Lost in Telomere Translation
(Read first episode of my French Tech Comedy here.)
« — I mean, why all the fuss about patients owning their data? It is just as important as it used to be in the past, no more, no less. What people want is staying healthy for a much longer time, let’s say, staying healthy during 150 years, with the help of stem cell therapy and AI and genomics and all the stuff we are only beginning to discover today. There’s a 50% chance this might happen in my life time, or in yours, what do you think? »
« — Yes », answered Taka in a rather sheepish tone.
« — Right, see? We both want to youthanize people. »
« — Euthanize?! »
« — Youthanize. From youth. Making younger. »
« — Oh I see…, » answered Taka in such a way one could see he was clearly lost in translation.
“ — So I think the orientation they took for this grant writing is wrong. What we want is money for telomere research; not money for mHealth lobbyists.”
« — Yes… »
Taka didn’t know how to squeeze out of this, but he certainly wished he could. The Skype session on his laptop was activated, and a middle-aged man with a Gandalfian beard and a pint of beer was ranting in a British accent.
“ — I know perfectly well the point they want to make. We have not yet established any model for the rightful ownership of all this health and genomic data, or even fitness data, coming from people. Why? Until now, we had organ-based medicine. How crucial is the ownership of medical data by patients in such a scientific context? It is of little relevance. No patient is a trained organ specialist, and conventional medicine is built around this assumption. Now, here comes genomic precision medicine, based on the knowledge of the human cell; not the human vital organ. Today, as you know even better than I do, you can digitise pretty much anything in biology. So if medicine is about the digitised cell and its genome, let me ask again: how crucial is the ownership of medical data by patients in such a scientific context? Very. Changing medicine is gonna be dangerous. Can you see the point they want to make? »
« — Yes… » answered Taka, becoming increasingly despondent. Why did his boss make him write this grant in cooperation with no less than 30 countries? This was a full-time job for some cross-cultural specialised senior project manager (Prince II certification level minimum), and the likelihood of getting any money from the damn grant was less than 1%, as far as he knew. He had a patient to attend to, a Chinese zillionaire, and he was leading a worldwide première: semi-personalised cancer therapy with genetically altered immune cells. But Gandalfian leader of worldwide crusade against ageing, Geronimo Faber, did not seem to care. There seemed to be no end to the granting, or rather, the ranting.
« — Geocentric and Heliocentric Systems, rings a bell? Shifting from the vital organ to the human cell could trigger conflicts (doesn’t it already?). Will the main change come from the fact that billions of people, who have never been online, will finally be able to get an Internet connection? Democratisation of ideas hasn’t yet happened. Democratisation of medicine hasn’t either.
In conventional medicine, there was little room (if any) for digital players. But in the era of genomic precision medicine, new players will appear: parents cracking the code of their son’s or daughter’s DNA and RNA and microbiome to get a diagnosis that doctors won’t give them in the first place, then doing some mouse modelling of the disease with CRISPR genome editing (trying to find a cure) and building a platform to cure a whole bunch of diseases, like Salvatore Iaconesi, an Italian brain cancer patient and computer programmer. We are setting up new ways of brainstorming, keeping up to date, researching and interacting. Such new players, also found in rare diseases, or in type I and type II diabetes, will be the Linux (open access) of genomics, or medicine, while Californian biotech company Illumina will be more like the IBM of genomics or medicine. »
« — … »
Taka hardly knew a thing about Illumina.
« — So you see, this is the point they want to make. »
« — Yes… » Taka was literally melting on his seat.
« — And of course, we will not write this in the grant. »
« — No, of course not … », offered Taka.
« — See? I knew I could count on you. »
Taka was puzzled to the extreme. What did the guy expect from him? Before he could open his mouth, two superheroes popped on his screen, like he was in a video game on steroids. There was a shakespearian knight, holding a skull, pondering if he might shorten or lengthen his telomeres, while some delirious stuff mocking Japanese ads on TV was going on around him. A curious mix of kawaii, porn, art, manga, 7-eleven comfort food, and make-up products was dancing around two superheroes, one making his telomeres longer; the other one, shorter. Then Super Mario popped on the screen, announcing in a hysterical voice: « longer is the right answer ».
Faber was sipping his beer, laughing at the whole thing. His most recent rent was being reshuffled, only he was not talking but singing, rapping, howling instead. He was Gandalf, then, among many others he failed to recognise, his next avatar was Geronimo Stilton. The game or video went on for a few more minutes. It was hilarious. Faber fell off his chair laughing, while Taka was wearing a frown all the time. All of a sudden, Nono was standing next to his boss, smiling.
« — Bonjour! Konnichiwa! Hello! arigatou gozaimasu ». Nono was bowing on stage.
« — This is outstanding. I want this stuff for our grant writing. I mean, this cool stuff will be our grant application. We don’t need anything else. »
Taka was speechless.
« — This is Noël Bonnheur », one of our four A.I. program post-docs.
« — Working in your lab of Bioinformatics for personalised CAR-T-therapies in Tokyo certainly looks like fun, and Nono is one of a kind. »
« — Yes … Yes, he is. »
Taka decided he couldn’t care less about the damn grant project, and he would let Nono handle the whole thing. Writing a grant proposal for no money at all… Youthanizing people. Love’s Labour’s Lost. Nono was currently attending a traineeship in California, in some kind of experimental video games program run by Facebook. Or the session was over, since his one-of-a-kind postdoc was back. He never took care to explain why he wanted to apply there. He had simply vanished, and shortly after that, Taka found a text: « will be back in 3 weeks. Working in FB California, accommodation is arranged, cool »
« — Wait, I’m sending you the karaoke version of this vid »
« Since Nono and Faber are up and running, let’s get back to real work… » Taka was just happy he could finally squeeze out of the grunt job.
« Oh, no… » Impeccably dressed in his navy blue suit and red tie, his home-made bento with him, Taka was on his way to the cafeteria. Now he was wearing a frown again. Same reason as before. Nono. The French engineer. Yuki was sitting next to him. He was talking to her, trying to appease… what? Her stage fright, of course. She was used to small concert venues. But in a few weeks, she would have to be the flute soloist at the Suntory Hall in Tokyo in a series of concerts. Taka’s sister was wearing virtual reality glasses. She looked like she was going through a whole mix of various emotions. At some point she even bust out laughing. A few seconds before that she was trembling with fear.
« OK. I know exactly what is going on here. And I don’t like it. » He made up his mind and started walking towards the couple. « Nono must be using the cutting-edge interactive A.I. system our investors entrusted us with. We both signed a non-disclosure agreement. And now, he is using it to help Yuki. Playing doctor with my sister.»
Before he knew it, though, his steps had brought him to the cafeteria. Yuki was a mystery to him. She looked so confident on stage. How about the rest of the time? She was a mess. Tortured by anxiety, nightmares, anorexia, bulimia. Since she was crystal fragile, Taka had to be rock solid. « That’s how our parents raised us… » Again, his sister was laughing. Nono was glancing in his direction, smiling like that grinning cat in Alice in Wonderland.
« — Your brother’s aptitude to humour matches the one of this sophisticated A.I. »
« — Really? » Yuki was confused.
« — Wait. You know that this A.I. can write great song lyrics in a couple of minutes, but is terrible at making jokes, right? »
« — Oh now I understand. » Yuki was dying with laughter.
« — So you are the only one here whose job won’t be replaced by a machine I guess? »
« — So far so good, » answered the post-doc with his signature grinning from ear to ear.
Nono had talked Yuki through the process of her upcoming Suntory Hall performances. Humour-augmented reality, lost in Suntory whisky, all translated by flute. « For relaxing times, make it Suntory Hall time. » Indeed, the A.I. was now rehashing and music-mixing — Yuki had been studying everything about all kinds of Baroque flutes for over a decade — adding extra bits from the Suntory whisky scenes from the movie « Lost In Translation ».
« — Not bad. You really look great. Wait, let’s try and rearrange the segments I wanna send to that colleague of your brother, Prof. Faber. Aaaand just throw in a teeny-weeny itsy-bitsy little of that flute playing when he’s talking, and a tad bit of the lost-in-translation effect you can observe on Taka’s face whenever he’s trying to figure out what the hell it is this guy wants from him with the fregging grant… »
Nono was working fast, talking at the same time.
« — Now which format do you think would be best suited for grant application? Video or online game? Let’s play it safe and keep the video. We’ll be back with the online game version if they happen to ask for it.»
For a moment, Taka wished he could spy on them. Nono seemed to possess special abilities when it came to addressing Yuki’s fears. He didn’t want to interrupt. Every Sunday and evening concert she had performed in had been video recorded by him, the protective brother, by hand. A brother who took pride in being highly reliable. Even if his hand, or his arm were sometimes trembling with fatigue. It was his own way of telling her: « — Look. I’ve got the proof here. Rock solid evidence you are unique, and that each moment is just perfect. » Now he was being disrupted by an A.I. where least expected. Nono was just an accomplice. The actual culprit was the A.I. machine.
Youthanize your telomeres,
I can tell by the mere
Look at your face
That you are lost in translation.
Shortening your telomeres
Will turn you into a grandmother
Making them longer
Will either give you cancer
Or you’ll become a vampire.
Suntory immortality
Your bloody glass of whisky
Forever.
Aging is a complicated science
Youthanizing people
Euthanizing death
And the vampires
Of immortality.
The combination of rap music and baroque flute was quite stunning. So was the Geisha. Quite honestly, nobody expected to see a performing Geisha in a grant application for stem cell therapy. Everything and everyone was being chomped up by the A.I. with great enthusiasm. In Taka’s service, everybody was pulling out their hair. Faber was laughing his ass off. Nono, standing in a corner, was watching quietly, with his arms crossed.
