San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Bromides and bold visions for the future.
Po Bronson, the managing director of IndieBio, and Arvind Gupta, the San Francisco company’s founder, like big, striking analogies.
“Cancer,” Bronson writes in their new book, “is a lot like Facebook. It’s a network.”
“The human genome,” he adds, “is like the U. S. Constitution” — each underpins a dynamic system. A patent standoff between UC Berkeley and a Massachusetts research center? It’s an “East Coast versus West Coast showdown” even bigger than “Tupac versus Biggie,” Gupta says.
The splashiest analogy in “Decoding the World” concerns the coauthors’ locale: “Silicon Valley actually operates a lot like Donald Trump. It says a heck of a lot of things, and the rest of the world can’t tell if it’s bluffing or real.”
People hoping to project trustworthiness don’t often compare their milieu to America’s factphobic president. But like many in Silicon Valley, Bronson and Gupta are selling originality. Their book, which imagines a wideranging vision for the future, features lots of innovative ideas — and some obvious weaknesses.
IndieBio, a venture capital firm that has backed numerous biotech startups, focuses on health and the environment. Its Jessie Street lab has helped launch companies that are developing new “cell therapies for cancer,” turning “food waste into hydrogen fuel cells for hydrogen vehicles” and growing “miniature human lymph nodes, little immune systems.” IndieBio recently announced that it will fund companies fighting COVID19. Bronson and Gupta hand the writing chores back and forth. Their experiences fuel interesting discussions about pressing issues and trailblazing science.
With nods to Blue Cross Blue Shield and the Green New Deal, Bronson proposes an idealistic Blue New Deal, which asks us to rethink everything from government sugar subsidies to the ways we test for disease. Gupta pens accessible chapters about artificial intelligence ( his optimistic take: “AI is just good at finding hidden patterns” and shouldn’t be feared) and Iceland’s efforts to sequester carbon dioxide in volcanic rock. And they demystify CRISPR, the geneediting technology linked to concerns about “designer babies.” Though “CRISPR works nearly perfectly on cells in a petri dish,” Gupta writes, it’s a different story “in a human guarded by an immune system.” But they have blind spots. In a patronizing section about the “thrift class” — people who have little in savings and make less than $ 50,000 a year — Bronson says “gig work is a tradeoff most are willing to take, because they can prioritize their personal lives.” Bronson won prominence for his insightful journalism — he’s written several best sellers — but this is an egregious oversimplification.
It’s not their only misstep. After devoting five pages to research into the connection between health and finding purpose in life, Bronson bails: “Okay, I’m going to call a premature end to this chapter. It’s a failed experiment.” Then why include it all? Gupta talks of “breaking every rule of biotech,” repeating the stalest of Silicon Valley bromides. We see many screenshots of the coauthors’ text exchanges; only a few are edifying.
Bronson and Gupta say this is the first title in their “convergence trilogy.” That sounds grandiose, but these two don’t lack for big ideas — or attentiongetting analogies to explain them.