs by 2030. Israel, a semi-arid country with limited landmass, has invested heavily in biomanufacturing, as has the Netherlands, where farmland has been heavily depleted by chemical fertilizers. But even in less constrained countries, “agriculture is on its knees because of climate change,” says Lester, the regulatory expert. “At some point, sadly, we’re just not going to be able to produce food in the traditional way. We do need alternatives. We need government support. We need fundamental policy change in how we fund food.”
This sentiment seems to be resonating in the United States. In September 2022, President Joe Biden signed an executive order to advance biomanufacturing by expanding training, streamlining regulation, and bolstering federal investment in biotechnology R&D, specifically citing “boost[ing] sustainable biomass production” as a key objective. In 2021, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency launched the Cornucopia program, asking four research teams—one of which includes Dyson’s company, Air Protein—to create a complete nutrition system, small enough to fit on a Humvee, that can harvest nitrogen and carbon from the air and use it to produce microbial rations in the form of shakes, bars, gels, and jerky. Microbial protein may never be deployed on long-haul space trips as NASA dreams, but it seems that the government is betting it could keep us alive on Spaceship Earth—that is, if the crew doesn’t reject it outright.
Claire L. Evans is a writer and musician exploring ecology, technology, and culture.
In the decade-long fight to control CRISPR, the super-tool for modifying DNA, it’s been common for lawyers to try to overturn patents held by competitors by pointing out errors or inconsistencies.
But now, in a surprise twist, the team that earned the Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing CRISPR is asking to cancel two of their own seminal patents, MIT Technology Review has learned. The decision could affect who gets to collect the lucrative licensing fees on using the technology.
The request to withdraw the pair of European patents, by lawyers for Nobelists Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, comes after a damaging August opinion from a European technical appeals board, which ruled that the duo’s earliest patent filing didn’t explain CRISPR well enough for other scientists to use it and doesn’t count as a proper invention.
The Nobel laureates’ lawyers say the decision is so wrong and unfair that they have no choice but to preemptively cancel their patents, a scorched-earth tactic whose aim is to prevent the unfavorable legal finding from being recorded as the reason.
“They are trying to avoid the decision by running away from it,” says Christoph Then, founder of Testbiotech, a German nonprofit that is among those opposing the patents, who provided a copy of the technical opinion and response letter to MIT Technology Review. “We think these are some of the earliest patents and the basis of their licenses.”
Discovery of the century
CRISPR has been called the biggest biotech discovery of the century, and the battle to control its commercial applications—such as gene-altered plants, modified mice, and new medical treatments—has raged for a decade.
The dispute primarily pits Charpentier and Doudna, who were honored with the Nobel Prize in 2020 for developing the method of genome editing, against Feng Zhang, a researcher at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, who claimed to have invented the tool first on his own.
Back in 2014, the Broad Institute carried out a coup de main when it managed to win, and later defend, the controlling US patent on CRISPR’s main uses. But the Nobel paircould, and often did, point to their European patents as bright points in their fight. In 2017, the University of California, Berkeley, where Doudna works, touted its first European patent as exciting, “broad,” and “precedent” setting.
After all, a region representing more than 30 countries had not only recognized the pair’s pioneering discovery; it had set a standard for other patent offices around the world. It also made the US Patent Office look like an outlier whose decisions favoring the Broad Institute might not hold up long term. A further appeal challenging the US decisions is pending in federal court.
Long-running saga
But now the European Patent Office is also saying—for different reasons—that Doudna and Charpentier can’t claim their basic invention. And that’s a finding their attorneys think is so damaging, and reached in such an unjust way, that they have no choice but to sacrifice their own patents. “The Patentees cannot be expected to expose the Nobel-prize winning invention … to the repercussions of a decision handed down under such circumstances,” says the 76–page letter sent by German attorneys on their behalf on September 20.
The chief intellectual-property attorney at the University of California, Randi Jenkins, confirmed the plan to revoke the two patents but downplayed their importance.
“These two European patents are just another chapter in this long-running saga involving CRISPR-Cas9,” Jenkins said. “We will continue pursuing claims in Europe, and we expect those ongoing claims to have meaningful breadth and depth of coverage.”
The patents being voluntarily disavowed are EP2800811, granted in 2017, and EP3401400, granted in 2019. Jenkins added the Nobelists still share one issued CRISPR patent in Europe, EP3597749, and one that is pending. That tally doesn’t include a thicket of patent claims covering more recent research from Doudna’s Berkeley lab that were filed separately.
Freedom to operate
The cancellation of the European patents will affect a broad network of biotech companies that have bought and sold rights as they seek to achieve either commercial exclusivity to new medical treatments or what’s called “freedom to operate”—the right to pursue gene-slicing research unmolested by doubts over who really owns the technique.
These companies include Editas Medicine, allied with the Broad Institute; Caribou Biosciences and Intellia Therapeutics in the US, both cofounded by Doudna; and Charpentier’s companies, CRISPR Therapeutics and ERS Genomics.
ERS Genomics, which is based in Dublin and calls itself “the CRISPR licensing company,” was set up in Europe specifically to collect fees from others using CRISPR. It claims to have sold nonexclusive access to its “foundational patents” to more than 150 companies, universities, and organizations who use CRISPR in their labs, manufacturing, or research products.
For example, earlier this year Laura Koivusalo, founder of a small Finnish biotech company, StemSight, agreed to a “standard fee” because her company is researching an eye treatment using stem cells that were previously edited using CRISPR.
Although not every biotech company thinks it’s necessary to pay for patent rights long before it even has a product to sell, Koivusalo decided it would be the right thing to do. “The reason we got the license was the Nordic mentality of being super honest. We asked them if we needed a license to do research, and they said yes, we did,” she says.
A slide deck from ERS available online lists the fee for small startups like hers at $15,000 a year. Koivusalo says she agreed to buy a license to the same two patents that are now being canceled. She adds: “I was not aware they were revoked. I would have expected them to give a heads-up.”
A spokesperson for ERS Genomics said its customers still have coverage in Europe based on the Nobelists’ remaining CRISPR patent and pending application.
In the US, the Broad Institute has also been selling licenses to use CRISPR. And the fees can get big if there’s an actual product involved. That was the case last year, when Vertex Pharmaceuticals won approval to sell the first CRISPR-based treatment, for sickle-cell disease. To acquire rights under the Broad Institute’s CRISPR patents, Vertex agreed to pay $50 million on the barrelhead—and millions more in the future.
PAM problem
There’s no doubt that Charpentier and Doudna were first to publish, in a 2012 paper, how CRISPR can function as a “programmable” means of editing DNA. And their patents in Europe withstood an initial round of formal oppositions filed by lawyers.
But this August, in a separate analysis, a technical body decided that Berkeley had omitted a key detail from its earliest patent application, making it so that “the skilled person could not carry out the claimed method,” according to the finding. That is, it said, the invention wasn’t fully described or enabled.
The omission relates to a feature of DNA molecules called “protospacer adjacent motifs,” or PAMs. These features, a bit like runway landing lights, determine at what general locations in a genome the CRISPR gene scissors are able to land and make cuts, and where they can’t.
In the 76-page reply letter sent by lawyers for the Nobelists, they argue there wasn’t really any need to mention these sites, which they say were so obvious that “even undergraduate students” would have known they were needed.
The lengthy letter leaves no doubt the Nobel team feels they’ve been wronged. In addition to disavowing the patents, the text runs on because it seeks to “make of public record the reasons for which we strongly disagree with [the] assessment on all points” and to “clearly show the incorrectness” of the decision, which, they say, “fails to recognize the nature and origin of the invention, misinterprets the common general knowledge, and additionally applies incorrect legal standards.”
