11/24/22: The Island of Stability *OR* How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Dark Science

Jane Pearson made her fortune on Zinc-Sodium-ion batteries. She nicknamed it - of course - the Pear. 

The field had been littered with battery startups before Pear Industries came along. There were batteries made with zinc-manganese, salt-cobalt, nickel-tungsten, fluoride-solid-state-polymers, ceramic silico-nanotubes, and dozens more ingredients that all blended into an over-hyped word salad. After a decade of just-around-the-corner tech that never materialized, the press stopped reporting on the field entirely. 

So when Jane demo’d the Pear at Venture Tank, hardly anyone noticed. No one explicitly called her product vaporware, but none of the major players in the field showed any interest either. 

So she started small. She partnered first with toy companies; powering Elmo’s and remote-control trucks that hardly ever needed to be charged. Then came the partnerships with the headlamps industry and dozens of widgets; key-chain finders, car key fobs, electric wine bottle openers. But what finally got her traction in the mainstream was powering vibrators. 

“Woman invents battery which puts women first!” was the headline. “Hitachi-wand-to-go problem solved once and for all!” Jane winced when she read the headline, but any press was good press. 

Three years later, her Pear batteries were powering everything. “THE DECADE OF THE BATTERY IS HERE,” said Times in its yearly retrospective. 

And for once, reality was even more magnificent than the headlines. The world changed. Electric cars, with their effective one-charge range suddenly extended from 300 to 3000 miles, not only achieved majority market share but actually made internal combustion engine cars obsolete. Solar power, with its energy storage problem fixed, accounted for the majority of the Western world’s power within a decade. Essentially every appliance became cordless; with battery-powered air purifiers and kettles and webcams becoming the norm. Food trucks that ran on Pear batteries could run their electric stoves for days without a recharge, and began to outcompete sit-down restaurants. Only fringe groups talked about global warming any more, with the dream of renewables finally apotheosed into reality.

Jane became the richest person in the world - the richest person in history - and the best thing was, no one hated her for it. “Billionaires shouldn’t exist… except maybe for Pearson,” AOC was caught saying when she thought she was off-mic.

At age 40, Jane was at the top of the world. Then, she got a call from her PCP.

“Your chart was flagged as part of a population genomic study at UCSF Biohub.”

“Genomic study? I never signed up for…” 

“It looks like you donated blood 20 years ago at Stanford undergrad, and signed some waivers?”

Jane had no memory of this. She found it darkly funny that she was one of the most powerful people in the world and yet still had been caught by a waiver agreement she hadn’t bothered to read.

“So what’s the TLDR? I have a meeting in two minutes.” 

“You carry two copies of the APOE ɛ4 gene,” her primary care doctor told her. “That by itself would increase your likelihood of early-onset Alzheimer’s by -”

“Alzheimer’s?”

“- a great deal, but quite unfortunately you also carry the Presenilin 1 gene, which likely has a multiplicative effect on your risk. To have this combination of genes is extraordinarily rare and -

“How early are we talking?

“- quite bad luck.” He paused. “Early 40’s? Maybe 50’s? Nothing is set in stone. Some people present earlier, other people later.”

“Oh.”

Jane had never been one of those billionaires obsessed with chasing agelessness or “defeating senescence.” Her friends went in for their youth blood transfusions, or plasma exchanges, or supratherapeutic IV metformin doses, but the whole endeavor had always left a bad taste in her mouth for reasons she couldn’t quite put her finger on. 

But in that moment, she felt the unfamiliar feeling of fear. She had seen her maternal grandmother succumb to Alzheimer’s, and the idea of a slide into mental oblivion and non-identity in just a few years was terrifying.

She would not go gently into the dark. She was going to fight this fucking thing.

From that moment forward, she shifted gears entirely. Biomedical sciences had never been her forte - she was a chemical engineer by training - but she had infinite willpower and resources at her disposal. Within the day, she was on a conference call with the five most prominent Alzheimer researchers in the field. 

What she learned about the state of the field depressed her.

“We’re years away from having a good model of the disease, and decades from any real therapeutics,” she was told. “The beta-amyloid hypothesis tied up the field for a good twenty years. Then we rebooted and got stuck in the astrocyte CMV quagmire for another ten. Currently we think that what was formerly called Alzheimer’s is actually a group of a dozen pathologies, which interplay with each other in a network feedback loop. In other words, there’s no silver bullet; you need a dozen silver bullets for problems which haven’t even been described yet.”

“We don’t even have a mouse model,” another scientist added morosely. “Not a real one, anyway.”

Over the next month, she gave every Alzheimer’s researcher in the world effectively infinite money. She did not keep news of her diagnosis secret. 

“Just to be clear, this is clearly self-serving, and a vastly inefficient way of spending my money,” she said, in an interview. “If I was really trying to better the world, I’d probably just be doing direct cash transfers. Any benefit to society is a purely unintended side effect.”

Somehow, her frankness seemed to buy her even more goodwill. Not wanting to die of Alzheimer’s at a young age was a relatable desire. It helped that the second richest person in the world made headlines that year for spending 2 billion USD on a mega-yacht that had a swimming pool large enough to hold it’s own yacht. Spending a small country’s GDP on life sciences was charity in comparison. Meanwhile, as the world’s economy experienced its longest run of growth in recorded history, due in large part to her battery tech, Pear Industries grew with it. 

When she became the world’s first trillionaire, she looked outside her window for pitchforks and found none. 

“Come on,” Sanders Jr. said. “She single-handedly reduced global poverty by double percentage points. And she’s going to die in like, a few years from Alzheimer’s. You can’t kick a woman while she’s down. The Murdochs on the other hand…”

But the more Jane learned about the state of academic science the more depressed she got. It turned out that money was not the limiting factor in scientific progress; the entire academic system was. Universities seemed to want to maximize for funding, with research being a side-effect; large parts of the scientific literature were likely wrong, even that which was published after the New Replication Crisis; the most successful researchers had become optimized for grant-writing rather than research; medical research was hopelessly bogged down by administrative commitments and an endless merry-go-round of IRB’s and NIH approvals. 

Two months in, she could feel time slipping away. Nothing was fast enough. She started seeing signs of cognitive impairment in the most innocuous of mistakes; she spent a full hour ruminating one day about whether her losing her keys in her house was a sign that her mind was slipping.

“Just buy an AirTag,” her husband said. “Everyone has those.”

“I would sooner fucking die,” she replied. She later, reluctantly, allowed her husband to buy her an AirTag.

“You’re seeing pattern in noise,” her therapist said to her. “Everyone loses their keys every once in a while.” She fired him, thinking that therapy was a waste of time that she could be spending on directing Alzheimer’s research, then rehired him the next day when she had a mental breakdown in the bathroom and had to cancel the entire morning’s worth of meetings.

“It turns out that sobbing in the bathtub is not very good for my productivity,” she said to him. “Teach me how to not have them.”

Six months in, she panicked. She had nothing to show for her work. Research still felt as if it were moving at a snails pace. “Something has to change,” she said to her husband.

She bought an island off the coast of Canada. Not a small island, like millionaires might buy. Not a large island, like billionaires might buy. A large-enough-to-create-your-own-nation-state island.

And build a nation-state she did. 

It took two years, which was two years longer than she wanted, and ten years shorter than the rest of the world predicted. “Boring is good,” she told the construction companies. “I want a functional airport, not architectural brilliance. I want tried-and-true construction methods, off-the-shelf parts for all the laboratories. Use Brutalist architecture for the living complexes - I’ll get the Psyc-WellBe department to paint over all the concrete with murals later. I want speed, gentlemen.”

“Ahem.”

“And ladies. Sorry, Monica.”

When contractors weren’t moving quickly enough, she bought out their companies. When there was a shortage of beach sand for pouring concrete, she acquired the rights to half of Jamaica’s beachfronts. When shipping times became a constraint, she bought the Suez Canal as a three year loan from Egypt to give her ships priority shipping lanes. She bought the shipping container companies, the crane-supply companies, and the companies in charge of acquiring other companies so that there was no competition for her acquisitions. 

“Verticalization to end all verticalization,” as she put it.

And through it all, she sold the world’s scientific community a vision.

“None of you are doing your best work. You know it, I know it. It’s no one’s fault, I’m not blaming anyone. 

The reason is because there are too many rules. You have to cut through a mile of red tape just to get approval for a project. You spend years working on a project, only to have the manuscript shot down by journal editors for trivial reasons even they don’t understand - after a 6 month delay in getting back to you. You spend more time revising manuscripts and hoping that it’ll get published then actually doing any science. And then no one actually reads your paper! No one acts on it! I guarantee you that 99% of researchers will spend their entire lives working without having their research impact the material world in any way. And I say to you - what a waste. What a goddamn waste.

At the Island of Stability, our nation’s laws are optimized towards allowing you to do the work you were meant to do. You have infinite funding, and your only goal is to produce real, replicable results. 

No IRB committee’s. No funding cuts. No grant-writing. If you need equipment, it will arrive the next day, no questions asked. No journal pay-walls; all our data is published open-source on a living document and discussed in real-time. 

Want to develop a universal flu vaccine? We have hundreds of thousands of volunteers lined up for human challenge trials; congratulations, your iteration cycle was just reduced from 2 years to 2 days. Want to realize xenotransplantation? We have state-of-the-art virus-sterile pig farms - and thousands of patients who are willing to fly in for a last chance at organ transplant. Want to cure malaria? There’s no Phase 2 for clinical trials here - just 1 and 3, spaced a week apart. Want to work directly on the human genome? Our laws permit for direct human embryological gene-editing for any parents who give consent. Want to create neural-computer interfaces? We have fabs that are ahead of the curve for Corey’s Law, and a whole cohort of quadriplegic patients ready to sign up for direct experimentation. Feeling unmotivated or anxious? We have psychiatrists on staff ready to provide world-class therapy and anxiolytics with no friction or baggage.

Your family will live on a luxury campus amongst the brightest minds in the world. Your children will be taught by PhD’s. If you get bored, you can lie on the beach and I will personally come hand hand you a margarita. Every need will be provided for. 

Leave your local maximum, jump across the sea of chaos, and land here at the Island of Stability. The peaks are higher here. And if you’re going to work all your life, have it at least mean something.” 

She built it, and they came. Five years in, the Island of Stability was a mecca of the world’s best and brightest. 

It was at this point that the rest of the world had bones to pick with her. The brain drain was enough to be noticeable amongst the world powers. Jane had a full third of her resources devoted to international diplomacy and PR mitigation. She bought off those on the Geneva Scientific Ethics Committee, one by one, with spots on the Island. An entire division of Pear Industries was devoted to lobbying Congress. And where diplomacy failed, she used Pear Industries as leverage, the mere idea of being cut off from Pear battery supply enough to silence most nations.

“The Island of Dark Science,” her critics called it. She rather liked the ring of it. Stability Island, Dark Science Island, it all felt like it blurred together. It didn’t matter at that point - a Pear Industries stock share was considered a safer investment than a U.S. Treasury Bond, and she still had more money than God. She had the world’s leaders on speed-dial, and knew what made them tick. The world had outgrown the Scientific Method.

She turned 50, and she could feel herself slipping away right as the Island itself was blossoming. Medical tourism alone was enough to break even with costs; visitors came from all over the world to have their sickle cell or cystic fibrosis gene-edited away, to have their Lp(a) silenced, to have their kidneys replaced by the latest yield from the Porcine Farms. It would have taken a decade for the FDA to approve half the biotech which was already a reality on the Island.

One day, she couldn’t find her way back to her apartment. She wound up at one of the many little cafes that dotted the Island, and sat down to sip at a tea for an hour. 

“Tell me, how much time do I have left?” she asked her physician. 

“You know I can’t provide an answer to that,” he said back. “But your disease has been accelerating more quickly than our therapies can keep pace with. And it’s not just your genes - we snipped out every risk gene a long time ago. The Council formally recommended your cryogenic preservation two months ago, to buy us more time. Have you given any more thought to that?”

“Of course,” she said. “I’ve told you before, I find it distasteful.”

He sighed. 

“I don’t know if we’re ever going to find a solution, Jane. There are some problems that don’t have answers.”

“Like entropy.” 

“If that’s how you want to view it, then like entropy, yes. Which is why as your physician, I recommend that you make a decision now. Either spend the time you have left in a slow burn and take cryo off the table. Or enter cryo now, before your mind-state deteriorates further and there’s nothing left to revive - accepting the upfront cost that the process could fail and that it’s lights out forever.”

“Since when do physicians say lights out?”

“Since when do individuals buy an island to create a nation-state?”

“Since when do physicians try to conversationally one-up Alzheimer’s patients?”

“You’ve used that line before. You don’t remember?”

“…”

“Joking.”

“…”

“I’m sorry, that wasn’t funny. I’ll show myself out now.”

The day that Jane was scheduled to enter cryo, she finished settling her affairs. She divided her shares of Pear Industries evenly amongst all the residents of Stability Island. She had a nice breakfast with her husband and daughter. And then she slipped into a pleasant medical-induced coma. 

“Don’t have too much fun without me,” were her last words. And as she drifted off into oblivion, she thought of all the things she hadn’t yet done, all the friends and family she hadn’t yet spent enough time with. 

“I’m not ready to go,” she thought. “I’m not ready for this to be the end.”

And then it was dark.