Imagine that it were possible to create the perfect human. The process would be like making an app, but instead of computer code, your design language would be DNA. You'd do the creating itself on your smartphone—using a piece of software called a Genome Compiler—then email what you'd come up with to a laboratory. Technicians in that lab would manufacture the DNA, per your instructions, dry it out, then send it back to you. After all, DNA isn't alive. It's a polymer, an arrangement of four different chemicals. Theoretically, from that DNA, it would be possible to construct the most advanced forms of life. You could make your human a super-genius, immune to all kinds of diseases. You could even make them live forever. After all, we only age and die because the DNA program we're running—our human code—contains an instruction to do so. Just get rid of it. Rewrite it. Why not?
This was the dream of a visionary young entrepreneur named Austen Heinz. At school, back in North Carolina, Heinz had been bullied, sometimes badly—the combination of his physical slightness and social illiteracy had seen to that. He was bad at reading people. He had a kind of genius for absorbing large amounts of complex information at great speed, but when he arrived at an opinion, often after a period of intense labour, he'd announce it provocatively and unapologetically. He'd found it difficult to find friends and he'd struggled with his mental health. But now, at the age of 30, he was living a few blocks from his own laboratory, in a high-rise apartment in San Francisco's tech district, looking out over 180-degree views of the Bay Bridge, the AT&T ballpark and the stunning harbour, everything seemed to be coming together. Among the Silicon Valley cognoscenti, Heinz was seen as a major rising talent. His idea and his company, Cambrian Genomics, was about to change everything. Of that he felt sure. As he'd tell investors and journalists again and again, the tools they were developing would one day be more powerful than the hydrogen bomb.
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