(Zebra-) Crossing The Rubicon
This is episode 10 of The French Tech Comedy Season 2.
Episode 9: Year of The Earth Dog
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.
— — — — — — — — — — —
Simone was having a nightmare. The evening before, she’d been exhausted and tried hard to go to sleep, but it took her forever to just relax. Maybe she’d had too much food?
And she couldn’t get rid of the stench she had been breathing that day in Chinatown Bangkok — stale and dirty water in canals beneath the streets, damaged drain covers — and there was that varan, too, eating a snake right under her feet, swimming in the filthy liquid. In her dream, the snake was a brain dead patient, and some doctor was trying to get her organs. Maybe she was that snake after all?
“ — See? She’s wearing this T-shirt. It means she is brain dead. We need her organs to save other patients.”
Simone knew about the T-shirt the doctor was talking about. It was a present she’d just gotten, from Ba, a Chinese zillionaire, co-founder of TenBa. Ba was in her dream, too. He was antagonizing the doctor and trying to tell her something. Or was it somebody else? It seemed to her that someone was trying to get in touch with her, via telepathy.
“ — You and me suffer from the same ailment. Can you hear me?”
“ — What ailment? Brain death?”
“ — Don’t be stupid. You know what I mean.”
But who was talking?
“ — Ba, why did you give me this T-shirt?”
“ — I want you to connect the dots. People in China and Japan don’t believe in brain death. This is something medicine has designed. An anticipated death certificate, a legal authorisation given to doctors to retrieve organs, for transplants. I want you to dissect cells’ DNA and RNA with CRISPR instead. Medicine cannot rely on brain death forever.”
“ — Are you dead too?”
“ — Don’t be stupid!” This time, it was Ba who was speaking. He was telling something to the doctor. Brain death, organ replacement medicine, organ trafficking in China, people dying because they were waiting for an organ. Countless people in the world. The unfair replacement medicine.
“ — You are waiting for an organ?”
“ — No!!!”
“ — Who are you?”
Simone was anxious and exhausted. And that overwhelming feeling of sadness. She couldn’t see what Ba was trying to tell, nor could she understand if somebody else was talking to her… Yes. Now she could. It was a student. A French student. maybe a doctor? Maybe he was the doctor asking for her organs?…
“ — No, I’m not. Don’t be afraid. Listen…”
“ — But how can there be different kinds of death? There are whole varieties of diseases, but only one kind of death, right? Organs aren’t big data, you don’t need AI and deep learning to perform transplants. You need consent to organ donation, from a patient’s family. You will be able to reinvent medicine only if you acknowledge that organ replacement medicine is unsustainable. They say cloning is unethical, enhancing people is unethical. But how about forced organ transplants? How about those never ending questions that the brain dead patient’s relatives will ask, again and again, with no answer? Because there is no answer, right? How about that feeling of unfairness, when you die whilst waiting on transplant lists?”
“ — I got it! Conventional medicine is a moonshot project.”
“ — It’s not what I meant, Simone. It makes me feel very sad if you don’t understand what I mean. You, of all people.”
But who was talking? Ba? A French student who was a perfect stranger but trying to get in touch with her? She was so confused. Little by little, deep-rooted feelings of helplessness, felt so deeply that she wanted to die.
“ — Am I dead?”
Ba was now speaking to the Chinese President. Xi Jinping was shaped as a zebra amulet, wearing a fresh flower necklace, bright orange. And now, it was Xi Jinping’s turn to speak:
“ — 1.0 pharmaceutical labs will not be tolerated in China. I want everybody to work on genomic precision medicine and innovate, find new drugs. Fed by big data, AI is now spilling out into self-driving cars, robotics, financial markets, business logistics, and health systems. China played no role in launching the AI revolution, but is making breathtaking progress catching up. To anticipate outbreaks of infectious diseases like Ebola and to protect against potential bioweapons, we need vastly better medical surveillance networks, drawing on new DNA and computer technologies. With longer lifespans, the number of cases of Alzheimer’s is skyrocketing and is expected to cost $1 trillion a year by mid-century in the US. Prevention will require understanding the molecular mechanisms that cause the disease. There are promising clues — for example, about unexpected roles of the immune system in the brain — but major research investment is needed. To decrease health care costs, we need to vastly improve electronic medical records, so that we can learn from experience.” (1)
Scientists were surrounding Xi Jinping. They were also zebra amulets. Simone was listening to them, drinking strawberry soda. That horrible, horrible chemical taste.
“ —Civil death? Legal fiction? But I’m not dead! See, I can drink!!”
“ — You are brain dead. This is civil death. We still need your organs, but we need to perfuse you, to hydrate you. Brain dead people are losing an awful lot of liquid, but we need their kidneys to stay healthy, in order to transplant them into other sick patients.”
“ — What??? No!!!”
“ — Drink!!! This is doctor’s order.”
“ — But this soda has been staying in the sun for days. It will poison me.”
“ — Drink!!!”
Ba was still sad and lonely:
“ — Simone, I need your help. I can’t do it without you.”
“ — Now you can hear me, I know it. My name is Pi.”
“ — Who are you? Some mathematical number? An A.I.? Ba?”
Simone was turning and tossing in her bed.
“ — Darling, sweetheart, are you all right? You were grinding your teeth so hard. Were you having a nightmare?”
Her grandmother was by her side. She looked worried.
“ — Here. Drink.”
“ — No!!! I don’t want to drink. Leave me alone, everybody.”
“ — Simone, Simone, calm down. You are alone in your room, with me, everything is all right. You are secure. And this here is only fresh water. Don’t worry. It will do you good. Actually, I also need fresh water. See, I’m drinking from that glass too. C’mon. Just a bit…”
Simone’s stay in prison, in Beijing, was having consequences, or severe secondary effets. The teenage hacker was suffering from post-traumatic stress, bruxism, anxiety, depression and eating disorders. And her family was hardly recovering from the ordeal. Getting an innocent teenager out of jail.
“ — Now tell me. Was it about prison? I mean, your dream…”
“ — No, nǎinai (2). It was about Ba, and a doctor, telling me I was brain dead, or suffering from civil death. Same thing, anyway.”
Simone shrugged it off:
“ — It’s all because of the stupid zebra amulets I saw today, and the damned varan, the predator of snakes. And there was an A.I. named Pi, and also… Ah. I can’t remember now. It was all so confusing, so stupid. Dreams are so stupid. I’ll go back to sleep, don’t worry.”
“ — Can I stay with you? After all, you have this queen size bed all to yourself, I’m jealous.”
“ — Sure.”
Simone and her grandma were lying in bed, their eyes opened. It was pitch dark, but neither of them could sleep.
(2) Grandma in Chinese (Mandarin)
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.”
For Season 1 of The French Tech Comedy (all episodes), see here.
