Holy Trinity: Jesus, Buddha, Selfie
This is episode 13 of The French Tech Comedy Season 2.
Episode 12: The 11th Commandment(s)
Previously in The French Tech Comedy: In Season 2 of The French Tech Comedy, we follow characters like Japanese oncologist and bioinformatics engineer Takafumi Nagato, who is leading the lab of Bioinformatics for personalised CAR-T-therapies in a Tokyo clinic, and his patient, Chinese giant TenBa’s founder Ken Ba, a zillionaire from Shanghai. Yuki, Taka’s sister, is a French-speaking geisha, meaning “artist” in Japanese, in touch with the French Tech. She just got married to a French engineer who was working in Taka’s lab, Nono, and has secretly donated her healthy T-cells to Taka’s patient who, after his second cancer relapse, decided to try an innovative treatment called “liquid biopsy”. Indeed, Ba is becoming an expert in genomic precision medicine. In his case it is a matter of life or death. Among Yuki’s friends in the French Tech branch is Frederic Mougin, a biologist, founder of the startup Gene-i-us:
“We are developing a patient-centric tool for patients to collect, share & monetize their medical, genomics, lifestyle, IoT data with academics & pharma industry.”
Yuki had promised she would introduce Mougin to people working with Facebook Singapore; among them: Nono. What biz plan can Gene-i-usimplement, in order to work with Facebook? Mougin is using a lot of buzz words, but when it turns out Ba’s cancer mutation has entered the stock exchange market, thanks to the efforts of a pharmaceutical company, his oncologist, Taka, fears a Ba Gate. More than ever, the privacy of genetic data is instrumental in the process of developing precision medicine. Singapore is the Chinese Mecca of I.P. and patents. A cryptocurrency, that is seen by financial specialists as a security, is used as a way to reward (healthy and sick) patients in exchange of their DNA data. Yuki is wondering if this kind of money will revolutionise the whole financial and pharmaceutical market as we know it, or will all digital currencies end up behaving like any other tradable financial asset? After all, a security is a tradable financial asset. Ba, Taka’s cancer patient, is trying to gain insight into the situation… While spending a few days in Malaysia both for business and vacation, TenBa’s founder gets to meet with a total stranger who in fact he only knows too well: Simone, Malaysian Chinese actress Michelle Yeoh’s niece. Between Ba and Simone, things are complicated. But it is only the beginning… Simone is trying to make an algorithmic cryptocurrency that could mimmic biological processes within the human body. Meanwhile, Manga artist Koba writes about the blurring frontier between curing and enhancing in the genomic precision medicine era, and the consequences in society. At school, Simone needs to present her Science Fair project alone. Overanxious auntie Michellehad bribed a student from Simone’s class. She wanted her niece’s science fair presentation to be filmed, live. A few days later, she sent a link to a video to a friend of hers, Chinese giant TenBa’s founder Ken Ba, a zillionaire from Shanghai. She’d compiled a 10 minutes extract for him to see, and a question:
“ — What do you think?” Ba said the video was very interesting and offered to have lunch in Ipoh, Michelle’s home town, next weekend, and discuss things. Simone, meanwhile, is stuck in Bangkok, where Ba has sent her a T-shirt as a thank-you gift, she’s not sure why. Also, as a hacker having served time in a Beijing prison, she is suffering from post-traumatic stress. In Singapore, rockstar US physician Tamir Subramanian is a keynote speaker at Facebook’s “The Patient Will See You Now” Breakfast. In the conference room nearby, a Facebook Open Day Q&A session for students from local high schools has just started. Simone is attending, she gets to meet with Nono, who ends up inviting her for lunch at the famous Facebook cafeteria. How to program a digital currency with its own blockchain, taking advantage (or mimicking) the underpinnings of the biological mechanisms of epigenetics? Simone, Nono and Yuki are trying to reflect on this. Yuki and Simone end up talking about reincarnation and video games, while shopping at Daiso, in Suntec City mall, Singapore. Close nearby is South Beach Tower, with the Facebook company at level 22.
— — — — — — — — — — —
Rockstar US physician Tamir Subramanian, editor in chief of the Transversal J Med, is interviewing Geronimo Faber PhD, who is spearheading the global crusade to defeat ageing. Nono is watching the one-on-one interview, a video that was just posted on the Transversal Journal of Medicine’s website. The whole thing is boring, and Faber still needs money. More than ever. As usual, Nono is multitasking. He needs to revamp the video. He just doesn’t know how. Yuki and Simone are talking about video games and reincarnation while shopping at Daiso, in Suntec City mall, Singapore. Close nearby, in South Beach Tower, at level 22, Nono is reading an article about this topic:
“(…) I brought up a personal pet theory — that respawning in a multiplayer FPS mirrors the Buddhist cycle of death and rebirth. Everyone starts a match inhabiting an avatar, and no matter how many times that avatar dies, the player — or in Buddhist terms, the consciousness — gets reborn into a another form, still retaining the knowledge it gained before death.
“If we go like this we go the wrong path, people shoot you,” says Pongsiri, indicating a path with his hand. “So then you go another way after rebirth, this is good to learn. This is the benefit of the game, we can learn.”
Suttarchai agrees that it could, theoretically, be a way to teach reincarnation. “In the game, you simulate and practice in your mind. Last life you do wrong, so you have to correct and take another path.”
Of course, that would mean using a violent game to teach a nonviolent religion — but it seems that may not be a barrier at all. As mentioned, the second-highest authority in Tibetan Buddhism, the Karmapa Lama, believes FPS games are a safe way to discharge aggression without hurting anyone.
But when asked the monks whether killing in-game causes karmic damage to the player, the monks had a nuanced answer.
“It depends on your intention,” says Suttarchai. He explains that for a killing to have karmic consequences, the act has to meet a series of prerequisites. First, the target has to be alive, and second, you have to understand it is alive. Third, you have to actually make an attempt to kill it, and do so with the knowing intent to harm. “So I think playing a game doesn’t affect karma, since they’re not alive.”
Nono finds the article interesting and sends it to Simone and Yuki on WhatsApp. Then he thinks about a manga that Japan used to be crazy about, Oniisan — Saint Young Men.
Except that Sub is a Jesus with no beard…
And Faber is a Buddha with a beard. And a very long one at that…
But then on the net they tell you that Buddha was about six feet tall with coal black hair and a golden brown complexion. When he was still a layman he wore his hair and beard long but, on renouncing the world, shaved them both like every other monk. Making a new video, like it was a product derived from a video game, Nono introduced Faber-Buddha as a layman. When he gets enough funding for his labs and research, he will shine (literally), and the beard and long hair will go away. The enlightenment phase will have been reached. But as shown in the video there was still a long way to go.
The real Faber was talking in the interview:
“ — When people get the message, when it gets heard, at last, that ageing is not natural, but a disease, and can and should be treated as such, and gets some proper funding, I’ll be able to retire. Until that happens, I’m spearheading the global crusade to defeat ageing. But I can’t wait to leave the spotlights. I will retire as soon as I get my message through. I dislike being the centre of attention.”
“ — Oh, really?” Sub was sounding very polite, and also like he had no such desire for himself, on the contrary. It was more like: Oh, we’re going to have to put up with you like, forever.
Nono replaced Sub and Faber with Jesus and Buddha.
“ — OK, see if I can get that working…”
He was making a video for the Worlds Fair Nano, adding drawings with 3D pens. “Mind-blowing technology, futurist talks, interactive art, future food.” And, last but not least, funding.
“ — Now, let’s see the science behind this.”
But as usual, Faber was ranting. Sub was patiently waiting until he was done:
“ — Health care costs in the US are spiralling and getting out of control. As a result, US activists and patients are too busy trying to crowdfund their own health care costs on social networks to do anything else. GoFundMe is the new doctor. Activists are asking each other for funding, which is becoming a vicious circle. Patients are hamsters that cannot manage to stop spinning in their wheel. Some say a cryptocurrency will disrupt this. But the blockchain, unlike Bitcoin, is just some kind of a notary. Not good enough to disrupt the opioid crisis or epidemic that is going on in the US. If you claim you can tackle the opioid crisis, you are likely to get some funding.”
“ — Right, right,” said Sub:
“ — According to you, what marketing choices did pharmaceutical companies make in the last few decades, or even years?”
“ — A choice that disadvantages the public good,” answers Faber:
“ — The normal price of drugs is multiplied by one hundred, because of investors who want to recover their money quickly. Pharma as ultra lucrative niche market. It means nine deaths out of ten patients, but investors earn ten times more.”
“ — This is quite brutal,” said Sub.
“ — It is. Look at the new drugs as a result of research: we hear ah yes, the drug will be very expensive, everyone cannot have it. Ah, too bad, but what can be done? This is just how things are.”
“ — What ethical problems do you see?”
“ — Mainly two,” answered Faber:
“ — The first one is about marketing choices that go against the common good to favour private interests in the short term. As a consequence, there will be people untreated or dead or who will be overindebted, just to get access to a drug or medical treatment that, maybe, just maybe, will help or even cure them.”
“ — This is problematic because the molecule that works, or that is effective as a treatment, can probably be done elsewhere, in another country, for a much cheaper price. We must not forget that patents are an exclusivity that was given temporarily to benefit the community. This was at the beginning, that’s what a patent does, or should do. Benefit the community. But the general idea is that some labs now use the common good — a molecule, which exists in the world, and therefore belongs in some way to humanity — much to the detriment of the common good.”
“ — Now the second ethical issue that I see here… let me give you an example. When you buy a saucepan, you can do whatever you want with it. You can cook, do some music, melt the saucepan into another object, etc., this won’t change a simple fact: you bought just that one saucepan; not the entirety of the saucepans worldwide. Just because I bought a pan or found a new use for it doesn’t mean that I will be granted some kind of exclusivity. Same thing with a medicine, a drug, whose formula belongs to humanity, and patents are only a temporary exception to that, whose justification is the common good — importantly, this is reflected in the legal definition of patents in the US: patents are only a temporary exception, whose justification is the common good. That’s the general idea. But now we have labs that use a common good, which they decide to use against the common good — the skyrocketing prices.”
“ — That’s interesting, and appalling at the same time,” said Sub.
“ — So if startup companies that are interested in helping us with the privacy of our health care data are not disruptive enough, what they will end up doing is that they will keep prices high.” But Faber was not done with the ranting:
“ — Plenty of Americans hate what they call socialist medicine. In my opinion it prevents them from seeing what is wrong with them. They have the impression that if they lived in Europe, they would be deprived of the choice of not having medical coverage.
Europeans are told, look at these people — US citizens — who are in personal bankruptcy because they need to go to the hospital. The US answer is: Yes, but they were able to choose. Choosing between options is always a good thing.”
Sub didn’t know what to say. He had plenty of questions about the science of anti-ageing medicine, but he was running out of time.
“ — Consumers are increasingly being asked to pay a greater portion of their drug costs, but they don’t get discounts that drug manufacturers offer to health insurers,” added Faber.
“ — It’s gouging. It’s despicable. But nothing ever gets done about it,” said Sub in a dry tone.
“ — Nothing is going to happen until the barrier to entry to start gets much lower (IMHO from open data, big data), and we get much much more competition,” answered Faber.
“ — Hard to ignore the parallel to guns, and the powerful lobbying influence of certain industries,” said Sub. He added:
“ — It’s one thing when a company invests huge amounts into research and development, but when its an old generic drug that was developed by someone else and is now super expensive, it really gets me upset. Many examples. Flucytosine is just one of those.”
It was going on and on; Nono cut the whole thing. Edited it out. Then the conversation went on about the real science of anti ageing medicine. As usual, Faber was unstoppable. Nono needed to pick items he could use in the new video, which he called Holy Trinity: Jesus, Buddha, Selfie.
“Life is only possible at all because living systems are extremely good at exporting entropy to their environment. However, it is true that entropy provides a reasonable starting point for explaining why aging exists, because it helps to explain why there is such a wide variety of different types of damage (creation of entropy) that the body does to itself, and thus such a wide variety of different sets of genetic machinery that have needed to evolve to export it. This in turn explains why it is unlikely that we will ever have medicine that can completely eliminate all such damage from the body. However, as I have noted repeatedly over the past decade, that does not mean we cannot defeat ageing with medicine, because the body’s ability to function at full performance in the presence of a limited amount of damage leads to the concept of longevity escape velocity, whereby we only need to approach that ideal at a rate faster than damage is accumulating — a task that, when one looks at the numbers, appears extremely feasible once we have achieved only a few decades of postponement of age-related ill health.”
Nono was halfway through figuring this stuff out, for the new video, when Yuki called. Her concert the night before went well, the Straits Times Singapore was now writing an article about her, her performance. And now, French painter Valerie Cabaret wanted to draw a Japanese geisha (meaning artist) from life. She’d asked Yuki to send her pictures, she was no portraitist so she would come up with something that was quite personal. Yuki was enthusiastic.
“ — Which pictures should I send her? If these ones are not ok, we’ll have to find more. Can you help??”, read the message on WhatsApp. And then, she added:
“ — I like this painting so much. It’s called the florist.”
“ — You’re very beautiful, bébé,” answered Nono.
In the interview, Faber was discussing the real science at work behind anti-ageing therapies:
“ — Our goal is not to emulate enzyme replacement therapy by injecting the enzyme, but rather to incorporate the gene encoding the enzyme into the cells that need it. In the case of atherosclosis, those cells are macrophages, and it should be sufficient to augment only a minority of them in this way, so this can be done ex vivo using genetic manipulation of hematopoietic stem cells followed by bone marrow transplant. In other cases, high-performance somatic gene therapy may be needed, but that is needed for many other medical applications too, and progress towards it is rapid, some of the relevant being performed by our research foundation.” (Source)
Takafumi Nagato, the oncologist leading the lab of Bioinformatics for personalised CAR-T-therapies in a Tokyo clinic, Yuki’s brother, is watching the interview.
“ — At present, preventative medicine, in general, is a very hard sell, because the public are not inclined to subject themselves to medical treatments (especially not new, experimental ones) when they are not yet sick. However, there are exceptions (such as statins and angiotensin-converting enzyme [ACE] inhibitors). We must learn from these examples; in my view, the main lesson is that there is a trade-off between the perceived benefit and the perceived risk (as there should be!), so we must communicate the huge potential benefit to maintenance of health that will result. Also, of course, the best way to communicate it will be by example: Even if only a few early adopters take this risk at first, their health improvements will rapidly persuade others to follow suit.”
Both Taka and Faber were looking for the same person — the providential, overachieving anti-ageing evangelist — and thinking about the challenge of producing such outstanding achievement, five-legged sheep as it were, but not obtained through genetic modification. The interview was concluded with a couple selfie caption, showing Sub and Faber as a couple, for science’s sake.
Catherine Coste
MITx 7.00x, 7.QBWx, 7.28x1–2 certified
Teacher and Member of the Walking Gallery of Health Care, founded by US activist Regina Holliday
Table of Contents:
Episode 1 of Season 2: Your DNA Will See (and Mutate) Your Credit Card Now
Episode 2 of Season 2: The Bitcoin That Pulled the Double Helix Apart
Episode 3 of Season 2: Kabuki Theatre and Desktop Epigenetics
Episode 4 of Season 2: Tenjin and TenGene
Episode 5 of Season 2: TenGene, Gene-i-us and a thousand planets in between
Episode 6 of Season 2: The Re:Creators Fault Line and the Epigenetic of Worldwide Middle Class
Episode 7: The Methylation of Money
Episode 8: “Biology has gone digital. Time to learn about it.”
Episode 9: Year of The Earth Dog
Episode 10: (Zebra-) Crossing The Rubicon
Episode 11: The Chinese Student Will See You Now
For Season 1 of The French Tech Comedy (all episodes), see here.
