The Music of Genomic Origami
This is episode 14 of The French Tech Comedy
Episode 1: The Science of Sakura
Episode 2: Lost in Telomere Translation
Episode 3: Feel Flee to Donate
Episode 4: Pasteurising Tech With the French Touch
Episode 5: The Newborn Symphony Project
Episode 6: The Unknown 9% of the Human Genome
Episode 7: The Apple Tech Specs Conference
Episode 8: religA.I.on
Episode 9: Hiroshima is Japan’s World Trade Center
Episode 10: Mao’s Robots
Episode 11: Zazen in the Shinkansen
Episode 12: The Last (French) Samurai
Episode 13: To Humanity and Beyond
Yuki is back to her training as a geisha. She finds the conversations around her boring. Words swirling in the air at random, folding and unfolding. Unsightly origami, with too much make-up around the eyes. Kung Fu panda make-up. Made-in-China kung fu. Nono the French engineer was now in China, and he was there to stay. Yesterday afternoon, after the usual brunch with her parents — her brother Taka was allowed to skip that part because it was a well accepted fact that he was too busy, even on Sundays — that shouting match between Yuki and her mom… about that one-of-a-kind French engineer working in Taka’s lab. Nono.
“ — Taka told us Nono is brilliant, but definitely not what he would call the reliable type. We have checked his blood type personality. He has a dual personality. He will make you suffer.”
“ — The ABO blood type? Mom, you know that’s crap all right, don’t you?”
“ — Blood type personality theory has never been proven wrong by science. Ask your brother.”
“ — Small reminder, mom: Taka is not a God. And science is evolving, just like the rest of us.”
Later, she could hear her mom practicing in her bath her breathing exercises derived from yoga. She was told Nono would stay in China and marry that Chinese rich girl she had heard of. Taka had told her that Nono was not working in his lab anymore, since he had completed the post-doc learning-through-research-program-in-Japan, which was the reason why he had been working with Taka in Tokyo.
“ — Nono brought us some funding, but talent for scientific breakthrough is obviously not his strong suit. At this point I’m not even sure he is into genomic precision medicine at all. However, for better and worse, he has a knack for deep learning, A.I. and gaming, whimsical videos and viral web marketing, all things video games. The winning combination for e-commerce in China, but not for medicine in Japan, I’m afraid.”
The die was cast.
Yuki was getting ready for a party with politicians in the poshest Tokyoite hotel. That make-up part was so boring. Meanwhile, she was checking her twitter account. 70,000 followers already. If people knew the truth. She was a geisha, curious about genomics. But she wasn’t a scientist. After a few months of reposting tweets about precision genomic medicine and bioinformatics and writing her own bioethics chronicles on social networks like Line, Facebook and Twitter, her brother Taka had decided he needed her help, as she was good at handling that digital social network thing he hated so much. He was reluctant to spend time and money to hire a community manager, and he thought his sister could be doing the job, just for fun and for free. Indeed, CRISPR-cas 9, that cool gene editing tool, was Yuki’s new passion. She’d just found that interesting twitter account, Victor de Lorenzo in Madrid: “Environmental biology meets synthetic biology:”
“ — Let’s face it, the two bottlenecks for engineering biology are gene expression noise and evolution (which sometimes go together).”
She had been wondering why, if CRISPR was such a wonderfully user-friendly tool allowing us to edit faulty stuff in the genome, this hasn’t been done already. Cancer patients, sick people with cystic fibrosis, rare diseases (not rare at all, in fact). So much things needed to be CRISPR-ed, so many people desperately needing it.
“ — The control system for potassium homeostasis in E-coli has the same logic as the thermostats for air conditioning.” She looked up the meaning of “homeostasis:”
“The ability to maintain a constant internal environment in response to environmental changes. It is a unifying principle of biology. The nervous and endocrine systems control homeostasis in the body through feedback mechanisms involving various organs and organ systems.” The geisha was thinking along the lines of origami. Synbio yoga. Folding like RNA. There were these MOOCs on the EdX platform — done by MITx — she enjoyed following on occasion. It was teaching stuff in biology and genomics. The updates, and the cool videos. Yuki needed videos — tutorials — to learn. And she had a passion for Japanese animes and manga books, too. She wasn’t sure she would be able to learn stuff thanks to books only.
“ — If we cannot control evolution we are screwed. Can evolution be stopped? Or is it like time? Can we engineer a system that does not evolve?”
And the answer on twitter:
“ — Host-aware design to minimise burden only gets us a delay. How can we make stable strains for the long term hundreds generations?”
The science of ageing and synthetic biology were fascinating her. She had this contract in the most luxurious hotel in Tokyo, all right. But did that mean her life had to revolve around kimono design and make-up and hair pins? Politicians and geishas. Living conditions which are void of any purpose, in her humble opinion. She would have to ask Taka what “host-aware design to minimise burden” meant.
Her skype account buzzed. Nono. Oh, no. She decided to ignore the incoming call.
Nono had sent her a short message on Skype she hadn’t seen. Talking of violent living conditions which are void of any purpose… His photograph had been in L.A. and N.Y. and a couple of other U.S. cities to do some test shooting photography sessions and yada yada yada video games blah blah… Yuki was not interested in this stuff. But then she saw that apparently, somebody had threatened to use a weapon and the guy working for Nono had to give them all the costly equipment…
“ — Yuki, are you in here? We are running late.”
“ — Sumimasen. Almost ready.” Back to reality.
Yuki, the geisha with the strange haircut. Nono was checking out Yuki’s profile on YouTube. Her channel, “A Geisha lost between two worlds”. No new video.
Nono sent a couple of crazy videos to Yuki, trying to inspire her to carry on with her video project. She wanted to have her whole genome sequenced and a medical interpretation. And she wanted to discuss it on YouTube. She had found that great startup, Veritas Genetics. Meanwhile, Nono was in trouble, even if he didn’t like to think about it. He was good at raising funds, and Taka needed the money. So even if he had completed his post-doc session in Japan, he was still successfully raising funds for Taka and his friends, the founders of genomic startup Awakens — Tokyo, San Francisco. Also, he had heard that the guys were trying to build synergies with the French Tech: gene-i-us founder Frederic Mougin, and the Institut Pasteur in Paris, with their startup Eligo. They had just raised 20 million dollars to study the microbiome. Awesome. Meaning, sugoi. But the Chinese government wanted him, Nono, to stop hammering away at petty stuff that was soaking up his precious time and that in the end would not matter. In other words: he wasn’t making enough money to stay in China. Or he could stop raising funds for others outside of China... Nono had a great guanxi (network) in Beijing, Shanghai, etc. Armies of engineers finding he was doing a great job. But the authorities in Beijing had decided he was not making enough money, which meant he could be expelled from the country and lose the money he had invested in his startup in China. And this could happen anytime. Ironically, in Japan things were quite the opposite: the government wanted him to stay — remember the demography issue in Japan: ageing global population and ageing health workforce — but native Japanese people weren’t too fond of “aliens.” That time he had been invited to lunch at Taka’s place. Meaning, the family house. With the parents. And Yuki, who ended up crying, because she was eating too slowly. The usual polite way had nothing sincere. Yuki’s parents didn’t like him. And the geisha was torn apart. Now who is talking about petty stuff?
In China, the pollution was costing lives. Many lives. And among those, the doctor Nono was working with, who had died of lung cancer in Beijing, at 36 years old. So many prisoners killed for their organs, each year, just before Chinese New Year, this was the worst season. The bloody harvest. So Nono was working on xenotransplant, making humanised organs in pigs that could be transplanted into humans. Also, his grandfather was a retired surgeon. He had the names of the French and American surgeons who had helped local surgeons yank out organs from people sentenced to death in China, teaching them to retrieve vital, transplantable organs. Gruesome stuff. The dark side of the French tech. Beijing authorities had the names of those surgeons too, and they knew Nono knew. But Chinese secret services were the worst. Once, Nono had asked the Chinese government if Chinese secret services, who were actually deciding matters and had the final say in the (recent) developments in North Korea, had the names, too. A couple of weeks after this discussion, it turned out that Nono’s boss in China had enough money to run a cutting-edge lab in xenotransplant. The lab went full throttle in no time, working hand in hand with the Harvard medical school. Nono was now spending more time in Harvard than he was in Japan, and the guy he was working with was also an MIT professor, advisor of countless startups, in synthetic biology, ageing, xenotransplant.
Dirty China versus clean Japan, or so they say. But the French Tech was going global, beyond the painful legacies of local history. “(Engineering) workers of the world, unite!” The only reason why Nono had not yet been expelled from dirty and polluted China was his achievements in xenotransplant. He had pitched Chinese giant TenBa’s founder Ken Ba, a zillionaire from Shanghai, and Taka’s cancer patient. “Black castle, white castle,” thought Nono, who was kind of trying not to fall between two stools. Japan and China. China and Japan. He had visited the castle in Okayama and the one in Himeji. The black replica in Okayama, where generations of Shoguns had lived, was named after the ravens; the genuine one in Himeji, where generations of warriors had lived, was called the White Heron Castle.
“ — Je dérange?” (am I bothering you?)
Thomas and his wheelchair were trying to make their way into the tiny concert venue Yuki and a couple of her fellow musicians had booked, as they wanted to show Baroque style flute instruments in action to a few members of the French Tech, currently visiting Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka. Thomas was here to tell Yuki he was sorry, but only him and a lady were interested in attending a classical music concert and taking advantage of the insider tips. The Geisha was very disappointed. She wanted to demo a few of her best Baroque flute instruments and explain why and how they were used now, and in history. She was wearing a stunning kimono — a brand new one, she told Thomas. The concert got kind of last-minute cancelled, Yuki offered her apologies to her colleagues who decided they would go shopping instead — the French lady who was accompanying Thomas said she would be more than happy to go shopping in Tokyo, as it was her first time ever in Japan. In no time, Yuki and Thomas were left alone. The French Tech blogger asked the Geisha if her brother Taka was doing fine, she answered he was working too much and a few moments after that, she broke into tears. Thomas didn’t know what to do.
“ — Are crying Geishas something French tourists commonly get to see in Japan, or are you doing me a favour?”
“ — Dôôô… I’m solllii…”
Yuki was blowing her nose, knowing that it was not rude to do so in the company of French people — but avoid it at all cost in front of Japanese people!
“ — A Geisha blowing her nose. I should take a picture and post it on Instagram, Line, Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter…” said Thomas, who was joking, trying to lighten the atmosphere. But Yuki thought he was serious and started crying again.
“ — Hey, I’m just kidding… What’s wrong?”
“ — Dothing,” said Yuki, blowing her nose again. “Sumimasen. I’b solllii.”
“ — You are disappointed because the concert was cancelled? I’m sorry for that. French people are rude, you know… I’m sure you are an excellent musician. By the way, I would be interested in that demo. I’ll post it as an interview with a Japanese geisha, whose brother is working as a bioinformatician, and…”
“ — I’m kind of lost between two worlds,” said Yuki abruptly, interrupting Thomas.
“ — I see,” said Thomas who was a bit lost in translation. Yuki was living in the world of feelings; whereas his own world was full of facts. The only things that could upset him were facts. Yuki was driven by invisible forces, and unpredictable ones. One thing leading to another, they soon talked about that one-of-a-kind French engineer who had worked with her brother Taka. Yuki told Thomas about her private life and heartbreak: as he was much older, more experienced in life, in her culture it was only a normal thing to do. Poor Thomas however wasn’t prepared for that. A stunningly beautiful geisha telling him about her love life and asking for guidance. Why did she choose him, of all people, for this… girly thing?
“ — OK, let’s face the music, if I may say so. I’m gonna ask you a few questions, without being intrusive. Are you ready?”
“ — Euh… oui,” answered Yuki, a bit puzzled.
It soon turned out that the only thing (or rather, boy) that was on Yuki’s mind was Nono, but she also loved her family and didn’t want to upset them. She was fighting a losing battle against herself. In her eyes Nono was being disrespectful of Japanese culture, which Thomas found illogical.
“ — But everybody is saying that Nono’s life is revolving around gaming, video games. To me, Japan is pretty much the hub of video games. And you want to publish a manga book about the French Tech. Manga and video games in Japan are not worlds apart, right? Instead, birds of a feather flock together.”
“ — But Taka said…”
“ — tatata, tatata, tatata, you said Taka was overworked. He is just being protective and doesn’t want you to get in trouble. Does he have a girlfriend?”
“ — He found a Japanese girl, but she was more the gold digger type than anything else. Sugoi prétentions …”
“ — What is sugoi prétentions?”
“ — A big house, kids in private school, all paid by the husband, whereas she would stay at home, raise the kids, with all the adequate staff, you know: the nannies, the cook, the gardener, the housekeeper…”
“ — I see…”
“ — So the wedding never took place… Poor Taka. He is such a great guy…”
“ — He’ll find the right girl, I’m sure. Don’t worry about him.”
“ — I worry a lot about him!”, said Yuki defensively — in Japan it is not polite not to worry about people. You have to worry all the time, and especially, express concern about things and people and stuff.
“ — I’ll never get married,” said Yuki and she started crying again. Thomas didn’t know what to do.
“ — Excusez, excusez… Are we too late for the concert?”
Speaking of the devils… Nono and Taka, making their entry.
“ — I’m afraid so,” said Thomas. “Everyone has left.”
“ — Baby, have you been crying? What’s wrong?,” whispered Nono to Yuki. Then the usual grin was back on his face. The trademark grin.
“ — You must be Nono. Nice to meet you. I’m Thomas. I think we’ve both heard of each other, via Yuki. Now we’re meeting for real.”
It turned out that Nono was back to Japan, working with Facebook, in a marketing position. Thomas and Taka looked like they understood what he was telling them about his new job, but Yuki only recognised the made-in-California buzz words: gaming, video games marketing, social networks, digital, corporate. To her, none of this was consistent. One thing was clear, though: her brother would carry on working with Nono, via Facebook and a Japanese startup in genomics, Awakens. And now, Thomas was involved in a skype session with Gene-i-us founder, French biologist Mougin. Looking at how the people were interacting and how new synergies were trying to emerge, Yuki felt like her sadness was evaporating. Maybe the concert was taking place, after all. And the music was beautiful.
Catherine Coste
MITx 7.00x, 7.QBWx, 7.28x1–2 certified
Member of the Walking Gallery of Health Care, founded by US activist Regina Holliday
