Blog Odyssée

"Look," I sighed, fidgeting with the rear-view mirror. "Boss says I’ve gotta give this talk to everyone. If you have the gene drive, it’s in your blood. It doesn’t matter if the Ash has started affecting you, if your skin has started to go all white and crumbly or not. It won’t be any better for you on the other side."

"I promise we are not GMs," the dark-haired woman said. "Please. Keep driving."

She winced as we hit a bump, clutching her slung-up arm. Her eyes screamed desperation. She had no right to be looking at me like that. What with the Genome Authority drones flying around projecting her image on rubble all day. A scientist from a bioweapons lab, wasn’t it? Well, money was money. If that little girl with her wasn’t really her daughter, if she wanted to spread some of her knowledge outside the Wall, more power to her.

Ash lashed the windows, for all the world like the snow storms I hadn’t seen since I was a kid. They weren’t dressed for the journey. Not like it was easy to find winter coats nowadays. But you needed something to slog through the last stretch to the breach. No luggage either. Only stacks and stacks of red-covered notebooks. The little girl clutched one like a teddy bear.

"What’s your name?" she asked.

"JJ."

"You gonna escape over the Wall with us, Jayjay?"

I shook my head.

"Why?"

"People out there are afraid of people like me," I said.

"Why?"

"That’s enough honey," the scientist shushed her. "Try to get some sleep now."

My sensor beeped and I jerked the wheel, pulling over to the side of the road. A herd of mammoths passed in the distance. Even through the Ash, I could make out their shaggy forms, the red helix on the backs of their gun-toting riders. The Genome Authority. I remembered when the Wall first went up. Most of us went willingly. After all, we understood that we couldn’t breed with normal humans. It made sense. It made sense, but when they sealed the gates, I couldn’t help but think of Jade, left behind in one of their labs. The mammoths would disintegrate too, I thought. They would turn to Ash that floated like snowflakes on the wind. Like us, it was meant to happen before we reproduced. There was only supposed to be one generation of us.

"We’re going to make it," I said, as if we hadn’t been stop-and-go, pinned by patrols on all sides for hours. "We just have to wait for the Ash to clear. They won’t find us."

We could just see the mass of the Wall on the horizon, so near and so damn far.

"You were a soldier?" the scientist asked.

The girl slept in her lap. I adjusted my sleeve over my white-streaked skin and nodded.

"I’m sorry. You see, I’m one of the people whose research was used to make the technology — that made you what you are."

More free sci-fi stories from Futures

It was the same with all these do-gooders who locked themselves behind the Wall with us and decided they wanted out now. I’d heard it all. It was a war. Our parents made tough choices for us. Better for your super-powered kid to fight and come back than get smashed in the claws of a mech on their first day, at 18. They didn’t know about the Ash. The safeguard disease in our genomes, which would disintegrate us piece by piece if we lived past reproduction age.

"You think I give a damn that you’re sorry?"

"No. I don’t expect to be forgiven. But I want you to know my group has been working on a reverse drive — a cure — these 20 years behind the Wall. In 5 more, we could’ve. But the Genome Authority found us."

She unbuckled her seat belt and grabbed an armful of notebooks.

"The hell are you doing?"

"I’ll tell them it was too dangerous. That I insisted on walking the rest of the way and you turned back. Please. Take care of her. Make sure she gets to the other side."

When the little girl woke, the sun had risen. I bundled her up the best I could in my jacket and carried her outside. We found the scientist like a beacon in the Ash, her notebooks fluttering around her, her hand clutching the already dried bullet wound in her chest. This one dignity would be afforded to her — that she wouldn’t dissolve like the rest of us, at least.

"Jayjay, don’t cry," the little girl said. "It’s going to be okay."

"How can you say that it’s okay?"

The most important part of me had crumbled. I realized that the Genome Authority was crap. My Jade — my daughter — had been gone for a long time now.

"Your mother is dead," I finished.

"No." The little girl shook her head. "Mama is inside of me. Half of her DNA. Her notebooks too. She took out the extra parts of my genome that didn’t mean anything and wrote a message there instead."

"I don’t know what that means!"

She slipped her hand into mine.

"As long as I live, the cure will too," she said. "That’s what Mama told me. The same technology that caused this can be used to make something beautiful too."

I clung to it. Even though I didn’t have any right to, I know. To fill the gaping hole in my chest, both physically and mentally. But I was selfish. I still grasped at it. Because I’d never got a chance to say good-bye to the people who mattered, you know?

"What’s your name?" I asked.

"It’s Hope."

A short piece by Andrea Kriz published in Nature

I got the idea for this story after reading a recent Nature article in which researchers describe encoding a movie into a bacterial genome (Nature 547, 345–349; 2017). Late night in lab, the thought popped into my head — how much information could be encoded in the human genome using similar technology? What kind of state would the world have to be in to make it even remotely acceptable to use genome editing in that way? And what could lead a scientist to use another human, rather than synthetic DNA or bacteria, for this purpose?

Probably everyone who uses CRISPR in their research has thought of a similar slippery slope at one point or another. Gene-editing technology has already been used to correct devastating genetic diseases in embryos. The world is understandably hesitant about taking the next step, making edits to ‘improve’ human traits. But what happens if someone does it first? And, after a few years, if it looks like the kids are okay, even outperforming non-genetically modified children? If one country embraces the technology, others may follow out of fear that their next generation will fall behind if they don’t. Add an on-going world war on top of this, and it becomes an arms race. Eventually, the changes to the genome become so experimental and extreme that it could be disadvantageous to let them spread to the general population. In the United States, a governing authority arises and oversees the implementation of a safeguard (a ‘gene drive’) in the genomes of genetically modified soldiers to prevent this from happening.

Of course the scenario remains firmly science fiction. Currently, many technical issues limit even the theoretical use of genome-editing technology in humans (for example, most human traits are not the result of one gene but incredibly complex gene networks as well as environmental factors). But even if these could somehow be overcome, I don’t think that genome-editing technology should be feared. Instead I believe it should seen for its potential to improve the lives of everyone on Earth — if used in a compassionate and ethical way. Hopefully that’s the story all of us are writing with our research now

The New Scientist (@newscientist) just released a poster of the nine probes that have reached the outer solar system, with their trajectories and current location.

In a recent article, Justin Bariso (@JustinJBariso) published a mail Elon Musk (@elonmusk) sent to Tesla employees a few years ago.

Très intéressante intervention de Bruno Toussaint, directeur de la rédaction de la revue indépendante Prescrire, aux Matins de France Culture (@Lesmatinsfcult) :

Les vaccins c’est très divers. Il y a des médicacaments très divers, il y a des médicaments qui sont des poisons comme le Mediator et des médicaments magnifiques comme l’insuline ou les antirétroviraux quand on a le sida.

Dans les vaccins, il y a des vaccins inefficaces, des vaccins dangereux, sans grand intéreêt, c’est à dire sans avoir une efficacité qui les contrebalance et puis il y a des vaccins très importants contre le tétanos, ou la dyphtérie ou la poliomyélite. Il faut faire attention, tous les vaccins ne se valent pas comme tous les médicaments ne se valent pas. Il faut, selon la situation de la personne, dans quel pays elle vit, à quoi elle est exposée ou à quoi elle sera exposée probablement quand il s’agit d’un enfant, etc, il y a plein de facteurs à prendre en compte, ça ne doit pas être automatique. Il y a très peu de choses dont l’intérêt est vraiment évident pour tout le monde. J’ai parlé du tétanos, c’est un exemple classique : c’est une maladie qui ne disparaitra pas, le bacille est dans la nature donc il faut s’immuniser, sinon il y a un risque mortel, très simplement. Et il y a des pays où il y a encore beaucoup de morts de tétanos.

Alors, pour ce qui est de l’obligation, nous à Prescrire on défend depuis longtemps que ce qui compte c’est d’être informé et de pouvoir choisir en connaissance de cause son traitement, ses vaccinations, etc. Donc, de ce point de vue là, la vaccination obligatoire, c’est dommage puisque ça utilise l’argument d’autorité et non pas le raisonnement et le choix éclairé, et ça, pour nous, c’est vraiment une régression.

[...]

Il y a dans l’histoire beaucoup d’exemples où les choix des autorités en matière de vaccins étaient très discutables et, finalement, pas bien fondés, ça n’incite pas à la confiance. Mais tant qu’on en reste à utiliser l’argument d’autorité plutôt que mettre en avant les explications, la pédagogie, l’information, la transparence, ça aura beaucoup de mal à progresser.

Nearly a year from now, Maria Popova (alias @brainpicker), published a list of 10 advices from 10 years of her famous web site Brain Pickings ; as she puts it:

I first set down some of these core beliefs, written largely as notes to myself that may or may not be useful to others.

I think that they may be useful… hope you agree… whatever, here they are:

1. Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind. Cultivate that capacity for "negative capability." We live in a culture where one of the greatest social disgraces is not having an opinion, so we often form our "opinions" based on superficial impressions or the borrowed ideas of others, without investing the time and thought that cultivating true conviction necessitates. We then go around asserting these donned opinions and clinging to them as anchors to our own reality. It’s enormously disorienting to simply say, "I don’t know." But it’s infinitely more rewarding to understand than to be right — even if that means changing your mind about a topic, an ideology, or, above all, yourself.
2. Do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone. As Paul Graham observed, "prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like." Those extrinsic motivators are fine and can feel life-affirming in the moment, but they ultimately don’t make it thrilling to get up in the morning and gratifying to go to sleep at night — and, in fact, they can often distract and detract from the things that do offer those deeper rewards.
3. Be generous. Be generous with your time and your resources and with giving credit and, especially, with your words. It’s so much easier to be a critic than a celebrator. Always remember there is a human being on the other end of every exchange and behind every cultural artifact being critiqued. To understand and be understood, those are among life’s greatest gifts, and every interaction is an opportunity to exchange them.
4. Build pockets of stillness into your life. Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going nowhere in particular. There is a creative purpose to daydreaming, even to boredom. The best ideas come to us when we stop actively trying to coax the muse into manifesting and let the fragments of experience float around our unconscious mind in order to click into new combinations. Without this essential stage of unconscious processing, the entire flow of the creative process is broken.

   Most important, sleep. Besides being the greatest creative aphrodisiac, sleep also affects our every waking moment, dictates our social rhythm, and even mediates our negative moods. Be as religious and disciplined about your sleep as you are about your work. We tend to wear our ability to get by on little sleep as some sort of badge of honor that validates our work ethic. But what it really is is a profound failure of self-respect and of priorities. What could possibly be more important than your health and your sanity, from which all else springs?

5. When people tell you who they are, Maya Angelou famously advised, believe them. Just as important, however, when people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them. You are the only custodian of your own integrity, and the assumptions made by those that misunderstand who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about you.
6. Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity. Ours is a culture that measures our worth as human beings by our efficiency, our earnings, our ability to perform this or that. The cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living — for, as Annie Dillard memorably put it, "how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives."
7. "Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time." This is borrowed from the wise and wonderful Debbie Millman, for it’s hard to better capture something so fundamental yet so impatiently overlooked in our culture of immediacy. The myth of the overnight success is just that — a myth — as well as a reminder that our present definition of success needs serious retuning. As I’ve reflected elsewhere, the flower doesn’t go from bud to blossom in one spritely burst and yet, as a culture, we’re disinterested in the tedium of the blossoming. But that’s where all the real magic unfolds in the making of one’s character and destiny.
8. Seek out what magnifies your spirit. Patti Smith, in discussing William Blake and her creative influences, talks about writers and artists who magnified her spirit — it’s a beautiful phrase and a beautiful notion. Who are the people, ideas, and books that magnify your spirit? Find them, hold on to them, and visit them often. Use them not only as a remedy once spiritual malaise has already infected your vitality but as a vaccine administered while you are healthy to protect your radiance.
9. Don’t be afraid to be an idealist. There is much to be said for our responsibility as creators and consumers of that constant dynamic interaction we call culture — which side of the fault line between catering and creating are we to stand on? The commercial enterprise is conditioning us to believe that the road to success is paved with catering to existing demands — give the people cat GIFs, the narrative goes, because cat GIFs are what the people want. But E.B. White, one of our last great idealists, was eternally right when he asserted half a century ago that the role of the writer is "to lift people up, not lower them down" — a role each of us is called to with increasing urgency, whatever cog we may be in the machinery of society. Supply creates its own demand. Only by consistently supplying it can we hope to increase the demand for the substantive over the superficial — in our individual lives and in the collective dream called culture.
10. Don’t just resist cynicism — fight it actively. Fight it in yourself, for this ungainly beast lays dormant in each of us, and counter it in those you love and engage with, by modeling its opposite. Cynicism often masquerades as nobler faculties and dispositions, but is categorically inferior. Unlike that great Rilkean life-expanding doubt, it is a contracting force. Unlike critical thinking, that pillar of reason and necessary counterpart to hope, it is inherently uncreative, unconstructive, and spiritually corrosive. Life, like the universe itself, tolerates no stasis — in the absence of growth, decay usurps the order. Like all forms of destruction, cynicism is infinitely easier and lazier than construction. There is nothing more difficult yet more gratifying in our society than living with sincerity and acting from a place of largehearted, constructive, rational faith in the human spirit, continually bending toward growth and betterment. This remains the most potent antidote to cynicism. Today, especially, it is an act of courage and resistance.