HOW

WE’RE
BORN.
HOW
WE
LIVE.
HOW
WE
DIE.

,
IT S
ALL
GOING
TO
CHANGE.

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digital-reality
Digital sees smarter working harder
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:HȇUHKHOSLQJFOLHQWVXVHFORXGDQDO\WLFVHYHQDXJPHQWHGUHDOLW\LQQDQFHVXSSO\+5DQG
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Welcome to the Life Issue
We’re all going to die! ¶ Before we get too far
into an entire issue about the many ways that
science and technology are extending, altering,
optimizing, and disrupting every stage of
human life, we may as well get the bad news out
of the way: Despite the eforts of humanity’s
greatest minds, we’ve yet to ind a way of
perpetuating physical vitality or individual
consciousness indeinitely. As of press time,
it appears that each of us, sooner or later,
will die. ¶ It’s the sooner or later, though the
stuf between conception and death that is a
moving target. From the day we’re born until our
inal winding down, we’re adapting to technology
as technology is adapting to us. Geneticists and
biotechnologists are reengineering our bodies.
Revolutions in consumer tech screens everywhere,
apps for everything, VR devices and social
media avatars for all are transforming how we
experience the world. We are a species rewritten,
youngs and olds alike. ¶ In the following pages
you’ll ind miracle babies, #famous toddlers,
Ethereum-mining teens, idealistic cybersoldiers,
middle-aged gamers, and swipe-happy seniors.
You’ll ind scientists, surgeons, innovators,
and inventors who are creating body-enhancing
(and mind-altering) technologies. And you’ll
ind people ordinary people at every stage of
life making choices that have few precedents in
history, showing us all what it means to live
in an age of improvisation.
-

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 Capturing the
Flower of Life
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electrolytes for taste.

spotlight
sidekick.
vapor-distilled for purity,
0 1 3
SYSTEM ERRORS
0 1 5

A eggs and sperm, that could be combined to
About 40 years ago, Louise Brown,
the first human created using in vitro fertil-
ization, was conceived in a petri dish. Not
long after her birth, Leon Kass, a promi-
nent biologist and ethicist at the Univer-
sity of Chicago, wrung his hands about the
then-revolutionary technology of joining
sperm and egg outside the body. The mere
existence of the baby girl, he wrote in an
article, called into question “the idea of
the humanness of our human life and the
meaning of our embodiment, our sexual
being, and our relation to ancestors and
descendants.” The editors of Nova mag-
azine suggested in vitro fertilization was
“the biggest threat since the atom bomb.”
The American Medical Association wanted
to halt research altogether.
Yet a funny thing happened, or didn’t, in
the decades that followed: Millions of babies
were conceived using IVF. They were born
healthy and perfectly normal babies, and
they grew to become healthy and perfectly
normal adults. Brown is one of them. She
lives in Bristol, England, and works as a clerk
for a sea freight company. She’s married and
has two healthy boys. Everyone is doing fine.
Nothing so excites the forces of reac-
tion and revolution like changes in human
reproduction. When our ideas of sex are
nudged aside by technologies, we become
especially agitated. Some loathe the new
possibilities and call for restrictions or
bans; others claim untrammeled rights to
the new thing. Eventually, almost everyone
settles down, and the changes, no matter
how implausible they once seemed, become
part of who we are.
We are now on the brink of another revo-
lution in reproduction, one that could make
IVF look quaint. Through an emerging tech-
nology called in vitro gametogenesis (or
IVG), scientists are learning how to convert
adult human cells—taken perhaps from the
inside of a cheek or from a piece of skin on
0 1 6 the arm—into artificial gametes, lab-made
create an embryo and then be implanted in
a womb. For the infertile or people having
trouble conceiving, it would be a huge break-
through. Even adults with no sperm or eggs
could conceivably become biological parents.
In the future, new kinds of families might
become possible: a child could have a single
biological parent because an individual could
theoretically make both their own eggs and
sperm; a same-sex couple could have a child
who is biologically related to both of them;
or a grieving widow might use fresh hair
follicles from a dead spouse’s brush to have
a child her late husband didn’t live to see.
At the same time, modern gene-editing
technologies such as Crispr-Cas9 would
make it relatively easy to repair, add,
or remove genes during the IVG process,
eliminating diseases or conferring advan-
tages that would ripple through a child’s
genome. This all may sound like science
fiction, but to those following the research,
the combination of IVG and gene editing
appears highly likely, if not inevitable.
Eli Adashi, who was dean of medicine at
Brown University and has written about
the policy challenges of IVG, is astounded
by what researchers have achieved so far.
“It’s mind-boggling,” he says, although he
cautions that popular understanding of
the technology has not kept pace with the
speed of the advances: “The public is almost
entirely unaware of these technologies, and
before they become broadly feasible, a con-
versation needs to begin.”
T iPSCs become primordial germ cells. In
T h e st o ry o f a r t i f i c i a l g a m e t e s
truly begins in 2006, when a Japanese
researcher named Shinya Yamanaka
reported that he had induced adult mouse
cells into becoming pluripotent stem cells.
A year later, he demonstrated that he could
do the same with human cells. Unlike most
other cells, which are coded to perform
specific, dedicated tasks, pluripotent stem
cells can develop into any type of cell at
all, making them invaluable for research-
ers studying human development and the
origins of diseases. (They are also invalu-
able to humans: Embryos are composed
of stem cells, and babies are the products
of their maturation.) Before Yamanaka’s
breakthrough, researchers who wanted to
work with stem cells had to extract them
from embryos discarded during IVF or
from eggs that had been harvested from
women and later fertilized; in both cases,
the embryos were destroyed in the process
of isolating the stem cells. The process was
expensive, controversial, and subject to
intense government oversight in the United
States. After Yamanaka’s discovery, scien-
tists possessed a virtually inexhaustible
supply of these so-called induced pluripo-
tent stem cells (or iPSCs), and all over the
world, they have since been trying to rep-
licate each stage of cellular development,
refining the recipes that can coax stem cells
to become one cell or another.
In 2014, as a consequence of Yamana-
ka’s work, a Stanford researcher named
Renee Reijo Pera cut skin from infertile
men’s forearms, reprogrammed the skin
cells to become iPSCs, and transplanted
them into the testicles of mice to create
human germ cells, the primitive precur-
sors to eggs and sperm. (No embryos were
created using these germ cells.) Two years
later, in a paper published in Nature, two
scientists in Japan, Mitinori Saitou and
Katsuhiko Hayashi, described how they
had turned cells from a mouse’s tail into
iPSCs and from there into eggs. It was the
first time that artificial eggs had been made
outside of an organism’s body, and there was
even more extraordinary news: Using the
synthetic eggs, Saitou and Hayashi created
eight healthy, fertile pups.
But baby mice do not a human make,
and Saitou and another scientist, Azim
Surani, are each working directly with
human cells, trying to understand the dif-
ferences between how mice and human
December 2017, Surani announced a cru-
cial milestone concerning the eight-week
cycle, after which germ cells begin the pro-
cess of transforming into gametes. His lab
had successfully nudged the development
of stem cells to around week three of that
cycle, inching closer to the development of
a human gamete. Once adult human cells
can be made into gametes, editing the stem
cells will be relatively easy.
JASON PONTIN (@jason_pontin) is the
former editor in chief and publisher of
MIT Technology Review.
 How soon before humans have children
using IVG? Hayashi, one of the Japanese sci-
entists, guesses it will take five years to pro-
duce egg-like cells from other human cells,
with another 10 to 20 years of testing before
doctors and regulators feel the process is
safe enough to use in a clinic. Eli Adashi is
less sure of the timing than he is of the out-
come. “I don’t think any of us can say how
long,” he says. “But the progress in rodents
was remarkable: In six years, we went from
nothing to everything. To suggest that this
won’t be possible in humans is naive.”
S find morally impermissible. With IVG and
Some cautiousness about IVG and
gene editing is appropriate. Most medicines
that succeed in so-called mouse models
never find a clinical use. Yet IVG and gene
editing are diferent from, say, cancer drugs:
IVG induces cells to develop along certain
pathways, which nature does all the time. As
for gene editing, we are already beginning
to use that in non-germ-line cells, where
such changes are not heritable, in order to
treat blood, neurological, and other types
of diseases. Once scientists and regula-
tors are confident they have minimized
the potential risks of IVG, we could easily
make heritable changes to germ cells like
eggs, sperm, or early-stage embryos, and
with those changes, we’d be altering the
germ line, our shared human inheritance.
Used together, we can imagine would-be
parents who have genetic diseases, or are
infertile, or want to confer various genetic
advantages on their children going to a
clinic and swabbing their cheeks or losing
a little piece of skin. Some 40 weeks later,
they’ll have a healthy baby.
The demand for IVG coupled with gene
editing would be significant. Around 7 per-
cent of men and 11 percent of women of
reproductive age in the US have reported
problems with fertility, according to the
National Institutes of Health. And IVF,
which is typically the last, best hope for
those struggling to conceive, is invasive,
often doesn’t work, and can’t work for
women who have no eggs at all.
Then there is genetic disease. Of the more
than 130 million children who will be born
next year, around 7 million will have seri-
ous genetic disorders. Today, parents who
don’t want to pass on genetic abnormali-
ties (and who have the thousands of dollars
often required) might resort to IVF with
preimplantation genetic diagnosis, where
embryos are genetically tested before they
are transferred to a woman’s uterus. But
that process necessarily involves the same
invasive process of IVF, and it entails reject-
ing and often destroying embryos with the
unwanted genes, an act that some parents
gene editing, prospective parents would
think it unremarkable to give doctors
permission to test or alter stem cells or
gametes. A doctor might say, “Your child
will have a higher chance of developing X.
Would you like us to fix that for you?”
Proving that IVG and gene editing are
broadly safe and reliable will be neces-
sary before regulatory agencies around
the world relax the laws that currently pre-
clude creating a human being from syth-
netic gametes or tinkering with the human
germ line. Although IVF was greeted with
alarm by many mainstream physicians and
scientists, it nonetheless was subject to lit-
tle regulation; it slipped through the fed-
eral regulatory machinery charged with
overseeing drugs or medical devices, as
it was neither. Because IVG and gene edit-
ing are so strange, there may be popular
and expert demand for their oversight.
But in what form? Richard Hynes, a pro-
fessor of cancer research at MIT, helped
oversee a landmark 2017 report on the sci-
ence and ethics of human genome editing.
“We set out a long list of criteria,” Hynes
says, “including only changing a defect
to a gene that was common in the popu-
lation. In other words, no enhancements;
just back to normal.”
Critics imagine other ethical quanda-
ries. Parents with undesirable traits might
be coerced by laws—or, more likely, pref-
erential insurance rates—to use the tech-
nologies. Or parents might choose traits in
their children that others might consider
disabilities. “Everyone thinks about parents
eliminating disease or [about] augmenta-
tion, but it’s a big world,” says Hank Greely,
a professor of law at Stanford University
and the author of The End of Sex and the
Future of Human Reproduction. “What if
there are parents who wanted to select for
Tay-Sachs disease? There are plenty of peo-
ple in Silicon Valley who are somewhere on
the spectrum, and some of them will want
children who are neuro-atypical.”
And what of unknown risks? Even if
Saitou, Hayashi, and their peers can prove
that their techniques don’t create imme-
diate genetic abnormalities, how can we
know for sure that children born using IVG
and gene editing won’t get sick later in life,
or that their descendants won’t lack an
important adaptation? Carriers of the gene
for sickle cell, for example, enjoy a protec-
tive advantage against malaria. How can we
know if we are shortsightedly eliminating
a disorder whose genes confer some sort
of protection?
George Daley, the dean of Harvard Med-
ical School, has a simple answer to that
question: We can’t. “There are always
unknowns. No innovative therapy, whether
it is a drug for a disease or something so
bold and disruptive as germ line interven-
tion, can ever remove all possible risk. Fear
of the unknown and unquantifiable risks
shouldn’t absolutely prohibit us from mak-
ing interventions that could have great
benefits. The risks of a genetic, inherited
disease are quantifiable, known, and in
many cases devastating. So we go forward,
accepting the risks.”
Among the current unknowns are the
name and sex of the first child who will be
born using IVG. But somewhere there might
be two people who will become her parents.
They may not know each other yet or the
diiculties with fertility or genetic disease
that will prompt their physician to suggest
IVG and gene editing. But sometime before
the end of the century, their child will have
her picture taken for a birthday profile in
whatever media exists. In the likeness, her
smile, like Louise Brown’s today, will be
radiant with the joy of being here.
0 1 9
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THE VOORHES

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26.04_WIRED_APR_2018_THE_LIFE_ISSUE

By Photographs by
Eva Holland Kamil Bialous

J the point at which medical science has the
Jessica Green was getting impatient.
She was 19 weeks pregnant and waiting for
her ultrasound images at Whitehorse General
Hospital, but it was taking forever. She’d never
had to wait this long before. Her fiancé, Kris
Schneider, had already headed back to work
for the day, and Green wanted to do the same.
She told the receptionist that she would pick
up the images later and headed out. It was
late October in Whitehorse, the capital city
of Canada’s northern Yukon Territory, and
winter was beginning to set in.
The ultrasound technician caught up to her
in the parking lot. Green couldn’t leave, the
tech said. She needed to be admitted, right
away. Green remembers responding with some
sort of instinctive, mulish refusal: “I can’t.”
But she knew her pregnancy was consid-
ered high-risk: She was 37, she’d conceived via
IVF, and she was carrying twins. She followed
the tech inside and headed up to the mater-
nity ward, where she learned that her cervix
was shortening precipitously, a precursor to
labor—it was already down to 1.1 centimeters,
less than half of what it should have been. A
baby’s lungs and guts take a long time to fully
develop in the womb, and her tiny babies still
lacked the abilities to breathe or digest food on
their own. But the barrier between them and
the outside world was fading away.
Within a few days, a doctor performed an
emergency cervical cerclage—efectively, he
sewed her cervix shut—to protect the twins.
That procedure came with serious risks: Both
twins might die. But doing nothing might also
mean losing them, so Green and Schneider
had opted for action. After the surgery, Green
gritted her teeth through a week of strict bed
rest at home, but then pain and heavy bleed-
ing chased her back to the hospital, where
she was admitted and given morphine, fen-
tanyl, and laughing gas while the staf waited
to see if her labor would hold of. When she
began to dilate again, the doctors removed
the cerclage sutures before they could tear
through her cervix. She and Schneider now
Kris Schneider at
home with Owen in
Whitehorse, Canada,
14 months ater the
baby was born.
lived in her hospital room. Contractions, irreg-
ular but powerful, came and went for days.
All hope of the twins reaching full term was
gone. The couple simply hoped to reach what
neonatologists call the threshold of viability:
ability to keep a premature baby alive out-
side the womb.
A full-term human baby can seem help-
less at birth, but in comparison to a preemie
that baby has an impressive toolkit of skills.
Aside from their underdeveloped lungs and
guts, babies born too early don’t yet have the
reflexes or muscular control to suck and swal-
low simultaneously. They are prone to cra-
nial hemorrhage, and sometimes a heart duct
remains open. Their skin is thin and fragile;
the veins glow eerily. They are sensitive to
sound, to light, to touch. Their eyelids may
still be fused shut, and the tiniest preemies
may not yet even have the ability to close a fist
around your finger—that essential early act,
the moment when they take possession of you.
Over several decades, doctors and nurses
have become better at grappling with all of
these obstacles. The threshold still varies
widely depending on a baby’s circumstances
and on the care available immediately at birth.
But advances in drugs, technology, and meth-
ods of care have pushed that line earlier and
earlier, and today there are preemies growing
up, healthy and whole, whose survival would
have been unimaginable a generation ago.
These days, the line between birth and death
generally lies somewhere between 22 and 25
weeks’ gestation. Green and Schneider could
only pray that they would get there.
W
W h i t e h o r s e i s a s ma l l c i t y, h o m e
to roughly 25,000 people, that sits along the
only highway to Alaska. Schneider works for
the post oice, and Green is self-employed
as a massage therapist, acupuncturist, and
osteopath-in-training. The hospital where she
lay bearing through jagged contractions was
not equipped to deal with preemies younger
than 35 weeks. So as they waited and hoped 0 2 3
for her labor to subside, they made plans to
get to Vancouver, to the neonatal intensive
care unit where the very tiniest and sickest
babies in British Columbia and Yukon wind up.
On November 10 one of the amniotic sacs
began to leak—the one containing Baby A,

who lay on the bottom of the uterus. (These
were fraternal twins, so each had their own
placenta and sac.) Green and Schneider were
loaded onto a small plane and flown more
than 1,000 miles south to Vancouver, and in
the early hours of November 11, Green was
admitted to BC Women’s Hospital. Viability
was in sight. They were at roughly 22 weeks—
and, after a hard conversation with their
physicians, they had agreed that the doc-
tors would attempt to resuscitate the twins
if they made it to 23 weeks. The babies’ heart-
beats were still strong. Green went to sleep;
Schneider crashed out on the floor beside her.
A few hours later, Green woke up feeling
that something was wrong. A nurse came in,
took a look, and rushed her to labor and deliv-
ery. The umbilical cord attached to Twin A,
the girl they’d named Maia, had slipped out
0 2 4 of the uterus and into the birth canal. Maia
had no heartbeat. Now doctors had to deliver
her as fast as possible before her movement
through the birth canal triggered labor in
Baby B, the boy they called Owen.
This meant Green had to push, even though
she knew Maia wouldn’t survive. She asked the
doctors to put her under, to let it happen with-
out her participation, but they couldn’t—a
C-section would risk Baby B too. Do it for
Owen, someone said to her.
Maia came out weighing just 12.3 ounces,
minuscule and bruised. The nurses handed
her to Green and she held the little body
against her chest. “I think she’s still alive,”
Green said. But Maia was gone. Hospital staf
dressed her tiny body in tiny baby clothes,
sewn by volunteers. They took her photo,
took casts of her feet—collecting memen-
tos that her parents might spurn now but
want to have later. Green was anesthetized
and her cervix was sewn shut once more.
For 12 more days she remained in the hos-
pital, enduring regular inspections of her
cervix by a pack of doctors who were watch-
ing for signs of infection. Every extra day in
utero could give Owen a better chance at
Jessica Green
and Owen, who so
far has met every
developmental
benchmark for his
corrected age.
life, but if the amniotic sac became infected,
it could take him. How soon should they
induce? How long could they safely wait?
It was another seemingly impossible life-
or-death decision.
On November 22, at about 24 weeks ges-
tation, Green spiked a fever. The next day
Owen was delivered by emergency C-section.
Schneider held Green’s shoulders while the
delivery team worked on the other side of
a raised curtain. They caught a glimpse of
their tiny son, wrapped in plastic to trap his
body heat, before he was wheeled away in
an incubator. At 1.4 pounds, Baby Boy Green
was admitted to the neonatal intensive care
unit at BC Women’s Hospital. He had a 60
percent chance of survival. The NICU would
be his home, and the center of Green and
Schneider’s world, for nearly five months.
N
Neonatology is a relatively young
field. The first incubators for babies were
invented in the 19th century, adapted from
poultry incubators to create a stable and warm
environment intended to simulate the womb.
These early incubators were cumbersome
creations of glass and metal. To fund them,
they were put on public display—with living
preterm babies inside them—at exhibitions
across Europe and North America. Incuba-
tor babies were regular attractions at Coney
Island and occasionally on the Atlantic City
boardwalk throughout the early decades of
the 20th century. A total of 96 preterm babies
in incubators were shown to visitors at the
1939–40 New York World’s Fair. (Eighty-six
of them survived.)
By the 1960s and ’70s, neonatology had
graduated from carnival sideshow to accepted
medical discipline. But the basic nature of
the NICU hadn’t changed that much from the
Coney Island days: A typical nursery held rows
EVA HOLLAND (@evaholland) is a free-
lance writer based in Canada’s Yukon
Territory.
T
 antibiotics for the possible infection he was
born with, and then more for a suspected case
of pneumonia, thought to be caused by his
ventilator. He had a breathing tube down
his throat for 45 days and a feeding tube
threaded through his nose for four months.
He received a steady supply of morphine
to numb the pain of the treatments keep-
ing him alive.
If someone so much as spoke too loudly
near his incubator, his oxygen levels could
drop, setting of alarms from the monitors.
He received seven blood transfusions in his
first two months. “It was just so tenuous,”
Schneider says. Green wondered, in those
early days, if they had made the right deci-
sion for their son. It was an agonizing 22
days before they were allowed to hold him.
The couple moved into Ronald McDon-
ald House, a charity-run residence on
the hospital campus reserved for out-of-
towners whose children faced life-threat-
ening illnesses. Schneider took leave from
his job; Green canceled months of sched-
uled appointments with her clients. Back
home, friends took in their two dogs and
raised more than $12,000 to help them make
up their lost income. Green was as sleep-
deprived as the mother of any other new-
born: waking up repeatedly in the night to
pump her milk and freeze it for when Owen
was strong enough to digest it. She spent her
days sitting beside his incubator, reading
children’s books to him in a whisper, refusing
to allow herself to dwell on anything except
his survival. “I remember walking into the
NICU and making a choice—my feelings of
anger, my feelings of grief, I really tried to
keep them out of the NICU because he was
so sensitive,” she says. “I swear to God that
he could sense the energy you brought in.”
The nursery was kept as quiet as possible,
but Green and Schneider were uncomfort-
ably, intimately aware of the other parents
hovering over other incubators nearby.
Their feelings about those other parents
were complicated. They’ve formed lasting
connections with some, but in the NICU,
envy and sadness and anger mingled with
their solidarity. When another parent’s baby
was having a bad day, its monitors beep-
ing out constant alarms as it struggled to
grow and live, Green and Schneider felt relief
that today was not their bad day—and the
awful certainty that their turn would come
soon enough. On one of the first days, Green
0 2 6 glimpsed twins in side-by-side incubators,
and suddenly anger and jealousy—and the
pain of her loss—shot through her. One day
in late January, a new mom arrived with a
daughter, Bronwyn, born at 28 weeks. To
Green, the baby seemed so much more sta-
ble than Owen. But after nearly 200 days
of treatment in the NICU, Bronwyn died.
T that the most stressful event of having a
Technology is essential to
neonatology, but there’s a critical human side
to the science of saving preemies too. In the
late 1970s, something happened in Bogotá,
Colombia, that would begin to bridge the
divide between the incubator babies and their
parents. A lack of equipment and concern
about the risk of hospital infection led doc-
tors at San Juan de Dios Hospital to send sta-
ble preemies home with their mothers instead
of incubating them. The doctors instructed
the mothers to hold the babies continuously,
bare skin on bare skin, vertically against their
chests, and to feed them only breast milk
whenever possible. When mothers started
doing this, the area’s low survival rates for
larger preterm babies tripled. The close con-
tact seemed, in some ways, to replicate the
womb better than an incubator—at least one in
an underfunded hospital. This practice is now
well known as kangaroo mother care and was
written up in the Lancet in 1985. The paper’s
authors didn’t endorse the home-care option
for babies with access to modern NICUs. “Nev-
ertheless,” they wrote, preemies in a hospital
setting “could benefit from similar emphasis
on education and motivation of mothers and
early skin-to-skin contact.”
Three decades later, while Green and
Schneider adapted to life in the open NICU, an
experiment built in part on the Bogotá break-
through was unfolding in two rooms down the
hall. For the first time in North America, some
new mothers could receive their postpartum
care in the same private room where their
infants received their neonatal care. The same
nurse who checked a baby’s oxygen levels and
drew blood from his tiny arteries would also
be checking his mother’s cesarean incision
site or monitoring her for excessive bleeding.
The program was part of a reimagining
of the entire NICU at BC Women’s. Around
2010, hospital administrators had invited
past patients to consult on the design
for a new building. They gave the former
patients a cardboard model of the hospital
and a handful of Lego figures. One woman
kept moving the mother Lego character
next to the baby. Why, she asked, couldn’t
she just get her care with her baby nearby?
The answer was rote and unsatisfying. It’s
just not done that way. Postpartum is post-
partum, and the NICU is the NICU.
But the idea of private rooms where par-
ents could spend more time with their babies
had been on the administrators’ minds.
“Mothers tell us, and it’s in the literature,
baby in the NICU is being separated from
baby,” says Julie de Salaberry, the direc-
tor of neonatal programs at the hospital.
This was about more than just alleviating
parental distress too. One research paper,
from Sweden in 2010, found that private
NICU rooms reduced babies’ hospital stays
by an average of five days. In fact, plenty of
medical literature now shows that restoring
parent-child connections helps improve the
lives of the tiniest preemies as surely as the
drugs and the tubes and the machines do.
BC Women’s opened the doors of its new
building in late October last year. The new
NICU, made up entirely of private rooms
(including a dozen built for integrated mom-
and-baby care), is intended to safely facili-
tate breastfeeding and skin-to-skin contact,
the most basic human interactions that were
once of-limits to sick babies.
E
E v e n t h o u g h O w e n wa s a t B . C .
Women’s before the new building opened,
skin-to-skin contact was a part of his life as
soon as he was stable enough. In between
the rounds of drugs and tests, he’d spend
hours curled up on Green’s or Schneider’s
THE SPIRIT OF FREEDOM
®
©2018 FCA US LLC. All Rights Reserved. Jeep is a registered trademark of FCA US LLC.
 From augmented reality to gesture controls,
the latest technologies inevitably find their
way to toys. Here are some of the best
teched-out playthings to come out this year.
All make for guaranteed fun, at least until the
batteries run out. —MICHAEL CALORE

1. but few do it with-

Marvel Avengers: out a screen or a
Infinity War Hero book. The Playbits’
Vision Iron Man AR wand lights up and
1 Experience instructs children to
Plunk a smartphone tap the right chips
2 3 into the goggles to answer questions
of Hasbro’s new hel- and complete exer-
met and your tyke cises. When it’s time
assumes the iden- for recess, the chips
tity of Iron Man. function as musical
The accompanying instruments. (Ear-
plastic hand strap plugs not included.)
transforms into $69–99
Tony Stark’s gaunt-
let in the game, fir- 4.
ing bursts of energy, DJI Mavic Air
parrying attacks, This compact drone
and blasting Tha- is controlled not
nos’ drones as they just by an app but
fly around the room also by gestures. A
(or yard) in aug- wave of your young
mented reality. Take pilot’s hand can
4 5 out the phone and make the Mavic Air
it doubles as a Hal- hover, follow them
loween costume. around, or even
$50 snap an epic video
selfie. An onboard
2. collision-avoidance
Roxs 2 system makes the
These palm-sized quadcopter diicult
light-up pods con- to crash, but your
nect wirelessly to kid will figure out
an app that trans- how to do it anyway.
forms them into $799
interactive outdoor
game pieces. Kids 5.
can race to see who Kolibree Magik 26.04_WIRED_APR_2018_THE_LIFE_ISSUE
can tap all of them Turn cleaning teeth
first, or compete to into an AR game
see who can finish with this smart
an obstacle course toothbrush. Prop
without dropping your phone against
one. Whatever the bathroom mir-
they play, they’ll be ror, fire up the selfie
exhausted when camera, and your
it’s time to go back child’s vigorous
inside. $89–139 scrubbing becomes
the sole weapon
3. able to defeat a
Robotix Taco tooth-decay-happy
Playbits goblin. Silly? Yes.
There are plenty But if it gets them
of toys to help to brush more, per-
preschool-age kids haps it is magic.
0 2 8 learn their ABCs, Price TBD
Cashing in on
Kiddie YouTube
 Sharing my daughter on social
media helped me connect with a
cybervillage of support. Now
it’s time to lower the volume.

By
Jamilah Lemieux

On November 7 , 2012 , I took a break

from four months of posting messages about
men and heartbreak—in addition to my usual
commentary on culture, identity, and poli-
tics—to make an announcement.
The closing scenes of a complicated
long-term relationship had resulted in a
pregnancy that deserves a word more com-
prehensive than “unplanned” to describe
it. And to describe my pregnancy as chal-
lenging would be an understatement. But
on March 29, 2013, the denouement came
in the form of a brief, painful labor and, a
day later, in a brief, sweet tweet.
More photos and status updates tagged
#MiniMilah quickly followed, because I
felt right away that the world needed to
know about this magical girl—and she then
became one of the growing number of chil-
dren to be raised firmly in the social media
spotlight. One study suggests that the aver-
age parent posts almost 1,000 images of their
26.04_WIRED_APR_2018_THE_LIFE_ISSUE

child before they turn 5.

With more than 170,000 Twitter followers,
I realize that I’m slightly more visible than
the average oversharing parent. However, I’ve
been telling folks my business on the inter-
net since 2007, starting with MySpace, Blog-
ger, and Facebook, and eventually expanding
to include Twitter, where I routinely share
both mundane and monumental moments.
As a result, I’ve built up a cybervillage of
(beloved) strangers across the globe who’ve
been cheering me on for the majority of my
adult life. Sharing my motherhood journey
with them felt second nature.
The earliest versions of coparenting that
my ex and I were able to summon were all

JAMILAH LEMIEUX (@JamilahLemieux) is

a writer living in New York City. This is her

first piece for WIRED.
0 3 1
 For as long as we’ve
had TVs, videogames,
smartphones, and
tablets, there have
been scientists,
politicians, and parents
worrying about whether
too much screen time
will make kids less
healthy (maybe), more
violent (debatable), and
hopelessly distracted
(Sorry, can you repeat
that?). Here’s a
short history of people
fearing the worst.
—BLANCA MYERS

1951
Anthropologist Earnest
A. Hooton describes TV
as “a visual education
in how to do wrong.”

1954
Fredric Wertham writes,
“I have found that
children from 3 to
4 have learned from
television that killing,
especially shooting, is
that you could be If your friends give one of the established
doing on a screen. you a Like, well, it procedures for coping
But there are also would be bad if you with a problem.”
interactive, explor- didn’t produce
atory things that dopamine. Now, 1977
I don’t think I’m the only parent who you could be doing. what the studies
frets about their kids’ screen time. The Following the release of
My grandson is show is kids who are a videogame called Death
Phineas and Ferb binges. Saturday learning how to play messed up or vulner-
nights playing Uncharted. It’s all turning Race, Gerald Driessen,
chess, and that’s able in real life are a behavioral scientist,
their brains to sausage, right? Devel- something that going to be vulnera-
opmental psychologist Alison Gopnik describes gaming
you can do on a ble on social media. consoles as “definitely
wants us to take a deep breath—and screen—in real life, But mostly kids inter-
focus less on how much kids use tech negative … The person
you have to actually act through social no longer is just a
and more on how kids can use tech to find another person media or through
their advantage. —SARAH FALLON spectator, but now an
to play with you. If texting the same actor in the process of
you have the right way that, in the past, creating violence.”
kinds of apps, you they would have
WIRED: You’ve spo- children interact- can do the same done in other ways.
26.04_WIRED_APR_2018_THE_LIFE_ISSUE

2004
ken about the qual- ing with a screen kind of exploration “Children with higher
ity of screen time while a caregiver that children are You must have weight status played
being more import- is also involved doing in play. He some hard and fast moderate amounts of
ant than quantity, and engaged. Chil- also loves Google rules about screen electronic games,” a
but I still suspect dren learn from that Maps—he wants time though. study in The Journal
that it’s all terrible. kind of interactivity to know where he Using screens at of Adolescence read,
GOPNIK: Think in much the same is and see what’s night disrupts “while children with
of high quality as way that watch- around the corner. sleep—that’s bad. lower weight status
ing a movie with an That’s a good exam- And some friends played either very
adult is better than ple of what you can of mine have a tech- little or a lot.”
watching something do with a screen nology Shabbat:
by themselves. that you couldn’t Everybody in the 2017
really do in real life. family turns of “Social media has
But don’t you think all the screens on been described as
that phones sort of Social media, Friday night. Then, more addictive than
supplant play? though, strikes me on Saturday night, cigarettes and alcohol,”
There are plenty as junk food—like everybody can says Shirley Cramer,
0 3 2 of mindless things dopamine Cheetos. switch back on. chief executive of the
UK-based Royal Society
for Public Health. “It
is no longer possible to
ignore it when talking
about young people’s
mental health issues.”
R E VO L U T I O N
An entirely new class of yacht

PRINCESSYACHTS.COM
0 3 5
SYSTEM ERRORS

By Photographs by
Lauren Murrow Jeff Minton
Vani Suresh, 16
D.tech encourages
its students to tackle
real-world prob-
lems. For Suresh,
that meant finding
a better way to extri-
cate herself from
creepy dates. In
wearable-tech class,
she and her team
developed the Iris
(named after the
messenger of the
Greek gods), a
Bluetooth-enabled
button that attaches
to any item of jew-
elry. When pressed,
the device sends
the wearer’s loca-
tion and a message
to a preselected
group of friends
via an app.

Jared Lin, 17
Lin has always
been what he calls
“a money person.”
At 12, he started
selling Magic: The
Gathering cards—
at a 300 percent
markup. “Their
prices fluctuate,
sort of like stocks,”
he says. Now he’s
interested in cryp-
tocurrencies and
builds Ethereum-
mining computers
at home. “The vola-
tility is far too high
for me to put money
directly into crypto,”
he says. “Hardware
is a much more
stable investment.”
His favorite class
to date? Financial
Literacy.

0 3 7
 K
Ken Montgomery has always nur-
tured star students. One went on to become
President Obama’s deputy chief technology
oicer; another founded a coding school in
Nebraska; still others are Rhodes scholars
and Harvard PhDs. But the English teacher
and debate coach had no idea what he
was doing right—until he started polling
those former students. The secret wasn’t
test prep or more homework, they told
him. It was that Montgomery had encour-
aged them to create. What if, he thought,
he built a whole school around that idea?
Cofounded with fellow educator Nicole
Cerra, Design Tech High School—known as
d.tech—opened in 2014. At first, students
were holed up in a single corridor of Mills
High School in Millbrae, just south of San
Francisco, earning it the nickname “Half-
a-Hallway High”; the next year, d.tech relo-
cated to a former auto body shop in nearby
Burlingame. (The school’s unoicial mascot
is the koi, a fish that’s said to grow to fill any
container.) “For a long time we were consid-
ered a joke school,” junior Vani Suresh says,
“a ‘weird nerd’ school without walls.” That
changed last year, after the Oracle Education
Foundation, the software corporation’s phil-
anthropic arm, ofered the nomads a parcel
of land on its campus in Redwood City and
$43 million to build a permanent home.
D.tech is a free public charter school and
admits about 135 students a year via lottery.
Each day, these Chromebook-clutching teen
techies wander into classes ranging from
music theory to the future of VR and AR, plus
seminars taught by Oracle employees and
other working professionals. Then there’s
the school’s two-story, 8,000-square-foot
Design Realization Garage—picture Ardu-
inos, 3-D printers, laser cutters, and solder-
ing and sawing tools—where students can
explore new tech and hack together proto-
types. “We’re trying to develop creative confi-
dence. Kids don’t just passively receive things;
they actively design them,” Montgomery
says. High school: It’s the ultimate incubator.

LAUREN MURROW (@laurenmurrow) is a

senior editor at wired. She wrote about
tech elites’ escape plans in issue 26.02.
David Boles, 18 Lauren Shannon, 16
As the cofounder of For most high school
d.tech’s First Robot- students, gradua-
ics Competition tion day is a celebra-
team, Boles has tion. For Shannon,
a mere nine weeks it’s a design chal-
to build an 8-foot-tall lenge. She’s one of
obstacle-dodging the core members
robot before it of Senior Send-Of,
faces of against a class tasked with
other high schools’ planning, model-
droids. Thank- ing, and executing
fully, he’s an expe- the school’s inau-
rienced tinkerer. gural ceremony.
Recent inventions When she was a
include a website sophomore, Shan-
that matches stu- non toured the con-
dents with tutors, a struction site for
self-watering planter, d.tech’s new per-
a light-therapy alarm manent campus, sat
clock, and an electric in on meetings with
scooter with a architects, and sug-
brushless DC motor. gested elements
Well, that last one’s to be incorporated
still in development. into the final design.

Elliot Boz, 16 Jaya Reddy, 17

Boz is rarely seen In an incubator-style
without his digital class called Moon-
camera; he fell in shots, Reddy helped
love with photogra- create a VR lab from
phy during a class the ground up. “It
freshman year and was a like a puzzle,
got an after-school really easy and
job taking pictures really fun,” she says.
of dogs for a local Last year she made
pet-accessory com- an Oculus Rift–
pany. (His favor- connected contrap-
ite thing to shoot, tion that dispenses
though, is plants.) whifs of banana
“My dad and I have and strawberry
photography com- while the user plays
petitions, just for Fruit Ninja. Now
fun,” he says. The Reddy is interested
hobby also sparked in using VR tech-
an interest in fashion. nology to create
He started sketch- outdoor-simulating
ing clothing designs, experiences—hik-
then had them 3-D ing, scuba diving—
modeled and digi- for people with
tally rendered. physical disabilities.

0 3 9
0
4
0
”

26.04_WIRED_APR_2018_THE_LIFE_ISSUE
 By Photographs by
Matt Gallagher Daymon Gardner

0
4
3
 branch headquarters marks a change for Fort
Gordon. For the surrounding community too,
with civic leaders hoping to turn Augusta and
its neighboring cities into a national cyberse-
curity hub. Hell, what’s happening with cyber
S might be changing warfare itself.
And the soldiers charged with carrying it
out don’t even carry rifles on missions. Their
minds are their weapons, they say.
Silly? It can sound that way. Accurate? It is.
At any given moment at Fort Gordon,
instructors in khakis are teaching soldiers
Satellite dishes mark the main gate of at every stage of their career—shiny new pri-
Fort Gordon, eggshell white and lasering up at vates, steely-eyed noncoms, cherry lieuten-
the moon. It’s a modest shrine, as these things ants, surly captains. Diferent courses tailored
go. Many military bases put machines of might for diferent ranks, for months at a time, on
on the front porch—tanks or helos or jumbo how to wage war through computer networks
artillery guns—but the dishes fit Fort Gordon in ways both ofensive (disabling enemy net-
just fine. They’re subtle. They’re quiet. works is one potential tactic) and defensive
Inside the gates it’s more of the same. Fort (trying to find vulnerabilities in US military
Gordon sits in a soft Georgian basin, the tra- systems before an adversary can). Meanwhile,
ditional home of the US Army Signal Corps. elsewhere on the base, about 900 cyber oper-
Signal has been around since the Civil War ators who’ve already passed through a form of
and has long been responsible for military this training—70 percent of the Army’s 1,300
communications—flags and torches back in active-duty cyber soldiers—are doing these
the day, radios and cables and mesh networks very things for real.
in the more recent past. Recently, this staple Well. As real as this kind of thing can be.
of warfare started sharing its digs with a new
branch: cyber. Find the right Signal old-timer,
maybe one feeling cranky or deep in their cups
Joining the military as a young person has
been a rite of passage since time immemorial.
See the World. Protect and Defend. Endless war
in a bar along the dark Augusta riverfront, and adds something else to the calculus of service.
they’ll talk candidly about this new branch. An all-volunteer force adds another something
They say it with envy, and sibling afection. else. And drones and computer hacking adds
Still, though. They say it. even yet another something else.
“Damn showboats.” The aimless kid who becomes a stud infan-
Maybe there’s some truth to that; maybe try grunt is a stereotype we know well from
it’s just bureaucrat territorialism. Either way, tales of Americana. Same with the brash over-
what’s happening at the US Army’s new cyber achievers who learn to thrive in the cockpit.
Private First
Class
Alicia Torres
-
Torres scored
high enough on
the aptitude test
administrated to
all new recruits
that she qualified
for cyber.
Warrant Oficer Specialist Second Lieutenant
Edwards Elizabeth Stokes Charles Arvey
- - -
Before joining A native of Pen- Arvey was 6 years
cyber, Edwards sacola, Florida, old on 9/11 when
served two tours Stokes got her the planes struck
in Iraq, making first computer at the Twin Towers
him one of the the age of 7.She and the Pentagon,
many cyber opera- joined the Army so his America
tors with combat to “learn from has always been
experience. the best.” at war.
0 4 4 Torres has no background with computer
Previous Spread Right
But who joins the military to hack computer
networks? What does this new type of war-
fare mean for soldiers, and how does it shape
their training? While we’re at it, how does
this reflect on us all, as citizens of a republic?
Big questions. Messy answers.
So. Through the Fort Gordon gates, past
the Holiday Inn Express, beyond the stark
Signal Towers building, seemingly built
for the Warsaw horizon after World War II.
Hang a left at Domino’s Pizza, then a right
at the barracks bursting with young soldier
angst. There lies a squat red-brick build-
ing. Headquarters, the sign reads. United
stateS Army Cyber School.
Don’t let the plainness of the building fool
you, though. Inside is a laboratory of ideas
and ambitions and a home to the Army’s most
ardent cyber apostles. Young aspirants can be
part of it too. If they’re smart enough. If they’re
creative enough. If they’re ready for physical
training before dawn. Even Uncle Sam’s hack-
ers need to be fit and trim.
A
Alicia Torres has better places to
be. Unlike the other soldiers huddling together
in a cyber classroom, she wasn’t sent out to
meet and greet a visiting journalist. She could
be doing a million other things. Like script-
ing with Python. The 20-year-old from Penn-
sauken, New Jersey, enjoys doing that in her
free time now, even if part of her still considers
programming “nerdy.”
Torres is a private, though, and privates
without sufficient training can’t walk the
cyber school grounds by themselves. Her
battle buddy, Elizabeth Stokes, was tasked
with the meet and greet. They’re the only two
women soldiers in their class, and thus are
attached to each other with invisible string.
So Torres has to be here too. She crosses her
arms and scrunches her forehead and looks
toward the public afairs oicer when I ask
about her journey to the Army.
She’s reluctant at first, but eventually, she
opens up. Her story would be perfect for a
recruiting poster.
programming, which contrasts with most of
her cyber school peers. She just happened to
MATT GALLAGHER (@mattgallagher0) is
a former Army captain and author of the
novel Youngblood.
0 4 3
 crush the Armed Services Vocational Apti-
tude Battery test after high school, and her
score on that exam (which is taken by all new
recruits) qualified her to go into cyber. “Even
my recruiter wasn’t sure what a 17 Charlie
was,” Torres says, using the military occupa-
tional specialty code for cyber soldier. “He said
it came with an enlistment bonus, though.”
Now she’s thriving, inhibitions about becom-
ing a nerd aside. She gets into friendly debates
with Stokes about Linux versus Windows,
about cyber ofensive operations versus defen-
sive operations. She’s not sure her friends from
high school would recognize her.
Stokes came to cyber ops more directly. Her
recruiter also didn’t know what a 17 Charlie
was, but she did. While Torres still has a bit
of teenage wistfulness to her personality,
Stokes is all pragmatism. A 27-year-old native
of Pensacola, Florida, she got her first com-
puter 20 years ago. Some cybersecurity and
programming courses in college focused that
curiosity, and she came to the Army “to learn
from the best,” she says.
Stokes says her friends and family didn’t
understand why she wanted to join the Army.
Pensacola is a Navy town, after all. But Stokes
had a diferent path in mind. This is something
many cyber soldiers have in common—they
want to show they can excel within an institu-
tion. That’s unique when compared to broader
Army culture; the worst thing you can do in
grunt land is to stand out in the vast sea of
camo. Soldiers have to be special to even get
to the cyber school, though. They have to be
special enough to know it too.
As the students tell it, day-to-day life at
the cyber school sounds … well, boring. In
one class I attend, a group of captains give a
presentation on how to deploy a weaponized
USB drive, complete with a live demonstra-
tion during which they insert a routine-look-
ing thumb drive into a routine-looking laptop.
Somewhere between the blinking lights and
vibrations, an electrical current destroys the
computer’s internal components. Later I sit
in on a class conducting a tunneling exercise,
where data is transmitted around the globe
through a series of masked entities, each one
helping to obscure the source of the transmis-
sion (the better to cover one’s digital tracks).
Later, in the parking lot, the captains from
the USB drive demonstration chat with a col-
onel about a “hypothetical”: Russian cyber
operators shutting down trains moving troop
supplies west to east in Ukraine. How would
0 4 6 they do something like that to an enemy
network, but better, quicker? It’s an excited
conversation and, I’m reminded, very much
hypothetical. Then they seem to remember
that I’m a journalist, and that’s the end of that.
During our time together, Stokes reveals
that she’s begun dreaming in code. It’s often
a very specific dream: She has developed a
game that helps people with brain injuries. It
helps them remember what their minds have
lost. She has it all planned out in the dream,
but the details get lost when she wakes up and
tries to write it down.
With Stokes and Torres the only two women
in their class, the question of gender diversity
comes up. Torres mentions a support structure
within cyber land, women helping women and
keeping an eye out for one another. Beyond the
gates of Fort Gordon, Brigadier General Jen-
nifer Buckner is seen as a rising star—indeed,
in February the Pentagon promoted her to a In recent decades, the
number of Americans
new position based in Washington, DC, help- graduating with a
ing direct Army cyber policy. degree in computer
I ask the two new soldiers what they want science has increased—
but not for everyone
to do after the military, whenever that may be. proportionately.
Stokes’ plans don’t stray far from what visits —BLANCA MYERS
her in sleep. “Go to developing countries to
24,557
teach coding and programming,” she says.
“It’s what I have to ofer.”
Torres plans on sticking closer to home. She Computer science
graduates in 1991–92
wants to someday work in software develop- -
ment for Apple, a goal she’s clung to during 29% were women
all the tribulations of training. -
9% were black
Cupertino may have to wait awhile, though. -
Her company commander at Fort Gordon 9% were Asian/Pacific
has recommended she apply to West Point to Islander
-
become an oicer. “Sometimes people think of 4% were Hispanic
the military as a last resort, at least where I’m -
from,” Torres says. “But I think I’m learning 9% were nonwhite women
that it can be for smart people too.”
That’s definitely not something you’d hear
in grunt land. The pride is the same, though. 64,405
Computer science
So is the belief in making a diference for the graduates in 2015–16
better. Squint hard enough, I think, and you -
can forget what these soldiers are learning to 19% were women
-
do here. That when they rattle of terms and 9% were black
courses like Wireshark and Snort and OSI, -
they aren’t debating toothless theoreticals. 13% were Asian/Pacific
Islander
That what they’re learning could cripple a -
nation’s defense capabilities in moments, in 10% were Hispanic
ways an entire infantry brigade could only -
8% were nonwhite women
fantasize about.
I
Infantry soldiers crack jokes about
artillery soldiers being far from the fight.
Artillery soldiers crack jokes about pilots.
Support soldiers, or fobbits in modern par-
lance, get the scorn of everyone for working
safer (albeit critical) operations like logis-
tics and medical support.
With new ways to harness data, farmers collaborate in an effort to learn
from every drop of rain. Evolutions in technology can help them make
smarter decisions and use fewer natural resources, from sky to soil.
Learn how digital tools are used in farming at ModernAg.org
 The more distance a soldier has from the
enemy, the more resentment there will be
from those closer to the action. Cyber sol-
diers and drone pilots are the latest link in this
ever-lengthening chain. They wreak havoc
in networks and rain death from above in
the Forever War, combating enemy terror-
ist cells and enemy-ish nation-states. Then
they go home and ask their kids about alge-
bra. They’ll be able to spend an entire military
career stateside, not once setting foot in a war
zone yet perpetually at war—a distillation of
the strange half-life that US service members
have found themselves living since 9/11.
Go to war. Redeploy home. Go to war again.
Who will be able to control the machinery
version of the Special Forces Creed, that
Redeploy home again. Go to war again.
Cyber soldiers and drone pilots will never
do that. And yet. They do it every day.
How military culture absorbs all this is still
being sorted through. In 2013 then Secretary
of Defense Leon Panetta announced plans
for a Distinguished Warfare Medal, meant to
of daily life : If there’s ever a cyber
recognize “extraordinary achievements that
directly impact on combat operations, but
that do not involve acts of valor or physical
risk that combat entails.” For drone pilots and
cyber operators, essentially. Veterans groups
raised hell, due in part to the order of prece-
dence the proposed medal would receive—
above the Bronze Star with Valor, for one.
Two months later the new medal was
scrapped. That’s light speed in Pentagon time.
The definition of what constitutes real war is
not fixed—it wasn’t too long ago that snipers
were considered cowards by foot soldiers, for
example. Now they’re warrior celebrities.
line needs to be in it.
Perhaps with time cyber soldiers and drone
pilots will be more fully embraced. Fighting
on a new front from the rear is a lot to take in
after millennia of linear battlespace.
And with much of their work classified, they
can’t tell people a whole lot about how they’re
defending our country. Do they inject mal-
ware into enemy networks? Do they employ
false-information-emplacement operations,
like the UK’s MI6 reportedly did with “Oper-
ation Cupcake,” substituting bomb-making
instructions in an online al Qaeda magazine
with cake recipes? Can they disable drones
with “cyber rifles”? All straightforward ques-
tions—gleaned in part from conversations
with experts like Greg Conti, a retired Army
oicer and coauthor of On Cyber: Towards an
Operational Art for Cyber Conflict, and Michael
Sulmeyer, the director of the Harvard Ken-
nedy School’s Cyber Security Project—and
across Fort Gordon all met with a variation
of the same response: They really can’t say.
I ask the new cyber lieutenants and pri-
vates at Fort Gordon about a potential combat
deployment in the future. Like to Afghani-
stan. It’s not mandatory but possible—some
tactical units on the ground do request cyber
assets for their command teams. To a soldier,
they say the right things, about wanting to
do their part, about wanting to go where the
action is. But there’s something missing in
the exchanges. It’s all hypothetical to them.
The war in Afghanistan has always been
there for this generation of soldiers. One of
them, Charles Arvey, a rangy, ardent second
lieutenant, tells me he was 6 on 9/11, and his
America has always been at war. Afghanistan
isn’t going anywhere. It’s indefinite and amor-
phous, the same way 401(k)s and grandchil-
dren are to their peers in the civilian world.
They’ll get to it. Maybe. Someday.
T
There’s a violent smoothness to War-
rant Oicer Marcus Edwards’ steps, shoulders
rolling like spinning tops. The best in the mil-
itary learn how to carry themselves this way
over the course of a career, whatever their
branch. It’s meant to express capability, “I’ll get
it done” and “Do not fuck with me” all at once.
And Edwards is among the very best operators
in cyber. The world isn’t to be reacted to for men
and women like this. It’s to be worked through.
“This is the most elite force the Army has
created in the 21st century,” says Edwards,
who requested I change his first name (but
not his last) because of concerns he might be
doxed or otherwise cyberharassed by adver-
saries. He is 33 and a true believer in the cyber
branch, having been with it from the begin-
ning. He splits his time between executing
live missions and teaching others how to do
that. He’s not an excitable sort—15 years in
uniform will wring that out—but a strange
look comes across his face when asked about
his profession. “Our skills protect and attack
for our country’s interest every day,” he says.
“Can’t get that anywhere else.”
Like other cyber soldiers of rank, Edwards
worked previous jobs in the military. He
enlisted as a cable dog, a network systems
installer and maintainer, responsible for run-
ning commo wires. Two tours in Iraq later, he
switched to military intelligence, where he
served in Hawaii alongside NSA gurus and
government contractors. In 2011 he was volun-
told to report for training to the Army’s then
nascent cyber command, which had aspira-
tions of standing up a schoolhouse and even
a branch. Of the 125 in that group of proto-
cybers, “only five of us made it,” Edwards says,
hinting at the rigors demanded of them.

A native of Hampton, Virginia, he credits
the military for molding him into the man he
is today. His mom worked supply in the Navy, a
single parent with four boys; they didn’t have
a lot growing up. Edwards found his way to
computer programming in school and cred-
its the National Blue Ribbon Schools Program
and the Virginia Air & Space Center for help-
ing shape those interests.
Warrant oicers serve a unique role in mil-
itary units: They’re technical masters who
exist somewhat outside the traditional chain
of command. It’s an enviable position, one
that is hard-earned and comes with a lot of
accountability. According to Major Ty Sum-
mers, the director of the Cyber Leader College
at the school, “Cyber is less hierarchal than
other branches … It’s about who can do the
job. Enlisted, warrant, oicer—all are doing
the same thing.”(Summers, like Edwards,
requested I change his first name but not his
last out of similar concerns about doxing.)
Whoever is the best at solving a particular
problem set gets that problem set.
This operating environment places a lot of
pressure on someone like Edwards, who usu-
ally possesses the most digital battle experi-
ence on a mission team. I press him to share
a bit of the tactics and techniques he’s using
as an operator and teaching as an instructor.
Instead, he tells me he recently got engaged,
and he tells his fiancée that he’s “safeguard-
ing, not keeping secrets” by sanitizing work
talk at home. That’s just the way it has to be,
he says. “Something will come on the news,
and she’ll ask me if it’s true.” Edwards shrugs.
“I can’t tell her any more than I can tell you.
Sometimes I don’t know.”
“But sometimes you do,” I say.
He shrugs again.
After he retires from the military, Edwards
says, he’ll probably work for the government
as a civilian or go into the private sector. The
thrills and daily purpose of digital combat
will be tough to replicate in the civilian world.
Something like the NSA might ofer slivers of
that. Silicon Valley will not.
I ask Edwards what he’d tell someone inter-
ested in joining the cyber ranks. That strange
look sweeps over his face again. I still don’t
know exactly what he does on ops, let alone
how, but it’s clear he lives for it.
“You can tear down someone else’s work
here.” He smiles to himself, perhaps recall-
ing a successful hacking op. Then he remem-
bers he’s talking to a journalist. “Or build on
someone else’s, too. Want to be the best in
that? You need to work for us.”
Todd Boudreau—the deputy commandant
of the cyber school and a retired chief war-
rant oicer—is one of a few diferent people I
interview who compares what’s happening in
cyber to the early Special Forces. The analogy
isn’t meant to compare the mission types but
rather the sense of independence from Big
Army, and the esprit de corps therein. I’m
not quite sure about it, and the Green Berets I
know would object, but what we think doesn’t
matter. There’s Good News to preach, and hard
work to be done. That’s admirable, at least
when it’s coming from people wearing the flag
of your country on their shoulder.
“This is not going to get easier,” Boudreau
says. He means that cyberwarfare isn’t going
anywhere soon. “It’s only going to get harder.”
Boudreau’s words remind me of a passage
from How Everything Became War and the
Military Became Everything, a 2016 book by
former Pentagon oicial Rosa Brooks: “Cyber
Major Summers battles will most likely be about information
-
and control: Who will have access to sensitive
Summers is the
director of the health, personal and financial information …
Cyber Leader who will be able to control the machinery of
College at the
cyber school. daily life: the servers relied upon by the Pen- 0 4 9
tagon and the New York Stock Exchange, the
computers that keep our cars’ brakes from
activating at the wrong time, the software
that runs our household computers?”
Who will be able to control the machinery
of daily life: a terrifying idea. If there’s ever a
 cyber version of the Special Forces Creed—or
even a recruitment poster or a retention pro-
gram—that line needs to be in it. No one at the
cyber school acknowledges the possibility of
a brain drain to Silicon Valley or government
agencies, but it has been raised elsewhere: A
2017 Rand study titled “Retaining the Army’s
Cyber Expertise” found that soldiers who
qualify to be cyber operators “are more likely
than others to remain in the Army for at least
72 months; however, they also appear to be
somewhat less likely to re-enlist.”
The NSA’s reported retention issues, cou-
pled with broader government cybersecurity
recruitment shortcomings, make it seem like
keeping qualified men and women in uniform
would be difficult. Bonuses can only do so
much, and not everyone will share Edwards’
commitment to the missions. That seems just
fine to Boudreau: “Our goal is to figure out
how to incentivize for those we want to keep.
Truth is, we don’t want to keep everybody.” HOW TO … PUB- … GET A
That briefs well. Regardless, no one is more LISH A HIT BOOK FILM DEAL
Millions of young YouTube tutorials
aware than Boudreau that Army cyber will scribes publish fic- are the new film
keep growing, and needs fresh and able minds tion on social apps school. Twenty-
as it does. Fort Gordon is actively expanding. like Wattpad and year-old Bertie
Radish. YA romance Gilbert has been
If current plans hold, by 2028 a new cyber author Beth Reekles releasing short
campus will sprawl across the post, all for published her novel films on YouTube
$907-ish million. The Kissing Booth (450,000-plus sub-
on Wattpad at age scribers) since age
As I leave Fort Gordon for the last time, I 15, then scored a 16. His dedicated
again take in the bleak, isolated Signal Tow- deal with Random fan base caught
ers. It’s really one tower and a nub of a build- House and a 2018 the attention of
Netflix movie adap- digital production
ing next to it, the urban legend being that the tation starring Molly studio New Form,
Army ran out of money before finishing the Ringwald. which mines online
second vertical structure. Built during the platforms for viral
… CLIMB THE BILL- up-and-comers. The
1960s, Signal Towers is a relic of another mili- BOARD CHARTS company funded
tary, another country. When wars were finite. Seventeen-year-old several of Gil-
When the layers between soldier and citizen MC Lil Pump bert’s films. Rocks
emerged from a That Bleed was
weren’t so manifold. When soldiers saw the crew of so-called screened at BFI’s
enemy and the enemy saw back. SoundCloud rap- Future of Film Festi-
Longing for the moral clarity of the Viet- pers by amassing val in 2015.
almost a million fol-
nam War feels foolish, so I stop. lowers on the ser- … START A MAG
Still, I wonder: Is something lost by remov- vice. Last fall his At 16, Evelyn Atieno
26.04_WIRED_APR_2018_THE_LIFE_ISSUE

ing soldiers from witnessing the consequences single “Gucci Gang” used her self-taught
peaked at No. 3 coding, design,
of their actions? How could there not be? War on the Billboard and writing skills
is not glory. Even when just, no matter how Top 100, and he’s to launch Ainity,
just, war is state-sanctioned violence. rumored to be con- a social-justice-
sidering several oriented magazine
Is something gained, though? That’s a much multimillion-dollar written by and for
more diicult question. A darker one too. record deals. teens. Her 400-plus
writers live-tweet
political debates
and solicit readers
for story ideas. That
engagement pays
of: Ainity racks up
more than 500,000
monthly pageviews.

0 5 0
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Other
Not long after I met my boyfriend,
By I put a tracking device on him.
Elizabeth Barber I didn’t quite mean to do that. What I did,
really, was follow him on Strava, the GPS-
powered social app that maps workouts.
Illustration by
I was 23 and a nonexerciser who stayed
Albert Tercero
fit with a precarious regimen of genetics.
My new boyfriend was a talented triathlete
whose values included pain tolerance. So
I bought running shoes and joined Strava.
We were a long-distance couple, separated
by a bland two-hour bus ride, but Strava
0 5 4
was an idyllic eradicator of distance. On it,
I followed the contours of his day, mapped
around his workouts. When we ran together,
he appeared on Strava as my “one other,” in
the app’s language for exercise partners. Over
three years, we bonded over a shared geogra-
phy of Strava routes that he’d named for me.
If that sounds like the modern denigra-
tion of romance incarnate, I don’t disagree.
But back then I was too in love, and too busy
exercising, to see that.
On Strava, I exercised with some 27 mil-
lion other people. I recruited my mom, and
she lovingly left “kudos” under all my runs.
But I suspect most of what we share on social
media is for one person—a deniable missive
to someone we hope will choose us. I put
runs on Strava for him. When I ran at deso-
late hours, faster than yesterday, I hoped he
would think that I was just as worthy as the
other women whose willpower he admired
with kudos. A runner’s workout on Strava,
with a title and photos, is a declaration of
who she is and, maybe, who you should be too.
One morning, lying in bed, I opened Strava
and observed that another one other, a cyclist
whose profile was set to public, had just
burned 2,000 calories with my boyfriend.
I had not yet put on pants.
I was curious, and Strava is a joyless data
bank for the insecure. When The Washington
Post recently reported that US military bases
are visible in the GPS shadows of uniformed
Stravites, I was not shocked. I had performed
equally fastidious forensics on the cyclist’s
Strava maps. Tracing her routes on that anx-
ious morning and days to come, I could see
where she lived, where she drank beer and
got coffee. I knew how many calories she
burned working out, and how often. I knew
when and where and with whom she spent
time (increasingly, my boyfriend).
She appeared to me as a pixelated avatar
of what I thought my boyfriend wanted me
to be, and I was obsessed. My boyfriend was
appalled. “I can’t believe you want to fight
about Strava,” he told me when I asked about
her—and not for the first time.
But we knew we weren’t fighting about
Strava. We just were not the people we hoped
we were when we met. When his new one
other invited him on a weekend bike trip,
I dreaded my inevitable surveillance of its
data, trying to confirm what I already knew.
Then we broke up. And after I watched their
vacation on Strava, I quit the app.
I didn’t need it. Somewhere in the maps—
ours, theirs—I’d lost the one other I’d been on
Strava to impress; I found, though, that I like
myself far better when I run unwatched. My
mom is still on Strava, using the app the way
it was intended and not like someone who’s
unreasonable and in love. Recently she asked
if I’d come back, so we could train together. I
might, but this time I’ll change my settings,
and it will really just be the two of us.
ELIZABETH BARBER (@ElizabethKateri)
is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York.
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0 5 7
SYSTEM ERRORS

By Illustration by
Peter Rubin Albert Tercero
0 5 9

T This isn’t the first time people have started
The gazebo isn’t much to look at,
but it’s big enough to hold the 20 or so people
milling about inside, their names hovering
over their heads. Sasquatch. Pug. Raban. Their
chatter dies down when the organ pipes up,
its familiar B-flat chord announcing Wagner’s
“Bridal Chorus.” A few hundred feet away, near
a large building of in the distance, a handful
of small white blurs begin to appear, vanish,
and then reappear a little closer to the gazebo,
blinking their way along the bridal path.
The first to come forward is a young woman,
her shoulder-length brown hair curling up at
the ends. She’s wearing a peach-colored blouse
and a white skirt. No shoes, though. No legs
either. Here in Rec Room, a popular virtual-re-
ality platform, users are represented by ava-
tars that don’t have all their parts. If you want
to sing “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes,”
you’ll get only about halfway through. So here
come Ice Soul’s head, torso, and hands, float-
ing along together, one leap at a time. With
each leap, a dotted line projects outward from
her midsection to represent where the avatar
will land in digital space. (Locomotion in vir-
tual reality isn’t all that great yet. If you’re at
home with your headset on and game control-
lers in your hands, you can navigate around
Rec Room by using your real-life legs, but
your head is still physically tethered to your
computer. So if you need to cover more than
a few feet, the best solution is to “teleport”—
hold down a trigger on your hand controller,
point that arced dotted line toward where
you want to land, and let go.)
After Ice Soul come the other members of
the wedding party. There’s J2, in a top hat and
tuxedo jacket. There’s Glitter, her red hair
up in two buns, wearing a pink and purple
ensemble. The trickle of bridesmaids and
groomsmen thickens to a stream: Hobobob,
Unlistedgamer, Princess Fuzzy, MrElmo,
Mia, Noble Archer Gib. Everyone in suits or
women’s separates.
Finally, here comes the bride. Priscilla. Pur-
ple flowers in her hair, a pale-yellow belted
dress on, holding a bouquet of flowers. She tele-
ports into the gazebo and stands next to Mark,
in his tuxedo and top hat. He’s abandoned his
usual Rec Room handle—Th!nk!—solemnifying
the occasion by using his real-life first name.
a relationship because of VR; this isn’t even
the first time people have been married there.
(That was in 1994, when a San Francisco couple
got married at CyberMind, a VR arcade where
the bride worked.) But this may be the first time
a couple has met in VR, become close in VR,
and then tied the knot in VR, nurturing along
their relationship from hello to matrimony
with only a nominal amount of real-life contact.
Priscilla Wadsworth is 28. a successful
sports artist, she creates incredibly detailed
pencil drawings of University of Alabama foot-
ball players and sells them over the internet
to diehard Crimson Tide fans. She’s also, in
her own words, a “hermit.” She grew up in
a tiny town in Alabama and now lives in Bir-
mingham, where for the past five years she
has worked from home without venturing out
much. “I just go to the post oice,” she says,
half-joking, when describing her nonvirtual
social life. “As far as, like, having actual people
that I talk to almost every day? No.”
One day in 2016, flush from the sale of a cou-
ple of big drawings, she decided to splurge on
an Oculus Rift headset at Best Buy. And Rec
Room, a free app that she could download and
open from her headset, became one of the first
games she tried. But at first, Priscilla’s new
pastime didn’t go well at all.
The music stops. The officiant, RWC,
stands for a moment, then slumps forward, his
hands dropping and coming to rest next to him,
as if they’d been put aside like a pair of glasses.
“OK, I have to … make a little change here,” he
says in his Southern drawl, the attendants tit-
tering. “I can’t see my computer.” In real life,
he’s put his hand controllers down in order to
peek at his monitor and gather his remarks.
“We are gathered here tonight,” he begins,
“to celebrate the joining of Priscilla Olivia
Wadsworth and Mark Daniel Gebbia in holy
matrimony. Together, we are a group of
important people to them. Our responsibil-
ity is to encourage them, support them, and
lift them up … and, of course, shoot them, steal
their flag, and …” The rest of the sentence is
drowned out by laughter in the gazebo.
Rec Room itself isn’t really a game;
it’s more like a virtual clubhouse built around
social activities, like paintball. Its gathering
spaces are littered with points of casual con-
nection: a basketball hoop, Ping-Pong tables,
lounges with chairs. It has a cartoonish, almost
Lego-ish aesthetic and a wry, upbeat summer-
camp vibe: When you high-five someone else
via your hand controllers, a cloud of confetti
bursts out. According to Nick Fajt, CEO and
cofounder of Rec Room’s parent company,
Against Gravity, the games themselves are
simply social lubricant. “I don’t think we really
think of ourselves as a games company,” he
says. “The area we focus on is creating a com-
munity for people from all walks of life.”
Community, however, wasn’t Priscilla’s
strong suit. At first she didn’t talk much, and
she once left, crying, because she thought
people didn’t like her. But she stuck with it.
Soon she was in Rec Room several nights a
week. She joined a group of 15 or so regulars
who began congregating almost daily. At
home they might keep a drink or some weed
nearby, while inside their headsets they’d
play paintball or another game, then recon-
vene in a private lounge for some drunken
3-D charades and soul-baring.
As time passed, the group’s closeness
spilled over the edges of VR. Regulars con-
gregated in other online spaces, from a Rec
Room–devoted subreddit to a dedicated area
of the chat platform Discord; many of them
followed one another on Instagram using
Rec Room–specific accounts, some of which
show only avatars, never the shy, real people
behind them. “A lot of the people in VR have a
similar social anxiety,” Priscilla says. “I think
that’s why we connect so well.”
One of the people Priscilla connected with
was Mark, a comparatively self-assured mem-
ber of their little group. He’d been self-em-
ployed for the past eight years, running a
collection of search-based websites. When
his mother retired recently, he helped her relo-
cate to a small town outside Seattle. The place
was great for seniors, but it wasn’t so stimu-
lating for a thirtysomething who worked from
home. Cue Rec Room. “This is pretty much my
outlet,” he says, “unless I want to drive two
and a half hours to Seattle and then two and
a half hours back just to go to a club.” Plus, it
was good exercise: Two or three hours a day
ducking and jumping in VR paintball beats
getting on the rowing machine.
On weekend nights, they’d all hang out,
drink, play games, and tell embarrassing
stories about themselves—“like you’re 10
years younger than you actually are,” Mark
PETER RUBIN (@provenself) is an editor
at WIRED. He wrote about virtual reality
metaverses in issue 26.03.
 The virtual wedding reception of Priscilla Wadsworth and Mark Gebbia.
jokes. Priscilla, as it happens, actually was
10 years younger than Mark, 27 to his 37. He
was easygoing, with enough gravitas to coun-
terbalance his silliness, and she was drawn
to the combination. Priscilla developed a
crush on Mark, and he on her, but they never
discussed it.
Instead, Mark ended up taking some time
away from Rec Room. And Priscilla connected
with someone else.
Ben Krieg, a 24 -year-old from ohio,
was a lot like Priscilla. The last time he’d had
a real social circle was in high school. In col-
lege, he was a commuter student, driving 30
or 40 minutes each way to get to his classes,
which made cultivating a social life next to
impossible. Even later, when he started work-
ing, he mostly kept to himself.
After he got an HTC Vive headset for
Christmas, Rec Room changed all that. Ben
fell in with Priscilla’s group and the two of
them became fast friends—texting through-
out the day, hanging out in VR at night. Then
one day last May, he became the first per-
son in the little group of Rec Room friends
to break through the virtual wall; Priscilla
invited him down to visit her in Alabama, a
seven-hour drive. “I figured, hey, I can do that
for a friend,” he says. The visit was charged,
and at one point the two kissed. But that,
they both ultimately decided, was as far as
the romance would go.
A real wedding, in other words.
After the summer ended, Mark
started spending more time in Rec Room, and
his and Priscilla’s conversations took on a dif-
ferent tenor. They recognized themselves in
each other; they talked about their diiculties
connecting with people, their tendencies to
feel self-conscious. Finally, in October, they
decided to meet, and Mark flew to Alabama.
Just in case, he brought an engagement ring
with him. That was a Tuesday; by Wednesday,
they were engaged; two days after that, they
got legally married in a (physical) gazebo on
a hill outside Birmingham, just them and the
oiciant. Then they broke the news to their Rec
Room friends. The next week, they said, Mark
would head back to Washington to pack up his
house so he could move in with Priscilla. While
he was there, they wanted to hold another
ceremony in Rec Room with all their friends,
to be followed by a big, drunken reception. A
“Now,” the officiant says, “Mark and
Priscilla have some vows that they would like
to recite. Mark?”
“Priscilla Olivia Wadsworth,” Mark begins,
“from this day forward I promise to give you
all of my love and never let you feel alone in
life again ...”
Priscilla sniles loudly.
The vows are done, the imaginary
rings exchanged. The happy couple “kisses,”
leaning toward each other. Fir trees dot the
background over their shoulders, the pink
haze of early dusk tinging the sky.
“How do I clean tears from my headset?” a
man asks no one in particular.
“We’ve got some music to play,” the oici-
ant says. “Blitz?”
Of to the side, an avatar turns toward the
oiciant. “Now?” he asks. Then that avatar 0 6 1
slumps forward as, back in Ohio, Ben Krieg—
Blitzkrieg is his handle—takes of his head-
set and cues the music: Kool and the Gang’s
“Celebration.” The happy couple heads down
the path back to the concrete, and everyone
follows in kind.
Effortless towing. Unbridled potential.
WELCOME TO THE ENTIRELY NEW EXPEDITION.
2018 Expedition shown.
We, the people
of the modern rodeo,
know a little something
about horsepower.
 Down the hill from the gazebo,
the reception is in full swing. Priscilla and
Mark manage to get both their hands on a
virtual knife and pull it down through their
three-tiered pink wedding cake—which
promptly disappears, blinking out into the
binary ether.
Someone produces a virtual microphone
and it’s passed around so people can give
speeches; Rec Room’s audio efects give their
voices a slight staticky hiss, as though they’re Ask the internet for antiaging tips and you’ll
speaking through a real PA system. “We call find advice ranging from Goop-y frivolities
to dangerous shams. “Aging has always been
it a game,” MrElmo says of Rec Room, “but a target for charlatans and snake oil sale-
this—this isn’t a game. This is real. This is men,” says John Newman, a geriatrics
something else. I don’t even know. This is … researcher at UC San Francisco and the
Buck Institute for Research on Aging. But as
well, this is love! This is marriage! And I just researchers begin to understand how aging
think that’s amazing.” works at a molecular level, there’s a glint of
“I’m like a borderline mentally ill her- promise—and oodles of hype—in new life-
extension treatments. —GREGORY BARBER
mit,” a guest says, “so coming out for this
has absolutely been incredible. I dunno, as
far as I’m concerned you kinda set history, Metformin VERDICT: It’s a pow-
so congrats.” THE METHOD: Pop erful experiment,
metformin, a com- Newman says, “but
Then it’s Priscilla’s turn. She takes the mon treatment for it’s not yet ready for
microphone in one hand. “I know this isn’t type 2 diabetes. prime time.”
‘real life,’ ” she begins, her other disembod- THE SCIENCE: It
reduces glucose Senolytics
ied hand unconsciously making air quotes, metabolism in the THE METHOD: Use
“but I’ve never had so many true friends. I liver, improving insu- drugs to kill senes-
know that seems silly, because it’s a fucking lin eicency. Diabe- cent cells—those
tes patients treated that have stopped
VR game with these silly little cute avatars, with metformin live dividing due to DNA
but I love each and every one of you.’” longer than those mutations.
Before long, it’s time for the couple’s first without—in one THE SCIENCE: These
study, even outlast- zombified cells
dance. Ben the DJ cues up a track by Late ing nondiabetics. secrete inflamma-
Night Alumni called “Meant to Be.” VERDICT: Promising. tory proteins that
“This is the song I told you about,” Pris- Clinical trials target- can harm nearby
ing age-related dis- tissue.
cilla says to Mark, their avatars gazing at eases are pending. VERDICT: Experi-
each other. “Remember? The one I used to mental drugs, not
cry to while drawing, when I thought I would Young Blood yet in clinical tri-
THE METHOD: Trans- als, could help our
never find the one?” fuse the old with the immune systems
“I remember,” he says. blood of the young. get rid of senescent
Then two dozen people pelt them with THE SCIENCE: cells faster.
Researchers con-
paintballs, green splatters covering the cou- joined the circu- Stem cells
ple as they dance—both of them in their own latory systems of THE METHOD: Repro-
headsets in Washington and Alabama, stand- young and old mice, gram and replace
a process called worn-out stem cells.
26.04_WIRED_APR_2018_THE_LIFE_ISSUE

ing and swaying in front of their computers, parabiosis. It rejuvi- THE SCIENCE: We
2,600 miles apart. nated the tissues of rely on stem cells
the older mice, but to regenerate dam-
the young mice also aged tissue, but they
This story is adapted from Future aged faster. become less func-
Presence, copyright © 2018 by Peter Rubin, tional as we age.
to be published by HarperOne in April. Studies have shown
that injecting young
stem cells into the
hypothalamus can
have life-extending
efects in mice.
VERDICT: We’re not
there yet. Avoid
“stem-cell-based”
topical creams and
dodgy stem-cell-
0 6 4 injection clinics.

The eyes are unwell. Their child-
By hood suppleness is lost. The lenses, as we
Virginia Heffernan log hours on this earth, thicken, stifen, even
calcify. The eyes are no longer windows on
souls. They’re closer to teeth.
Illustration by
To see if your own eyes are hardening,
Giacomo Bagnara
look no further than your phone, which
should require no exertion; you’re probably
already there. Keep peering at your screen,
reading and staring, snubbing life’s third
dimension and natural hues. The first sign
of the eyes’ becoming teeth is the squinting
at phones. Next comes the reflexive extend-
ing of the arm, the impulse to resize letters
into the preschool range. And at last the
buying of drugstore readers.
Modern medicine ofers little apart from
magnifying glasses to treat presbyopia
(from the Greek presbus, meaning “old
man”). But those $3.99 specs will get you
on your feet just fine, which is to say, you
can once again relish your phone without
squinting or arm-stretching. A remedy for
farsightedness evidently succeeds to the
degree that it restores a woman or man
to the comfortable consumption of texts,
email, ecommerce, and social media on a
glazed rectangle of aluminum alloys held
at a standard reading distance of 16 inches.
With reading glasses we live again.
Doesn’t this seem like an unwholesome
loop? The eyes may be unwell, but the pri-
mary object of our eyesight seems corrosive.
We measure our vision against the phone,
all the while suspecting the phone itself is
compromising our ability to see it.
Even if we don’t say out loud that failing
vision has something to do with our vastly
narrowed visual field, our bodies seem to
know what’s up. How convenient, for exam-
ple, that you can turn up a phone’s contrast
and brightness with a few taps. If perception
can’t be improved, objects can be made more
perceivable, right? But then the brightness
seems, like morphine, to produce a need for
more brightness, and you find yourself top-
ping out, hitting the button in vain for more
light only to realize that’s it. You’ve blinded
yourself to the light that was already there.
Having recently, in my forties, gotten
reading glasses, I now find myself having
to choose between reading and being, since
I can’t read without them and I can’t see the
world with them. The glasses date from a
time when reading was much rarer a pas-
time than being; you’d grope for them to see
a book, while relying on your naked eyes for
driving, talking, walking.
But of course now so many of us read
all day long. And I opt to flood my field of
vision with the merry play of pixels and emoji
rather than the less scintillating, brown-gray
“real world.” This means wearing the read-
ing glasses, even on the street, and afect-
ing blindness to everything but my phone.
What might modern vision be today
without the phone as its reason for being? If
you were a nomadic goatherd in the Mongo-
lian grasslands, you might not even consider
presbyopia a pathology. Many nomads carry
cell phones for calls and music, but, except to
play games, they rarely gaze at them. Instead,
they rest their eyes on the ever-moving flock,
alert to vagaries in the animals’ collective con-
figuration and inclinations; but simultane-
ously they soften the vision to wide angle, so
as to detect peripheral anomalies and threats.
On camelback in the wide-open grasslands,
the eyes line easily with the horizon, which
means their eyes take in distance, proximity,
 an unpixelated spectrum, and unsimulated
movement. A panoramic view of the horizon
line roots the beholder in the geometer’s sim-
plest concepts of perspective: foreshortening,
a vanishing point, linearity, and the change-
able shadows cast by the movement of the sun
over and under the horizon line. That third
dimension—depth—is never, ever forgotten
by the nomads. The sun rises and sets on depth.
Depending on your after-hours curricu-
lum in Mongolia (cooking, talking, playing
the fiddle), you might rarely even need to
do what digital moderns never stop doing:
recruit the eye’s ciliary muscle and con-
tract it, releasing tension in the ligaments
that suspend the eye to acutely curve the
lens and train it to a pixelated 1.4-milimeter
letter x on, for instance, a mobile news app.
If you explained to a nomad the failures of
her aging eyes, she might shrug: Who needs
anxious ciliary muscles?
Indeed. And the use of those muscles by
digital moderns gets even more compli-
cated when we encounter our x’s not on
paper—carbon-black ink, like liquid soot,
inscribed on bleached pulpwood—but on
screens. That’s where we come across the
quivering and uncertain symbols that play
across the—surface, is it? Where are they
exactly? Somewhere on or in our devices.
No wonder the eyes are unwell.
E be a function of unbroken concentration on
Every vocation has consequences
for eyesight. Ice fishermen can go snow-
blind. Welders sufer arc eye. Ships’ lookouts
hallucinate. Academics develop myopia.
And texters—call it an avocation—have
blurred vision.   with disdain: narcissistic, withholding,
There are at least two recorded cases of
something called smartphone blindness. The
New England Journal of Medicine notes that
both patients had been reading their phones
in bed, on their sides, faces half-hidden, in
the dark. “We hypothesized that the symp-
toms were due to diferential bleaching of
0 6 6 photo-pigment, with the viewing eye becom-
ing light-adapted.” Diferential bleaching of
the eyes! Fortunately, smartphone blindness
of this kind is transient.
The blanket term for screen-borne eye-
sight problems is computer vision syn-
drome, an unsatisfactory name given to
the blurring, dry eyes, and headaches suf-
fered by the people of the screen. The name
is unsatisfactory because, like many syn-
dromes, it describes a set of phenomena
without situating them in a coherent nar-
rative—medical or otherwise. For con-
trast, arc eye is a burn: Welders get it from
their exposure to bright ultraviolet light.
Snowblindness is caused when corneas are
sunburned by light reflecting of snow. Hal-
lucinations alict lookouts because, as Ish-
mael explains in Moby-Dick, they’re up at
odd hours and alone, parsing the “blend-
ing cadence of waves with thoughts” for
danger, whales, or other vessels; the brain
and eyes are inclined to make meaning and
mirages of undiferentiated land- and sea-
scapes where none exist.
Computer vision syndrome is not nearly as
romantic. The American Optometric Asso-
ciation uses it to describe the discomfort
that people report feeling after looking at
screens for a “prolonged” period of time.
When screens pervade the field of vision
all day, what counts as prolonged? (More-
over, reports of discomfort seem like not
much to predicate a whole syndrome on.)
But the AOA’s treatment of the syndrome
is intriguing. This is the so-called 20-20-
20 rule, which asks that screen people take
a 20-second break to look at something 20
feet away every 20 minutes.
The remedy helps us reverse-engineer the
syndrome. This sufering is thought to be a
function not of blue light or intrusive ads or
bullying and other scourges. It’s thought to
a screen 8 inches to 2 feet from the eyes. The
person sufering eyestrain is taught to look
20 feet away but she might presumably look
at a painting or a wall. Twenty feet, though,
suggests it’s depth she may be thirsty for.
The naming of a syndrome dis-
charges the latest anxiety about screens,
which have always been a source of social
suspicion. People who are glued to screens
to the exclusion of other people are regarded
deceitful, sneaky. This was true even with the
panels that prefigured electronic screens,
including shoji, as well as mirrors and news-
paper broadsheets. The mirror-gazer may
have been the first selfie fanatic, and in the
heyday of mirrors the truly vain had hand-
held mirrors they toted around the way we
carry phones. And hand fans and shoji—for-
get it. The concealing and revealing of faces
allowed by fans and translucent partitions
VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN (@page88) is a con-
tributing editor at wired and the author
of Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art.
suggest the masquerade and deceptions of
social media. An infatuation with screens
can easily slide into a moral failing.
Not long ago a science writer named
Gabriel Popkin began leading tree walks
for city dwellers in Washington, DC, whose
monomaniacal attention to screens had left
them tree-blind. That’s right, tree blind-
ness—and the broader concept of blind-
ness to the natural world—might actually
be the real danger screens pose to vision.
In 2012, Popkin had learned about trees
to cure this blindness in himself and went
from a naif who could barely pick out an oak
tree to an amateur arboriculturist who can
distinguish hundreds of trees. The biggest
living beings in his city suddenly seemed
like friends to him, with features he could
recognize and relish.
Once he could see trees, they became
objects of intense interest to him—more
exhilarating than apps, if you can believe
it. “Take a moment to watch and listen to a
flowering redbud tree full of pollen-drunk
bumblebees,” he has written. “I promise you
won’t be bored.”
If computer vision syndrome has been
invented as a catch-all to express a whole
range of fears, those fears may not be con-
fined to what blue light or too much close-
range texting are doing to the eyesight.
Maybe the syndrome is a broader blindness—
eyes that don’t know how to see and minds
that increasingly don’t know how to recog-
nize nondigital artifacts, especially nature.
Lately, when I pull away from the screen
to stare into the middle distance for a spell,
I take of my glasses. I try to find a tree. If I’m
inside, I open a window; if I’m outside, I will
even approach a tree. I don’t want media-
tion or glass. The trees are still strangers; I
hardly know their names yet, but I’m testing
myself on leaf shapes and shades of green.
All I know so far is that trees are very unlike
screens. They’re a prodigious interface.
Very buggy. When my eyes settle after a
minute or two, I—what’s that expression,
“the scales fell from my eyes”? It’s almost,
at times, like that.

Millennials, we’re assured by
By endless headlines, are the people most
Clive Thompson addicted to their devices. Addled by social
networking, obsessed with taking selfies
and hustling for likes, youngsters can’t put
Illustration by
their damn phones down. Amirite?
Giacomo Bagnara
Nope. That is wrong. The data suggests
that the ones most hooked on their devices
are those graying Gen Xers. Research by
Nielsen, for example, found that Americans
aged 35 to 49 used social media 40 minutes
26.04_WIRED_APR_2018_THE_LIFE_ISSUE
more each week than those aged 18 to 34.
Gen Xers were also more likely than millen-
nials to pull their phones out at the dinner
table. (Baby boomers were even worse!) The
middle-aged spend more time than millen-
nials on every type of device—phone, com-
puter, tablet—and, while they don’t peek at
their phones while driving more than young
people, they do it more than they should.
So: Why can’t middle-aged people put
down their phones? Because the midpoint
of life is when your need to communicate
peaks. The middle-aged are the central node
in their nuclear families, the hub through
which all messaging travels. Sure, people
under 30 may juggle endless Snaps and Ins-
tagram Stories with their friends. But the
CLIVE THOMPSON (@pomeranian99) is a
columnist for wired .
middle-aged are fielding texts and Face-
Times from their teenage kids (hitting them
up with questions about school or relation-
ships) as well as emails, phone calls, and
more texts from their parents, whose health
care they’re often organizing.
“It’s the nature of being middle-
aged—anyone can interrupt you with an
unnecessary question,” says Catherine
Steiner-Adair, a psychologist and author
of The Big Disconnect: Protecting Child-
hood and Family Relationships in the Digital
Age. Example: She was recently on a paint-
ing retreat with a friend in his early fifties
who couldn’t do much painting because he
was fielding a flurry of insurance queries
for his mother.
Worse, there’s work. Middle age is when
many employees ascend to middle manage-
ment—only to discover this requires them
to be pecked to death 24/7 by emails from
underlings, who beg permission, post que-
ries, and distribute ass-covering CC’d email
chains the length of War and Peace. The
middle-aged are the flight-traic control-
lers for corporations, and the work flows,
Niagaran, through their inboxes. Research
by Jennifer J. Deal, a senior research scien-
tist at the Center for Creative Leadership,
found that workers in upper management,
many of whom are older, spend on average 72
hours a week tied to work via umbilical email.
Of course, not all hyperconnectivity is
forced on the middle-aged. Some is purely
social, which Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, the
53-year-old author of The Distraction Addic-
tion, says is a good thing. “At our age, it
gets harder and harder to simply do the
everyday work of maintaining friend-
ships and social ties.” And the olds are just
as Pavlovian as anyone. They’ve turned
the obligation for connection into a vol-
untary, casino-fied habit, glancing at their
phones for ritualistic diversions all day long.
In her research, Steiner-Adair regularly
interviews elementary schoolkids. They
complain a lot about parents who can’t be
pried from their screens. “Parents,” she
sighs, “are the worst.”
0 6 7
By Photographs by
Justin Heckert Shayan Asgharnia
Pat Contri in the studio where he records his two podcasts.

0 6 9

I choking out “I need help.” And, looking at
it was december in san diego, the
palm trees strung with tinsel in Ocean
Beach. Pat Contri shuffled barefoot on
the floor of his game room, black hair wet
from the shower and curling above his eyes.
He was in front of a wall of nearly 1,000
games for the Nintendo Entertainment Sys-
tem, the greatest console ever released;
the wall, floor to ceiling, was amazing to
behold, Contri as small as Ahab in front of
his whale. He read from the spines of gray
plastic cartridges he’d spent two decades
collecting: Spy Hunter, with its Peter Gunn
theme, which he got for Christmas in 1987;
Jaws, which he picked up at a flea market
with his mother in Rahway, New Jersey, a
year or two later; Zelda II, a game he had
his parents order from the Sears catalog in
1988, a game he cried over because it took
forever to arrive.
The wall was both a shrine to his life’s
hobby and the backdrop for his work. For
a decade, Contri has played a character
called Pat the NES Punk for nearly 250,000
viewers on YouTube. Fans recognize him at
the airport, at the gym, at the swap meets,
and he has become not just an expert on
Nintendo but a public face for anyone who
grew up with the NES, anyone who’s worn
a Donkey Kong T-shirt or who still has the
Super Mario Bros. theme song thumping
in their heart.
The Punk is goofier than the real-life Con-
tri—a bit more manic, an exaggeration of his
id. Games are the Punk’s life, and thoughts
of the NES sing him to sleep and then wake
him in sweat. Almost all of his videos, which
run around 10 minutes, focus on the Punk’s
experience with a single NES game. Each is
a combination history lesson and review,
delivered with a narrative voice that lets
Contri (as writer, director, and star) show
of his sense of humor, his knowledge of Nin-
tendo, and occasionally even the depths of
his introspection—about being boxed into
an endless childhood by videogames, about
the inherent sadness of trying to fill a hole
in his life with them.
JUSTIN HECKERT (@JustinHeckert) is a
writer living in Charleston, South Caro-
lina. This is his first feature for wired.
One of Contri’s best videos, a 12-minute
piece from 2013 dedicated to the rare and
expensive NES game The Flintstones: The
Surprise at Dinosaur Peak!, begins with the
Punk rustling awake from a fever dream,
his games: “What am I doing? They’re just
videogames. I’m holding like a thousand
bucks’ worth right in my hands. That could
be going to something useful, something
memorable. Like a vacation! I could go any-
where I want. Scotland. Italy. Tahiti …” And
there he pauses. “I wonder if there’s NES
games in Tahiti.”
It was a bit, mostly, but as Nintendo cele-
brates the 33rd birthday of its historic con-
sole—and as Contri approaches 38—it was
also a sign of the conflict within him. Like
a lot of people who were born in the years
just before and after the launch of the NES,
he is no longer young and not nearly old,
neither new nor vintage, and it seems like
he has started to feel a bit lost in the in-be-
tween. “I don’t know if I want to be 65 years
old talking about retro videogames,” he told
me. “I don’t want that to be the only thing
I talk about forever. I think sometimes, ‘Is
this where my talent begins and ends?’ ” He
says he doesn’t play NES videogames any-
more—except when he’s in character—and
that it’s diferent now: it’s work. He admits
this in resignation, like it’s sacrilege, the
man for whom Nintendo became a career.
“There’s something a little self-deprecat-
ing about the Punk character, and about my
character too,” says James Rolfe, a 37-year-
old godfather of YouTube gamers who plays
a character named the Angry Video Game
Nerd and is a collaborator of Contri’s. “All
these YouTube characters have some kind of
element of sadness to them. Thinking back
to childhood, were we wasting our time with
games? Were we really entertaining our-
selves? Were we really happy?”
C dise and signing his name a hundred times
contri is a 37-year-old man who has
been playing videogames his entire life.
His cousin’s Atari 2600, when he was 4. His
family’s PC-IBM XT. Then he was 7 when his
parents bought him an NES console, and
preadolescent Pat started spending hours
in his family’s rec room in front of a small
Magnavox monitor. Later, in high school,
he played Super Nintendo and then PC
games, and rediscovered the NES while he
was in college. After he graduated, in 2002,
he eventually settled into a job in market
research, working 50-plus hours a week in
Princeton, New Jersey, and living in nearby
North Brunswick. He hated it.
One day in 2006, he came across the Angry
Video Game Nerd’s irascible game reviews,
and the sight of a character drinking beer
and railing about the game Castlevania II:
Simon’s Quest rang out to him. “I saw the
AVGN doing well, but I saw a lot of bad vid-
eos out there too,” Contri says. “I’d watch
them and think, ‘Not only does this person
not know how to play the game, he didn’t
include any history of it.’ At the very least,
I thought I could do better.”
Contri made his first video, six and a half
minutes of him as the Punk playing a cou-
ple of NES baseball games before landing
on the best, Baseball Stars. He chose the
nickname because he thought it had a ring
to it, had an attitude, and, well, women he’d
dated told him he acted like a punk. It also
captured the overpowering feeling he got
when he played the games; the NES made
him happy, and the character was a weird,
happy extension of who Contri really was.
He made his second video a month later,
about The Three Stooges, and then another
one after that. He started pumping out vid-
eos, each loaded with enough humor, per-
sonality, and insider knowledge to set it
apart from everything else online. In 2012,
a few years after leaving New Jersey for San
Diego, he quit his market research job and
started making videos full time.
Today Contri gets flown across the coun-
try up to a dozen times a year to attend
videogame conventions, where he often
arrives sleep-deprived and stressed, carv-
ing a smile in front of his fans. He schleps
suitcases full of NES Punk wristbands and
DVDs across banquet hallways and sits at
a booth wearing a T-shirt and sandals, a
guy with that perpetual five-o’clock shadow
and the foppish hair, selling his merchan-
on NES consoles and controllers and game
cartridges. He earns six figures a year, his
revenue coming from merchandise and book
royalties; from YouTube ads and the spon-
sors of his two podcasts, Not So Common,
which he hosts by himself, and the Com-
pletely Unnecessary Podcast, a show he
Contri’s home
library consists
of nearly 1,000
NES games.
cohosts with a friend named Ian Ferguson;
from the Patreon supporters whose monthly
donations help pay for his content.
As of earlier this year, the NES Punk vid-
eos were the least lucrative and most time-
consuming of all Contri’s ventures. One of
his most recent videos, about a game called
Stadium Events, took him more than 50
hours to create—much of that time spent
researching the mysterious rarity of the
game—and it attracted just over 70,000
views at last count, earning him a little less
than $400. A low return, by any measure,
and he’s started to think more and more
about retiring the character and maybe
doing something else with his time.
“For the last year and a half, I’ve never
really known what he does for fun,” says
Ferguson, who met Contri in 2008. “I can’t
think of one specific hobby aside from exer-
cise that he does that’s completely discon-
nected from work. His work was once his
hobby, and now he’s married to that work.”
Contri insists that he does, in fact, have other
interests: “I like movies. I love the zoo. I like
watching sports on TV. I hate the Patriots,
but who doesn’t?” He’s never been married,
has no kids, and lives alone, unless you count
the Punk. “The Punk is just a character,” he
says. “Sometimes people think it’s really me.
But at some point this will end.”
In the game room where he films the vid-
eos, Contri lingered over the wall of NES
cartridge games he no longer plays for
fun. “I don’t know if they give me a feel-
ing anymore,” he said. “And I don’t know
if I’m still looking for that feeling. Most of
us are well-adjusted adults now.” Maybe
he meant the generation of adults who’d
loved the NES as kids, or the obsessed peo-
ple like him who’d collected the whole North
American library (he keeps three games in
a bank vault), or the really insane people
who would want an ancient, mint-condi-
tion NES holographic cereal box, which he
proudly showed me.
Contri doesn’t know what to do—walk
the Punk into the sunset, or kill the char-
acter off. Nintendo is as popular as ever,
which isn’t making the decision any easier.
The Switch—a Nintendo console designed
for middle-aged people as much as it is for
anyone—has sold more than 14 million units
since it was released last year. Stores spent a
year selling out of the NES and SNES Classic.
And just this past summer, Contri released a
437-page, $60 hardback cofee-table-sized
bible called Ultimate Nintendo: Guide to
the NES Library, 1985–1995, which took
him nearly three years to finish. It includes
reviews of every mainstream NES game
released in the US along with information
and factoids and NES curio history. He wrote
450 of the 800-plus reviews, then compiled
it all before publishing it himself.
It sufocated him but turned into a sur-
prise hit—with two print runs totaling
10,000 copies—thanks in part to his metic-
ulous research and the surge in interest in
retro NES games. It was a big reason why
he was able to buy his house in San Diego,
where Nintendo is on the walls and in the
bedroom, on the floor and on the shelves,
in the beady plastic eyes of the stufed ani-
mals and on his personalized wristbands
and the five-o’clock shadow that his You-
Tube character can never seem to get rid
of. Nintendo forged him and allowed him
the strange bounty of internet fame, not
to mention a ton of crazy stuf he has col-
lected for no other reason than that it prob-
ably made him feel like a kid.
He has already planned a sequel to the
book, a guide for the Super Nintendo library
that he hopes to publish next year. “I am
happy, I think—I’ll definitely be happy, once
I finish the next book,” he says. Contri’s hair
is going a little gray, and he mentions that
maybe the Punk might survive to have totally
white hair—that maybe he could still be
talking about games 30 years from now,
like old men talking about toy train sets in
the corners of convention ballrooms. He has
enough games to make it all last forever. The
Punk, an old guy, hunched over, still collect-
ing, still playing the ancient games, still liv-
ing in a house full of Nintendo.
0 7 1
By Robin Illustration by
Marantz Henig Albert Tercero
H e r e ’s h ow i t c o u l d g o : S o m e day
in the future, it’s routine for every young
woman of a certain age—for argument’s sake,
let’s say 21—to undergo a procedure to snip
of a piece of tissue from one of her ovaries.
Her doctor slices up the tissue into a half-
dozen or so microthin sections; these are
frozen, to be used whenever she’s ready for
a baby. Her ovaries function normally, and
she keeps menstruating and ovulating just as
she has since puberty. But she doesn’t worry
about rushing into baby-making. The time-
table of how her life unfolds need not adhere
to a pesky biological clock.
Later, maybe much later, maybe not for
another 20 years, this woman wants to start a
family. She remembers those strips of ovarian
tissue in deep freeze. Each strip contains
thousands of follicles, the proto-eggs of the
ovary, preserved at their peak. The follicles in
her body have been getting progressively less
robust, but in the lab freezer her proto-eggs
have been in suspended animation, protected
from the degradation of age.
So she goes back to the doctor, who defrosts
one of the strips and implants it in her ovary.
It becomes established there, starts pump-
ing out hormones at the level of a younger
woman, and transforms one follicle each
month into a mature egg. Each menstrual
cycle, the hardy egg of a 21-year-old is depos-
ited into the fallopian tube, where it can be
fertilized. Ideally, one of those youthful eggs
turns into an embryo that embeds itself in the
uterus and grows into a healthy baby. Ideally,
that one strip of ovarian tissue keeps produc-
ing hormones and releasing eggs for years,
long enough for the woman—who might be
45 or even older by the time it’s all done—to
have a couple of children.
If the first implant doesn’t work, or if it
stops working before the woman’s family is
complete, doctors can defrost and implant
another strip. And if she doesn’t need the
strips for childbearing—maybe she decides
not to have children at all, or she gets preg-
nant naturally without needing to take
any strips out of deep freeze—she can use
them for a different purpose: postponing
menopause. As she enters her fifties, this
woman thaws a strip and has it implanted in
her forearm, where it releases estrogen and
other sex hormones in a way that mimics the
feedback loop of a younger woman, in theory
with fewer side efects than with artificial
hormones. She still menstruates, which is
the downside, but she also remains at lower
risk of chronic conditions, like heart disease
and osteoporosis, that usually get worse after
menopause, at least in part because of the
drop in estrogen. In this future, the one-two
punch of nature’s timetable—first making
it harder to have healthy babies after about
age 35, then making it harder to stay healthy
yourself after about age 50—is something
women have finally transcended.
Here’s the reality of where things
stand: At the Center for Human Reproduction in
New York, there’s a room with a boxy machine
that slow-freezes slices of ovarian tissue before
they are transferred to a stubby deep-freeze
tank that bears an uncanny resemblance to
R2-D2. But of the 14 tanks in the room, most con-
tain frozen embryos or frozen eggs or sperm,
not ovarian tissue. That’s because right now,
removing ovarian tissue involves an expensive
surgery requiring a hospital stay. (Infertile men
can have a bit of testicular tissue removed via
a comparatively simple probe-and-snip pro-
cedure; the hope is that a similar procedure
can be developed for women.) Transplanting
the tissue later requires another operation.
Which is all to say, we already do live in a
world where bits of ovarian tissue can be har-
vested, frozen, and then reimplanted later to
make a woman fertile, but it’s harrowing. The
process was developed for young women or
girls with cancer, who face oncological treat-
ments that are certain to make them sterile;
since 2004, about 100 babies have been born
to these women using the technique. In the
view of most researchers and the American
Society of Reproductive Medicine, ovarian
tissue extraction is still too experimental to
recommend for healthy women.
But soon, say experts like Sherman Sil-
ber, director of the Infertility Center of St.
Louis, freezing ovarian tissue could become
the next big form of what’s known as “social
freezing” (or, as it’s called in some waggish
circles, “AGE freezing,” short for “anticipated
gamete exhaustion”)—whereby women try
to prolong their fertility not for a medical
reason but just to give themselves the option
of delayed childbearing. For now, the only
way to pause the biological clock this way is
to freeze one’s eggs, a route taken by some
6,200 women in the US in 2015. But egg freez-
ing is expensive (up to $18,000 per cycle)
and uncertain. Experts calculate that each
egg frozen before age 38 has just a 2 to 12
percent chance of turning into a baby one day.
Egg freezing also requires women to inject
themselves with hormones powerful enough
to produce more than 10 times the normal
number of mature eggs at a time. These hor-
mones can lead to mood swings, nausea, and
abdominal pain; a slight chance of the serious
condition known as ovarian hyperstimulation
syndrome; and an unknown risk of ovarian
or breast cancer down the road.
ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG (@robinhenig) is
a science writer and the author of nine
books, including Pandora’s Baby.
So as women wait longer and longer to
have kids—more than 26,000 women 40 or
older became first-time mothers in 2016, an
increase of nearly 30 percent over 2001—
there’s plenty of incentive for the fertility
industry to figure out how to make ovarian
tissue extraction a better bet than egg freez-
ing. For one thing, it would do away with the
need for multiple rounds of in vitro fertiliza-
tion. If all goes well, Silber says, the thawed
and transplanted tissue will latch on to the
rest of the ovary, become functional within
about four-and-a-half months, and lead to
pregnancy the old-fashioned way.
Roger Gosden, who helped develop the
ovarian tissue-freezing procedure in sheep in
the 1990s, worries that the social freezing of
ovarian tissue will be fraught with the same
hazards and anxieties as egg freezing: “A lot
of commercial pressure and social pressure”
will promote a procedure that most women
end up not even needing—all “at great cost,
great inconvenience, and a little bit of risk.”
It’s also possible that the whole cold-storage
approach to infertility could eventually be
replaced by a better one: turning stem cells
into egg cells, say, whenever a woman is ready
to conceive. (For more on that, see “The End
of Infertility,” page 14.)
But the biggest benefits of socking away
young ovarian tissue may come at the other
end of a woman’s reproductive life cycle. “One
of the really big health challenges of the future
is that we’re getting too old,” says Claus Yding
Andersen, a professor at the Laboratory of
Reproductive Biology at the University Hos-
pital of Copenhagen. “The longer you’re in
menopause, the greater your risk of osteo-
porosis and cardiovascular disease. The very
best thing you can do to reduce those risks is
to have your own menstrual cycles.” However
they go about managing their fertility, women
of the future who wait until their forties to
start having children will probably want to put
of the indignities of an aging body as long as
possible. They will know they’ll need a spring
in their step—not to mention sturdy hearts
and flexible knees—if they’re going to keep
up with those long-awaited kids.
0 7 3
0
7
4
26.04_WIRED_APR_2018_THE_LIFE_ISSUE
26.04_WIRED_APR_2018_THE_LIFE_ISSUE

By Illustration by
Jason Tanz Giacomo Bagnara
i n 1 9 3 3 , t h u p t e n g yat s o , t h e 1 3 t h
Dalai Lama, died at the age of 57. Accord-
ing to Tibetan Buddhist doctrine, the spirit
of a departed Dalai Lama chooses the next
body into which he will be reincarnated. So
when a group of elders noticed that Gyatso’s
head had pivoted from facing south to fac-
ing northeast during the embalming pro-
cess, they took it as an omen. A search party
left Lhasa for the northeastern province of
Amdo, where they found a 2-year-old boy
named Lhamo Thondup. After he successfully
identified Gyatso’s possessions, the search
party proclaimed him the 14th Dalai Lama,
more than four years after Gyatso’s death.
Our quest to find the next Steve Jobs has
not been nearly so inspired.
Jobs’ passing in 2011, like the life that pre-
ceded it, was infused with spiritual fervor.
When he died at 56, mourners around the
world built makeshift shrines outside Apple
stores—an outpouring more suited to a pope
than to a captain of industry. They were a fit-
ting tribute to a man who always conceived
of his mission in quasireligious terms. In
Jobs’ view, he wasn’t just building a busi-
ness, but putting “a dent in the universe.”
As a student of Zen Buddhism, he presented
the first Apple motherboard as proof of his
own enlightenment. “He knew the equations
that most people didn’t know,” his daughter
Lisa told Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson.
“Things led to their opposites.”
In the time since his death, the tech
industry and press has hunted for his next
incarnation. At diferent points, journalists
declared Jack Dorsey, Jef Bezos, Mark Zuck-
erberg, Marissa Mayer, Ethereum cofounder
Vitalik Buterin, Chinese entrepreneur Joe
Chen, and personal-finance-app creator
Angel Rich to be the Next Steve Jobs. Tim
Cook, Jobs’ successor as Apple CEO, cast a
shadow on the entire exercise, calling Jobs
“irreplaceable” in a 2012 interview. It was a
necessary act of expectation-setting from
the new corporate leader, but it was also
true. Jobs’ successors may mimic his skills
as an entrepreneur or designer or marketer.
But how many of them could credibly claim
that their career was driven by an LSD-
inspired urge to put “things back into the
stream of human history and human con-
sciousness as much as I could?” How many
carry themselves with the natural authority
of someone attuned to the mysteries of the
universe? How many are likely to pass from
this earth with an utterance as humble and
profound as Jobs’ “Oh wow”?
If you roll your eyes at such mumbo jumbo
it may be because, in the years since his
death, Jobs’ lofty legacy has come back
down to earth. His toxic personality was
well-established before his death, but the
details that emerged have come to define his
life as much as his creations. That’s proba-
bly partly why Elon Musk, another peren-
nial entrant in the Next Steve Jobs power
rankings, rejects the title, telling Rolling
Stone, “If I was dying and I had a turtleneck
on, with my last dying breath, I would take
the turtleneck of and try to throw it as far
away from my body as possible.”
Conversely, the technologists most eager
to claim Jobs’ mantle are the least inspir-
ing. Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes
dressed in Jobsian black turtlenecks and
cloaked her company’s eforts in Jobsian
secrecy, until her eforts to re-create a Job-
sian “reality distortion field” were exposed
to be simple fraud. When ousted Uber
founder and CEO Travis Kalanick claimed
he was “Steve Jobs-ing it,” he wasn’t refer-
ring to a Joseph Campbell–style episode of
exile that results in humility and self-knowl-
edge, but merely biding his time before he
could force his way back into the company.
Jobs may have had access to equations few
people knew, but these purported acolytes
follow a much more familiar formula, one
that starts with unchecked ego and will to
power and ends in disgrace.
The larger tech industry sufers some of
the same aliction. What was once seen as
an almost mystical endeavor to advance
the species has threatened to devolve into
a series of naked power grabs. The sense of
magic that technologists once evoked has
been sufused with suspicion and fear, as
their creations gobble up a greater share of
our economy, attention, and lives. Some of
this backlash follows the predictable path of
the hype cycle. But some of it comes from a
vacuum left when Jobs died, the feeling that
someone with special knowledge was giving
us something we didn’t know we needed,
granting us powers we didn’t know we had.
That kind of person doesn’t come along on
a schedule; we can’t declare a new one just
because the previous one died.
It’s been more than four years since Jobs
died, but we’re still here, searching for a
leader to show us the way forward.
0 7 7
0 7 9
SYSTEM ERRORS

By Illustration by
Gerald Marzorati Albert Tercero
0 8 1

I ones found in a type of cell called granulo-
“I am a bit concerned about your
telomeres,” the doctor told me, evenly. Telo-
meres are the caplike segments at the ends
of the strands of DNA that make up your
chromosomes—think of the plastic aglets
at the ends of a shoelace—and some of mine,
he could see, were not as long as he would
have liked them to be.
Fifteen years ago, geneticists at the Uni-
versity of Utah published the results of a
small test with the following finding: Peo-
ple older than 60 with short telomeres were
three times more likely to die from heart
disease and eight times more likely to die
from infectious disease. It’s complicated, but
essentially shorter telomeres make it more
diicult for your cells to split and replicate,
which can lead to diseased tissue, which, in
turn, can lead to all manner of health prob-
lems. Other researchers have cautioned that
larger, longitudinal studies are necessary
before telomere length can be firmly estab-
lished as a key indicator of aging. Still, at the
edge of modern medicine, where the doctor
I was seeing, Joseph Raffaele, practices,
the length of your telomeres has become a
key indicator, or what he calls a biomarker,
of how well you’re aging. Rafaele talks of
telomeres as a sort of “biological 401(k)”—
molecular-level security with which to fend
of the health challenges of getting old.
Raffaele hadn’t literally seen those telo-
meres of mine. What he’d seen were the
results of blood work carried out by a lab
called Repeat Diagnostics, in Vancouver,
British Columbia, which has become a leader
in the burgeoning field of telomere diagnos-
tics. Burgeoning because, as Rafaele posits,
“telomeres are the new cholesterol”—by
which he means they are (A) something mea-
surable and understood to have explanatory
powers and (B) something Big Pharma can
aim at in the hope of finding the equivalent
of a statin to make them more robust.
Everyone’s telomeres shorten over time,
and a lot of mine were fine enough, but the
GERALD MARZORATI is a former editor
of The New York Times Magazine and
author of Late to the Ball: A Journey into
Tennis and Aging.
cytes were really short: bottom 10 percent
for my age. Not good, should some serious
disease come calling.
I was, chronologically, about to turn 65, as
the day’s mail—Medicare enrollment forms,
Social Security statements, brochures for
cemetery plots—regularly reminded me. But
Rafaele has staked his practice and his repu-
tation on the belief that an individual’s mus-
cles, organs, and bodily systems tend to age
physiologically at diferent rates. You might
have been born in 1958, and your cardio-
vascular system might be that of a 60-year-
old, but your lungs could be more like those
of a 50-year-old and your immune system
that of someone in their early seventies. Raf-
faele is a practitioner of age-management
medicine, and he assesses several dozen bio-
markers—things like telomeres and arterial
stifness—in order to assess patients and
assign them a diferent so-called Immuno-
Age, CardioAge, TelomerAge, NeuroAge,
CutoAge, and PulmoAge.
In truth, medicine has not yet reached a
consensus on how aging comes about, much
less PulmoAging. Growing old is one of the
most complex biological processes. The mys-
tery of how it works has, if anything, only
grown more elusive as our sense of the phys-
ical self extends to include our genes, our
microbiomes, our stresses. Moreover, Rafa-
ele’s embrace of biomarkers for aging is not
universally accepted. The National Institute
on Aging concluded, after 10 years of trying
to establish a set of such biomarkers, that
none of them could be scientifically validated.
Nonetheless, there are thousands of age-
management practitioners worldwide.
Raffaele’s own practice licenses its Physio-
Age technology and protocols to scores of
physicians. He and other age-management
physicians are experimenters, and their
patients—who tend to be aluent, as out-
of-pocket costs can run to more than $5,000
a year—are willing to experiment along
with them. Raffaele doesn’t promise that
his patients will live longer, necessarily—
that’s a big ask—but he suggests they could
live out their last years better, spending less
time immobile, pained, and befogged.
I wanted this, for sure, but I was also seek-
ing something else: to better understand
my aging identity, not only in terms of my
mind’s involutions and attachments but no
less crucially through the corporeal expres-
sions of my organs, muscles, systems, and
cells. This side of age-management medi-
cine draws on the tools of molecular diag-
nostics, imaging, and data analytics. What
has been my embodied life arc? Who am I,
deep inside? And why?
The length of certain telomeres, Rafaele
explained, not only tends to correlate with
the healthiness of various organ systems; it
“gives a history of all the assaults a person
has been subject to over the course of her
lifetime.” Hearing this, my mind drifted to
the blockage from my stomach to my intes-
tines that nearly killed me as a 6-week-old, as
my mother regularly reminded me until her
death two years ago; and then moved on to
scarlet fever, which, when I contracted it as
a 7-year-old, kept me quarantined for nearly
two months and thus, in its way, determined
what I would devote my life to: reading. Such
are my memories. Were those short telo-
meres molecular memories?
It turns out that biological self-knowledge
is not easy even with a trail of biomarkers.
Telomere shortening is often a result of
chronic or acute inflammation, research
suggests, but my inflammation was lower
than average, according to another test Raf-
faele had analyzed. Stress? Not a problem—
at least now, in semiretirement. My cortisol
level (another lab test) was “optimal.” Still,
when my data was analyzed in Rafaele’s sys-
tem, I had the ImmunoAge of a 71-year-old.
“I’m going to say it’s genetic,” Rafaele told
me. Despite the eforts I made to eat right
and exercise, my disease-fending self was
old before its time.
R
Raffaele, 58, was trained as an inter-
nist. He was practicing in New Hampshire in
the 1990s when his parents began showing
signs of Alzheimer’s, and he was struck by
how little he could do for them. Could there
be preventive care with regard to aging?
Since then Rafaele has become one of the
more outspoken proponents of evaluating
biomarkers for physiological age. He was
spurred, he said, by a remark from Robert
Butler, the founding director of the National
Institute on Aging and, until his death in
2010, arguably the country’s most prominent
aging expert. Butler pointed out to Rafaele
that conventional medicine had established
multiple ways of measuring vital signs, like
blood pressure, and setting them against
baselines of a broader public. What, Butler
wanted to know, was Rafaele using to deter-
mine a valid baseline? How did he know his
therapies were working? “I went searching
for the biomarkers of aging,” Rafaele says.
Biomarkers themselves are nothing new
in medicine. When a series of tests over time
reveals a rapidly rising presence of prostate-
specific antigen in a man’s blood, it’s a valid
indicator that he may be developing pros-
tate cancer. But aging is far less specific
than prostate cancer. And the search for
its biomarkers is in its infancy, with no gen-
erally agreed upon number of biomarkers
or standards for measurement among the
practitioners of age-management medicine.
Rafaele’s system is proprietary and thus
can’t be scrutinized, but he will say that he
draws on large databases of patients who
have taken his baseline exam, along with
larger databases provided by the compa-
nies that do the blood testing and whose
machines he uses for scanning. He also mon-
itors the change over time in biomarkers
he assesses. If my telomeres were to be no
shorter 10 years from now, for instance, then
they’d no longer be much of a concern.
My exam at Rafaele’s oice began with a
pretty typical form on which I filled in my
medical history and recorded my diet and
exercise habits. Next, I sat one morning for
an hour at home, taking a series of neurolog-
ical tests on my laptop: the CNS Vital Signs
tests, which evaluate the main areas of cog-
nitive function by taxing them relentlessly
for 20 minutes; the Stroop test, which mea-
sures reaction time; and the Symbol Digit
Coding test, to test the aging of the frontal
lobes of the brain.
A week or so later, I showed up at the oices
on Central Park South in New York: small
but elegant, with walls of pale bamboo and
a certain hush. I was the only patient there.
Rafaele was of at a conference. I was led to
a small room, where I was seated in a recliner
and a technician drew eight full vials and a
half-dozen half-vials of blood. It took a while.
Then, after measuring my height and weight
and taking my blood pressure, the technician
walked me from one machine to the next,
scanning, among other things, my carotid
and other arteries (with an ultrasound imag-
ing gadget) and obtaining a snapshot of my
body fat and muscle distribution with an
InBody body-composition-analysis device. It
was painless and done in 20 minutes. It was,
too, all but completely lacking in those small
but psychically significant reassurances we
expect from a physical examination. If this
is the physical of the future, we are going to
have to accustom ourselves to the indifer-
ent graze of whirring, chirping machines.
R But who we are, physically, is a signifi-
Raffaele shook my hand when we
met, a month after the oice visit. Then he
settled behind his desk and powered up
a touchscreen computer. No lab coat, no
stethoscope dangling from his neck: He wore
a trim suit with a lavender tie and looked a
good deal younger than 58.
There was good news as he walked me
through his analysis. I’d entered my sixties
training to become a serious senior ten-
nis player, so it didn’t surprise me that my
resting heart rate was “athletic,” my arter-
ies were clear of plaque, and my resulting
CardioAge was 43. My NeuroAge (process-
ing speed) was “younger” than my chrono-
logical age, too.
But the short telomeres in my granulo-
cytes cast a shadow. And then my PulmoAge
turned out to be … 81! Really? I ran around a
tennis court and regularly did interval sprints.
Spirometry, which measures how much and
how quickly you exhale, told a diferent story,
however. Rafaele didn’t seem too worried.
I had a small rib cage, which meant smaller
lungs, he said. “Keep up the interval training.”
My overall PhysioAge, as he computed it,
was 61. “You’re in good shape,” he said. But
there was room for improvement. I needed
to keep up the exercise and healthy diet.
I should take vitamin D-3, he advised, to
bolster my immune system. I might also
consider human-growth-hormone therapy.
“Hormone optimization,” as Rafaele put it,
plays an important role in his practice. Raf-
faele himself has for 20 years been taking
HGH, testosterone, thyroid hormone, and
DHEA. There have been warnings about side
efects of hormone therapies—from muscle
and joint pain to the exacerbation of cardiac
problems—but research to gauge the long-
term benefits or risks of such therapies has
been inconclusive so far.
S o , B e i n g 6 1 P h ys i oAg e - w i s e : Wa s
it any diferent than being 65? It wasn’t. I
did start to worry about the telomeres and
my immune system. I’ve been surprised at
how many of my friends seem to know about
telomeres and seem concerned when I men-
tion my shortened ones. Telomeres, in that
sense, are the new cholesterol. I worried,
too, that all this testing could be seen as a
supreme act of vanity: A guy in good shape
for his age dropping thousands of dollars
on tests out of curiosity while much of his
cohort nationwide struggles with hyperten-
sion and diseases like diabetes.
cant measure of our identity. And I suspect
that science will reveal this more exactingly
and profoundly in the years to come. Cicero
thought that the body’s decline over time
was a blessing in its way, leaving more time
for learning and reflection by those truer
aspects of ourselves, the mind and soul. That
view is being challenged. The health of the
mind (science doesn’t speak to the soul) may
well depend to no small extent on genes and
molecules in your gut that Cicero could not
have imagined the existence of.
As those molecules become more measur-
able, and as the meaning behind their signals
becomes clearer, it’s worth considering just
how much self-knowledge we want. Do you
want to know about your own shortened telo-
meres? Or worse, about some gene mutation,
say, that suggests you have a better than even
chance of developing an untreatable disease?
If you’re like me, you want to know every-
thing: To comprehend is to live. The smalling
down on the path to death is a diminishment
that’s never been easy to navigate. It could
be made less physically challenging by the
kind of diagnostics and treatment Rafaele
and others like him are working toward. But
knowing yourself, never uncomplicated, is
likely to get no less fraught. Just deeper.
0 8 3
 YURI HASEGAWA
When Dennis Berk-
holtz’s parents
moved to a retire-
ment home in
2004, he worried
they’d get bored.
“People were just
playing bingo,” he
recalls. But a cou-
ple of years later,
Nintendo released
the Wii, and Berk-
holtz—a former
Olympic handball
player and coach—
saw an opportu-
nity. With $120,000
from investors,
he launched the
National Senior
League for Wii
Bowling. Today,
some 1,400 players
on 280 teams com-
pete against rivals
in contests nation-
wide. It’s become
so serious that one
of Berkholtz’s main
challenges is polic-
ing rule-bending
at the highest levels.
(Occasionally, play-
ers fudge scores.)
But this year’s
Super Elite winners
had a clean victory:
The Wii Warriors
from Walnut Village
in Anaheim, Califor-
nia, dominated their
division. Lori Myers
and Elizabeth
Fink are two of the
team’s star bowlers.
—MALLORY PICKETT

0 8 4 Elizabeth Fink, 90 Lori Myers, 86

- -
“I used to be in a regular league with other housewives, “My husband is handicapped, and I bowl when he’s having
but the balls got heavier and the bowling alleys a nap. It took me a couple years before I got my
disappeared. I hardly expected to ever play videogames. first 300 game. They came and took pictures, and they
But Wii bowling is easy. It gets me up on my feet. As announced it at our happy hour at the Red Chair Lounge.
time goes on, you lose a lot of things, and when you My main tip is that you have to remember,first of all,
get to be my age you’re about ready to quit. But I to relax. Just don’t be in a hurry, and make sure you
don’t like to quit.” line up how you want. And have fun. It’s your time.”
 In 1889 , at a meeting of the Société
By
de Biologie of Paris, a physiologist named
Katrina Karkazis
Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard described
the results of an experiment he had recently
performed on himself. He had painstakingly
Illustration by
Giacomo Bagnara
mixed an elixir of blood, semen, water, and
26.04_WIRED_APR_2018_THE_LIFE_ISSUE
“juice extracted from a testicle, crushed
immediately after it has been taken from
a dog or a guinea-pig,” and then injected
the fluid into his arms or legs 10 times over
a three-week period. His goal, he told the
audience, was to see if he could reverse
some of “the most troublesome miseries of
advanced life.”
Brown-Séquard, who was in his seven-
ties, had a shiny pate, a halo of snow-white
hair, a neat beard, and bags under his eyes—
not unlike the Travelocity gnome. He had
been a distinguished and prolific researcher
but found himself hobbled by old age. His
experiments, however, produced “a radical
change.” Just one day after the first injec-
tion, he reported increased physical stamina,
“facility of intellectual labour,” and a mark-
edly longer “jet of urine.” The biggest change
he observed was in his “power of defecation.”
The benefits of the therapy lasted, Brown-
Séquard said, for a month—though he could
not confirm whether it was the dog or guinea
pig tissue that had given the elixir its potency.
Though his experimentation took place
before scientists had isolated the hormone
testosterone, Brown-Séquard was laying the
groundwork for an idea that is still in force
today: that testicular tissue contains the
substance responsible for a man’s strength
and virility. Possibly for masculinity itself.
In the decades that followed, researchers
tried other dramatic and crude techniques
to similarly rejuvenate adult men—includ-
ing implanting chimpanzee testicles in their
groins or injecting testicular matter from
goats, rams, or boars into their abdomens.
The results were published in top medical
journals and then reported in newspapers,
yielding waves of enthusiastic adopters.
In 1935 the synthesis of testosterone
streamlined the delivery system for what
KATRINA KARKAZIS is coauthor of
T: The Unauthorized Biography, to be
published by Harvard University Press.
 came to be seen as the active ingredient in
male vitality. No further need for goats, in
other words. Avenues for research and com-
mercial opportunities multiplied briskly.
Testosterone injections were widely touted
as a remedy for male menopause, or “andro-
pause”—a condition supposedly marked by
loss of sexual vigor, fatigue, and trouble con-
centrating. In 1945 a book called The Male
Hormone peddled testosterone as “magic far
beyond the merely sexual. It boosts muscle
power. It banishes mental fatigue. It eases
heart pain. It even restores the sanity of men
in middle life.” Hopeful men flooded doctors’
waiting rooms. Numerous scientists set out to
debunk the supposed wonder powers of the
hormone, but their voices did little to curtail
the hype. Instead, the industry dwindled for a
time in part due to manufacturing problems.
Then in 1995, the US Food and Drug Admin-
istration approved a testosterone patch, and
the modern era of T—as the hormone is now
colloquially known—kicked in.
Today, people can take testosterone orally,
nasally, intramuscularly, or even transbuc-
cally (through the gums), via drops, creams,
sprays, injections, and pills. Oicially, T is
approved only for use in men with “low tes-
tosterone levels in conjunction with an asso-
ciated medical condition,” such as genetic
irregularities or side effects from chemo-
therapy. Few men have such conditions.
Yet sales from testosterone prescriptions,
most of them for middle-aged guys, rose
12-fold between 2000 and 2011, fueling a
multibillion-dollar industry. The hormone’s
powers—actual or ascribed—are in unprec-
edented demand.
Testosterone is important for well-being.
Both men and women need it for heart, brain,
and liver function, among other things. Used
as an anabolic steroid, it stimulates muscle
growth—hence T’s popularity with body-
builders, who take massive doses. And it’s
true that not having enough of it can be bad
for you. But what T does for a person depends
on their age, their body’s history with tes-
tosterone, the number of hormone recep-
tors they have, the dosage, and other factors.
Still, the industry continues to push the
nebulous concept of “low T” as the central
problem haunting men. One Bayer ad asks:
“Over 40? Have you lost your lust for life?”
T, the ad assures, can help. Outside the realm
of advertising, the writer Andrew Sullivan—
who began testosterone replacement in the
0 8 6 late ’90s for low T levels related to HIV—has
written multiple paeans to the hormone.
“The Big T,” he wrote in a New York Times
Magazine cover story in 2000, “correlates
with energy, self-confidence, competitive-
ness, tenacity, strength, and sexual drive.”
By 2002, the National Institute on Aging
and the National Cancer Institute began to
express worries about the skyrocketing num-
ber of men using testosterone. There was,
after all, woefully insuicient evidence to
conclude much of anything about whether it
actually improved libido, vitality, or cogni-
tion—never mind what dangers it could pose.
So researchers set about designing the
Testosterone Trials: double-blind, random-
ized, placebo-controlled clinical trials—the
gold standard in medicine. They went look-
ing for thousands of men over 65 with low T
and at least one of its supposed symptoms.
When the first findings came out in Febru-
ary 2016, one thing stood out from the start:
Of the more than 51,000 men who had been
screened, fewer than 15 percent had testos-
terone levels low enough to be enrolled, even
after the researchers relaxed their testoster-
one threshold. The widely held idea that low T
is rife among older men seemed to be a myth.
All told, the studies found that T did not
improve men’s physical function or vital-
ity. Nor did it help with age-related mem-
ory impairment. It did help with anemia
and bone mineral density. It increased sex-
ual desire and activity, but the effect was
modest; men were better of using Cialis or
Viagra. The most worrisome findings came
from a study on cardiovascular risk: In men
with certain risk factors, T accelerated cor-
onary atherosclerosis, possibly increasing
their chance of heart attack.
Assessing the studies in JAMA, endocri-
nologist David J. Handelsman underlined
how little evidence there was to support
popular claims of T’s powers. And yet, he
observed, “rejuvenation fantasies thrive
on hope without needing facts.” Shortly
after Brown-Séquard’s self-experiment in
1889, an editorial in what would become The
New England Journal of Medicine warned
of a “silly season” that was liable to follow.
26.04_WIRED_APR_2018_THE_LIFE_ISSUE
There’s nothing inherently silly about want-
ing to preserve health and vitality into old
age. But the history of T offers a caution-
ary tale: Where rejuvenation is concerned,
many of the ideas that hold the most allure
are simply folklore.
By Illustration by
David Ewing Duncan Albert Tercero

G In writing the book, Church hopes to
George Church towers over most
people. He has the long, gray beard of a
wizard from Middle-earth, and his life’s
work—poking and prodding DNA and delv-
ing into the secrets of life—isn’t all that far
removed from a world where deep magic
is real. The 63-year-old geneticist presides
over one of the largest and best-funded
academic biology labs in the world, head-
quartered on the second floor of the massive
glass and steel New Research Building at
Harvard Medical School. He also lends his
name as an adviser or supporter to doz-
ens of projects, consortiums, conferences,
spinouts, and startups that share a mission
to push the outer edge of everything, from
biorobotics to bringing back the woolly
mammoth. And on a steamy August morn-
ing last summer, he wants to talk to me
about the outer edge of my life.
Church is one of the leaders of an initia-
tive called the Genome Project-Write, or
GP-Write, which is organizing the eforts
of hundreds of scientists around the world
who are working to synthesize the DNA of
a variety of organisms. The group is still
debating how far to go in synthesizing
human DNA, but Church—standing in his
oice in a rumpled sport coat, behind the
slender lectern he uses as a desk—says his
lab has already made its own decision on
the matter: “We want to synthesize modi-
fied versions of all the genes in the human
genome in the next few years.”
His plan is to design and build long chains
of human DNA, not solely by cutting and
pasting small fixes—a now-routine practice,
thanks to recent technologies like Crispr
that let scientists edit DNA cheaply and
easily—but by rewriting critical stretches
of chromosomes that can then be stitched
together with a naturally occurring
genome. If they succeed, it will be a breath-
taking leap in ambition and complexity
from the genomes of bacteria and yeast
that scientists up until now have worked
to synthesize. “What we’re planning to do
is far beyond Crispr,” Church says. “It’s
the diference between editing a book and
writing one.”
bend the human narrative to his will. By
replacing select nucleotides—the ACGTs
of life, which are scattered throughout the
chromosomes—and changing, say, a T to an
A or a C to a G in a process called recoding,
Church envisions being able to make cells
resistant to viruses. “Like HIV and hepatitis
B,” he says.
“And the common cold?” I ask.
He nods yes, adding that they’ve already
recoded bacteria to be virus-resistant. “It’s
in a paper we published in 2016,” he says.
Church and others who are working to
synthesize human DNA have created their
own efort within GP-Write—the Human
Genome Project-Write, or HGP-Write—and
its prospects for success have biologists
abuzz over the potential for treating dis-
eases and for creating bioengineered cells
and possibly even organs. Critics, though,
are scratching their heads over the techni-
cal challenges, high costs, and practicality.
Francis Collins, director of the National
Institutes of Health, acknowledges that
synthesizing a full human genome is fea-
sible, but he doesn’t quite see the point.
“I think it’s probably within the range of
possibility, given enough time and money,”
he says, “but why would you want to do
that? Technologies like Crispr are so much
more accessible right now.”
There are also the ethics of using a pow-
erful new technology to muck around with
life’s basic coding. Theoretically, scien-
tists could one day manufacture genomes,
human or otherwise, almost as easily as
writing code on a computer, transforming
digital DNA on someone’s laptop into living
cells of, say, Homo sapiens. Mindful of the
controversy, Church and his HGP-Write
colleagues insist that minting people is
not their goal, though the sheer audacity
of making genome-scale changes to human
DNA is enough to cause controversy. “Peo-
ple get upset if you put a gene from another
species into something you eat,” says Stan-
ford bioethicist and legal scholar Henry
DAVID EWING DUNCAN (@duncande) is a
longtime contributor to wired.
Greely. “Now we’re talking about a thorough
rewriting of life? Hairs will stand on end.
Hackles will be raised.”
Raised hackles or not, Church and his
team are forging ahead. “We want to start
with a human Y,” he says, referring to the
male sex chromosome, which he explains
has the fewest genes of a person’s 23
chromosomes and is thus easier to build.
And he doesn’t want to synthesize just any
Y chromosome. He and his team want to
use the Y chromosome sequence from an
actual person’s genome: mine.
“Can you do that?” I stammer.
“Of course we can—with your permis-
sion,” he says, reminding me that it would
be easy to tap into my genome, since it was
stored digitally in his lab’s computers as
part of an efort he launched in 2005 called
the Personal Genome Project. (Disclosure:
I’ve reported on Church for more than a
decade, and he serves as one of 17 unpaid
advisers to a small conference series I run
called Arc Fusion.) The PGP has enlisted
thousands of individuals to contribute their
complete genomes to a public database
open to researchers and everyone else, and
I had donated my genome to the efort.
With my permission and a few clicks on
his keyboard, Church can easily pull up
a digital blueprint of my Y chromosome.
Then scientists in his lab could build a syn-
thetic replica, only with a diference: They
would recode my sequence to be resistant
to viruses. And if they’re successful—and if
they recoded the rest of my chromosomes
and inserted them into a human cell, both
huge ifs—they could theoretically implant
these “corrected” cells inside my body,
where they would hopefully multiply,
change how my body functions, and lower
my risk for viral infection.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
For now, Church merely wants to recode
and synthesize my Y chromosome. “It’ll be
a little bit of you,” he tells me, “that we’ll
keep in a freezer once we’re finished.” An
optimized version of me that could one day
be thawed out, in a dozen or a hundred or a
thousand years. By then, Church explains,
scientists might be able to further manip-
ulate my genome. They could make me
stronger or faster or maybe even smarter.
They could possibly build an entirely new
version of me. Who knows what will be
feasible in the future?

S and waited, but nothing happened. It was
S y n t h e t i c b i o l o g y, a f i e l d d e d i -
be coming for another generation.”
cated to understanding and reengineer-
ing the basic building blocks of life, has its
not creating human babies,” says
roots in the early 1970s, when a team led
by Stanford biochemist Paul Berg made
key discoveries about how to cut and paste
Andrew Hessel. “ That work will
short DNA sequences from one organism
(everything from bacteria to humans) into
“ I want to reiterate that we’re
another (usually a bacterium). This prac-
tice allowed scientists to use a microbe’s
cell machinery to crank out proteins that in
some cases became blockbuster drugs like
Epogen, now commonly used to boost red-
blood-cell production for those with anemia
or on dialysis—or, um, in the Tour de France.
Larger-scale synthetic biology began to
take hold in the early 2000s, when scientists
began to synthesize complete viruses. In
2010, a team at the J. Craig Venter Institute
created the first synthetic, self-replicating
bacterial cell. But nothing so far has
approached the ambitions of GP-Write or
HGP-Write, which take their names from the
original Human Genome Project, the mas-
sive endeavor that sequenced the 3 billion
pairs of letters making up a human genome
at a cost of $2.7 billion to US taxpayers. (A
second, private efort led by geneticist Craig
Venter was completed for significantly less
money.) “We are looking at HGP-Write as the
bookend” to the Human Genome Project,
says geneticist Andrew Hessel, one of the
founders of GP-Write and HGP-Write and a
former researcher in the life-science unit of
software giant Autodesk.
It was Hessel, a lean 54-year-old with
a short, prickly beard, who first told me
about this new human genome project three
years ago when I visited him in his small,
funky cottage near the Russian River in
California’s Sonoma County. Sipping red
wine around a wood stove on a foggy night,
Hessel talked about how he began his career
in the late 1990s at Amgen analyzing data
from Venter’s private human genome efort.
“Even as we were finishing HGP-Read,” he
says, using his and his colleagues’ shorthand
for the original Human Genome Project,
“I was looking forward to seeing how we
could start making things. Then I waited
a failure of imagination. The technology
had reached a certain point, but no one was
moving on it.” He watched as Crispr and
other gene-editing techniques emerged,
but they didn’t satisfy him.
In 2015, Hessel got more serious about a
“write” project and asked Church to help
lead the efforts that became GP-Write
(and HGP-Write). Church insisted they
also enlist another prominent synthetic
biologist, New York University’s Jef Boeke,
as co-leader. The aims of the group range
from facilitating the development of faster
and cheaper technologies to developing an
ethical framework for synthesizing life.
They also have a ready answer to the ques-
tion posed by Francis Collins and others
about synthesizing human genomes—why
do it? Hessel, Church, and company talk
about the potential for large, genome-wide
changes that could be used to develop viral-
resistant cells , synthetic organs, and new
drugs. They draw the line, however, at the
prospect of activating a synthetic genome
in germ-line cells that could alter the genes
we pass down to our kids. “We’re not cre-
ating human babies—we’re just writing
genomes,” Hessel insists. “The real work
to make a synthetic baby will be coming
for another generation.”
Last May, GP-Write held its first public
meeting at the New York Genome Center.
The two-day gathering attracted 250 scien-
tists, ethicists, lawyers, educators, citizen
scientists, artists, policymakers, and com-
panies from 10 countries, including China,
Japan, Britain, Canada, Singapore, and the
United States. It featured sessions such as
“Isothermal Amplification Array to Extend
Synthetic Gene Sequence” and “Anticipating
and Understanding Governance Systems.”
The conference featured presentations
about pilot projects that the organization 0 8 9
was considering or endorsing. For instance,
Columbia University’s Harris Wang wants
to bioengineer mammalian cells that can
become nutrient factories churning out the
critical amino acids and vitamins we other-
wise have to consume through food. Another
 project, presented by June Medford of Colo-
rado State University, aims to reengineer the
genomes of plants so they can filter water
or detect chemicals. At the meeting, she
showed a slide of an airport gate encircled
by explosive-detecting shrubbery.
The GP-Write movement had its latest big
breakthrough last year, when Boeke’s lab
at NYU announced it had fully synthesized
six of the 16 chromosomes that make up
the genome of baker’s yeast. Boeke plans
to finish all 16 chromosomes by the end of
this year. “We’re setting out to untangle,
streamline, and reorganize yeast’s genetic
blueprint,” he says. “Once we’ve synthe-
sized all 16 chromosomes, we plan to create
a functioning yeast cell.”
That will be a remarkable accomplish-
ment, but given that yeast has only about
one-quarter as many genes as people do, it’s
still not anything close to the complexity
of synthesizing all or even part of a human
genome. The longest of the 16 synthesized
chromosomes in Boeke’s yeast genome will
us someone different altogether.
have to wonder whether new and
measure around 1 million base pairs—base
pairs being the doubling-up of genetic let-
improved genomes would make
With large-scale recoding, you
ters into pairs that run along each strand of
DNA’s double helix, like steps in a ladder.
The Y chromosome comes in at 59 million
base pairs, and that’s among the shortest
of a human’s 23 chromosomes. Some scien-
tists have estimated that writing an entire
human genome, all 3 billion base pairs,
could cost upwards of $3 billion, which is
not only prohibitively expensive but proba-
bly unnecessary. “We don’t need to rewrite
everything” to make serious changes to the
chromosome, Church explains. “Just those
parts that are important.”
I … and so on. Hysolli explains that, rather
In 2002 , as part of wired’s effort
to explain and humanize the newfangled
technology of genomic sequencing, I was
one of the first people to be genetically
sequenced. Back then, my genomic “read”
seemed highly personal, claiming to reveal
secrets about my health buried deep in my
DNA. As part of my reporting, a San Diego–
based company named Sequenom tested me
for several hundred DNA markers associated
with disease risk factors, ranging from Alz-
heimer’s and hypertension to some forms of
cancer. For instance, Sequenom’s scientists
found a mutation on my sixth chromosome
that was later found to be associated with
a slightly higher risk of heart attack. Like
a lot of people who’ve had their genomes
sequenced through services like 23andMe,
I mentally stored this information under
“good to know.” Fifteen years (and zero
heart attacks) later, as I contemplated my
own personal HGP-Write project, I won-
dered how it would feel to know that a little
piece of me was being partially copied and
recoded to be new and improved.
After meeting with Church last summer, I
sat down with his team in a conference room
at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically
Inspired Engineering, a glass and steel mar-
vel situated behind the Church lab’s main
building. The team included four research-
ers and 32-year-old Albanian postdoc Eriona
Hysolli. With dark, braided hair and a seri-
ous demeanor, Hysolli walked me through
how they’ll build my Y chromosome.
Gene synthesis, Hysolli says, starts with
the researchers looking up a subject’s digi-
tal genetic sequence on a computer. On a
glowing screen she shows me a segment of
my sequence, which looks like this:
CGG CGA AGC TCT TCC TTC CTT
TGC ACT GAA AGC TGT AAC TCT
AAG TAT CAG TGT GAA ACG GGA
GAA AAC AGT AAA GGC AAC GTC
CAG GAT CGA GTG AAG CGA CCC
ATG AAC GCA TTC ATC GTG TGG
TCT CGC GAT CAG CGG CGC AAG
ATG GCT CTA GAG AAT CCC CGA
than synthesize every nucleotide in my Y
chromosome, Church’s team will focus on
discrete genetic units, called codons, that
determine what kind of amino acids (and,
eventually, proteins) are produced by a cell.
Each codon is made up of three nucleotides
(ATG, for example, or TCC), and by swap-
ping out certain nucleotides in the codons,
Hysolli and her team hope to make genome-
wide changes that would make a cell resis-
tant to viruses. Once the targeted codons
have been recoded, Hysolli will send this
genetic blueprint to a company, Integrated
DNA Technologies, which creates small,
custom-made segments of actual DNA called
oligonucleotides, or oligos. IDT will then
freeze-dry the oligos and mail them back to
Hysolli. She and her researchers will thaw
out the oligos and connect them into lon-
ger and longer sequences, with each new
segment bringing them one step closer to
a completed chromosome.
That’s the plan, anyway, and it will take
up to a year to complete the process. In the
meantime, I ask Hysolli to provide a less
ambitious demonstration of how writing
DNA works. At first, she is reluctant to do
something that she considers easy (for
her). But she soon agrees, and we choose
a segment of DNA on my sixth chromosome
that contains the mutation revealed by my
earlier genetic tests—the one that’s asso-
ciated with a modest risk of heart attack.
To create a new and improved version of
this gene fragment, Hysolli corrects the
risky mutation on her computer. She also
recodes this morsel of DNA to be resistant
to viruses, just for good measure. Hysolli
then orders the recoded DNA fragment
from IDT, which arrives several days later.
Once they receive the fragment, the
researchers clone it and drop it into the
cytoplasm of E. coli, a well-known bacte-
rium. Geneticists frequently do this to take
advantage of E. coli’s rapid rate of repro-
duction. After several days, the E. coli have
churned out enough of my altered chromo-
some that Hysolli sends me a picture of the
bacteria in a petri dish containing these tiny
bits of me. Not that I can actually see the
nano-size flecks. But I can view a splatter-
ing of green glowing blobs inside the cell.
The blobs are produced by a “fluorescent
reporter gene,” taken from a jellyfish, that
is routinely used by scientists to tag genes
in this way. The smudgy, brown-green soup
of microbes speckled with glowing dots is a
long way from being a recognizable version
of me, but it did make me squirm a bit to
think that one day I might be looking at a
more complete version of my full genome
in a petri dish, all gussied up.
The final step in creating this synthetic
mini-me is to swap the repaired gene
into cells to be stored. Not just any cells,
though—scientists use my white blood cells
to make what are called induced pluripotent
stem cells, meaning that they can grow into
any cell in the body. (This bioengineering
is done by a Madison, Wisconsin, company
called Cellular Dynamics International,
which creates stem cells for pharmaceutical
and academic outfits.) Someday these cells
could be injected into my body in the hope
of changing the way my body works, but
right now, “getting edited cells in the body
is super challenging,” Hysolli says. “For
many tissues, you can inject them directly
and wait to see if a small percentage survive
and thrive. Or you can inject blood stem
cells intravenously and see if they home in
on the bone marrow or the thymus.” Until
that technology matures, these doctored
cells of mine will be frozen and stored, to
be accessed by me or perhaps someone
else in the future.
Church cautions that the technology
behind genome-scale synthetic biology
remains nascent, diicult, and expensive.
GP-Write has yet to raise significant funds,
though individual labs like Church and
Boeke’s have raised money from govern-
ment agencies such as the National Science
Foundation and Darpa, the Pentagon’s R&D
arm. For now, I’m not holding my breath
that I’ll get my recoded Y chromosome—or
the tiny fix that Hysolli made on my chro-
mosome six—implanted in me anytime
soon. But they’ll be sitting there in the deep
freeze should the raft of ethical, technical,
and safety issues ever get worked out.
I wonder, though, how this primal code
that makes me who I am, for better or worse,
might one day be used. I’m all for using
the tech to develop new drugs or to make
genome-wide DNA programming tweaks
that might prevent diseases, if it’s safe and
has no unintended negative efects—a really
big if. But if we push beyond the therapeutic
barrier, I wonder how I’ll feel if I or my chil-
dren are enhanced to be smarter or stronger.
Again, if it’s safe, and if it actually works, I
suspect many people would be eager for
the upgrade, though you have to wonder
whether such new and improved genomes—
whether we use genome-scale recoding or
other technologies like Crispr—would make
us someone diferent altogether.
How this will play out in future years and
decades is anyone’s guess. But the tools are
being forged right now that might make
it possible to do far more than add a few
improvements, says bioengineer Pam Silver
of Harvard: “The driver is your imagina-
tion.” She is part of the GP-Write project
that is setting out to reengineer DNA to
make amino acids that humans must oth-
erwise consume through food. Her notion
was echoed by geneticist Charles Cantor,
a professor emeritus from Boston Univer-
sity who helped facilitate my original DNA
“read” back in 2002 at Sequenom. Cantor
thinks that scientists and ethicists are
actually being too timid. “When I think of
writing genomes,” he says, “I like to think
of the diferent genres people could write.
Personally, I like fiction—coming up with
totally novel genomes, like making people
who are engineered to get their energy from
photosynthesis, or a plant that can walk.”
The fact that mainstream researchers are
seriously thinking about cells that resist
viruses and plants that might walk around
makes it all the more critical that scien-
tists like Church, Hessel, and Boeke—and
younger researchers like Hysolli—publicly
talk about all of this, and also spearhead
groups like GP-Write to keep everything
transparent and governed by standards
as often as possible. “I think it’s reassuring
to the public that scientists are thinking
about this, that they aren’t just of doing
mad-scientist kinds of stuf,” says Nicole
Lockhart, a program director at the NIH’s
Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications
Research Program. Or as Hessel frames
it: “We may not be able to stop bad guys
from abusing this technology, but given
that this technology is coming one way or
another, it’s always better to have this out
in the open as much as we can.”
During one of my final visits to her lab,
I ask Hysolli what chromosome they will
try next, once they’ve finished synthesiz-
ing my Y.
“We’re not sure yet,” she says. Perhaps
one of the other small chromosomes, like
21 or 22. Church is encouraging her and her
team to go ahead and try the X chromosome.
“That may be a bit much right now,”
Hysolli says, given that it has more than
10 times the number of genes and is much
longer than the Y.
I gingerly ask her whose sequence they
will use for these and other chromosomes
to create the rest of their recoded synthetic
human genome.
“We could use yours,” she says, ofering
the barest hint of a smile before turning
back to her work.
0 9 1
Social media is designed by the young, for
the young. Snapchat’s swipe-every-which-
way interface? Baling to anyone who didn’t
grow up with a smartphone. As sight and
motor skills weaken, all that pinching and
tapping gets harder, cutting people of from
social media at a time when they can be
more vulnerable to loneliness. But research-
ers have ideas for how to fix this, and they
helped us build a tablet that’s optimized for,
well, all of us as we age. —ELLEN AIRHART

Physical Contacts prints fade, and

The average arthritis makes
80-year-old corre- certain gestures
sponds with about more difficult.
seven people a Senior-specific
month—so why tablets should
not make those feature both
contacts superac- physical buttons
cessible? That’s and the option to
the idea behind use a stylus [3]
a prototype from and/or attachable
Georgia Tech, keyboard.
which has physical,
removable tabs for Super Size
friends and family Bigger is better.
members [1]. Just “It’s more forgiv-
pull the flap to call, ing of random
video chat, or send gestures,” says
messages. Chris Langston,
an accessibility
Clear researcher at
Notifications Facebook. This
A bright light [2] tablet has a roomy
illuminates the tab 13-inch screen,
of the person just preset to large
contacted, so text (experts sug-
users can keep gest a 14-point
track of in-progress font) with a bold,
conversations. even typeface (like
Arial, Futura, or
Real Buttons Helvetica).
Touchscreens
don’t always work Bold Color
for older people: Pastel blues
Drier skin can fail and yellows trip
to register, finger- up older eyes; a
more age-proof
color palette con-
sists of bright,
bold reds and
greens. And the
contrast adjust-
ment bar shouldn’t
be buried in Set-
tings—make it a
physical button on
0 9 2 the tablet [4].
 The number of seniors
in the US grows by more
than a million every
year. Finally, there
are apps for that.
These services were
designed with older
folks in mind.
—ELLEN AIRHART

MEDISAFE
Blood pressure meds?
Check. Aspirin? Taken.
Clear Iconography declines. That’s Medisafe Pill Reminder
“Icons should why researchers keeps track of pill
have analogs in the at USC’s Leon- regimens, and family
real world,” says ard Davis School members can see if
Elizabeth Mynatt, of Gerontology everything’s checked
director of Georgia recommend sim- off each day. (Free)
Tech’s Institute for plifying naviga-
People and Tech- tion. Creating a OURTIME
nology. A “wall” on new social media Senior swipers can
Facebook serves a account, for browse romantic pros-
diferent function instance, should pects and message with
than it does in only require filling matches. Says satis-
real life, and that’s out information fied customer Elaine
confusing. Here, on a single page. Evans: “It’s a wonder-
sending a direct ful way to spend time,
message to a Onscreen Help cruising through the
friend is as simple Tech companies are handsome men.”
as clicking the notorious for their ($12 for six months)
letter icon [5] in hard-to-find help
the bottom row. lines, and it’s almost GOGOGRANDPARENT
never a real person Instead of booting
Easy Charging on the other end. up Lyft every time,
A simple drop-in Here, a large but- simply call this
cradle doubles ton [6], permanently number and press 1
as a wireless displayed, provides for a pickup at home.
charging station, a phone number Real-life operators
with an indicator and email address are available too.
that clearly shows for a representa- (19 cents per minute)
when a charge is tive, along with an
26.04_WIRED_APR_2018_THE_LIFE_ISSUE

in progress. option to exchange MAGNIFIER

real-time messages. Once the magnifying
Minimal Screens glass is activated on
Having to tap Text-to-Speech, your new iPhone, just
through multiple Speech-to-Text triple-tap the Home
screens gets All text can be read button to embiggen
harder as memory aloud [7], and every everything from des-
video features cap- sert menus to this
tions. Actually, this tiny type. (Free)
should be avail-
able on all devices, SILVERNEST
always. “If you Want to monetize
design for older your kid’s old room?
adults,” Georgia Screen potential
Tech’s Mynatt says, housemates using a
“you have some- simple interface tar-
thing that works geted at empty nesters.
across the board.” ($30 for 90 days)
An

By
Hayley Campbell

Photographs by
Spencer Lowell 0 9 5

T terrible. The human body, liquefied, smells
The Resomator stands monolithic
in the corner of a room on the ground floor
of a building at UCLA. It’s as sterile as a hos-
pital in here, but every patient is already
dead. This is the penultimate stage of their
time under the care of Dean Fisher, director
of the Donated Body Program at the UCLA
David Gefen School of Medicine. After dis-
section, bodies are wheeled in under crisp
sheets for disposal in Fisher’s alkaline hydro-
lysis machine, which turns them into liquid
and pure white bone. Later, their air-dried
bones will be pulverized and scattered of
the coast by nearby Camp Pendleton, the
Marine Corps base, where they will float
and then disperse, because pure calcium
phosphate dissolves very slowly. From a
Coast Guard helicopter, it looks like drug
lords flushing their stash.
The machine is mid-cycle, emitting a
low hum like a lawnmower several gardens
away. It’s a rectangular box as big as a van,
and its stainless steel panels neatly hide
pipes, a panel of flashing lights and fuses,
and the cylindrical tank that holds the body.
All that’s visible from the outside is a touch-
screen and four lit-up buttons: three green,
one red. Bodies enter through the same kind
of circular steel door that Britain’s defense
ministry uses on nuclear submarines.
Fisher explains what’s happening inside
the high-pressure chamber: Potassium
hydroxide is being mixed with water heated
to 302 degrees Fahrenheit. A biochemical
reaction is taking place, and the flesh is dis-
solving of the bones. In the course of about
four hours, the strong alkaline base breaks
down everything but the skeleton into the
original components that built it: sugar,
salts, peptides, and amino acids. DNA unzips
into its nucleobases—cytosine, guanine, ade-
nine, thymine. The body becomes a sterile
0 9 6 watery liquid that looks like weak tea. The
liquid shoots through a pipe into a holding
tank in the opposite corner of the room,
where it will cool, reach an acceptable pH,
and be released down the drain.
Fisher, gray-haired and beaming in light-
green scrubs, says I can step outside if it all
gets to be too much, but it’s not actually that
like steamed clams.
C grows. “Our goal is that, in 10 or 20 years, the
cremation and burial, the most
common ways that bodies are disposed of
after death, haven’t fundamentally changed
in quite some time. The modern act of
embalming, popularized during the Amer-
ican Civil War, is a physically violent one in
which blood goes down the drain, untreated,
after being pushed out by embalming fluid
pumped through the vascular system. Full
of dyed-pink carcinogenic formaldehyde
and other chemicals, the body is put in the
ground, where its decomposition is delayed,
but not entirely so. The chemicals seep out
as the corpse putrefies, along with any drugs
that were present at the time of death. In
the US alone, more than 800,000 gallons
of embalming fluid are buried every year.
In 2015, the popularity of cremation frac-
tionally outpaced burial in the US for the first
time in history—but few ask what it entails.
They don’t know that an hour into the pro-
cess, a crematory operator will open the door
and use a rake to hook the skeleton by the ribs
and move it around to ensure the whole body
is touched by flame. They don’t know that,
despite the best eforts of crematory oper-
ators, bone dust catches in the bricks of the
retort (the chamber in which the deceased
is burned); cross-contamination of bodies
is inevitable. Instead of chemicals leaking
out into the soil, they end up in the clouds.
Alkaline hydrolysis avoids all that. It was
conceived in the mid-’90s to solve Albany
Medical College’s problem of research rab-
bit disposal—the bodies were radioactive
and therefore could not be burned or buried
afordably—and in 2003 Minnesota became
the first US state to allow its use on human
HAYLEY CAMPBELL is a frequent con-
tributor to wired uk, where an earlier
version of this piece first appeared.
remains. (The business of body disposal
is highly regulated at the state level, and
authorities are generally wary of novelty.)
In the years since, a growing number of inde-
pendent funeral homes have added alkaline
hydrolysis to their list of services, and last
October, California became one of a dozen or
so states to legalize it. Jack Ingraham, CEO
of Qico, a San Diego startup that’s joined the
two established players in the field—the UK’s
Resomation (creator of Fisher’s machine)
and Bio-Response Solutions in Indiana—
expects Utah to be next, with more states
to follow as awareness spreads and demand
term ‘cremation’ will be thought of entirely
as a water-based process,” he says.
One obstacle to wider-spread adoption:
Big Funeral needs to back it, and according
to Fisher, who was a funeral director before
working in body donation, industry leaders
have been reluctant to ofer it for a simple
reason: “Money,” he says. “The big corpora-
tions—Service Corporation International,
Carriage, Stewart Enterprises—have set
up billion-dollar models to sell you a cas-
ket, give you a ride to the cemetery in that
hearse, sell you the cemetery plot, and put
up the marker.” Alkaline hydrolysis doesn’t
require any of that.
B
Back at UCLA, a muffled dual-tone
alarm sounds in a cupboard. Fisher opens it to
show me a tiny implantable defibrillator, the
batteries of which have been running down
for years. “It’s been through the machine and
the battery’s still working. Crazy, isn’t it?”
On a small blue towel, below buckets of
teeth and fillings (teeth are separated from
bones—metal fillings aren’t biodegradable
and could break the cremulator in which
the bones are ground into powder), is a col-
lection of metal hip joints, valves, stents
that propped open the chambers of hearts,
pins, plates: things that remain on the tray
after the flesh around them has disappeared.
The process is gentle enough to render a
hernia mesh as new as the day the surgeon
implanted it, but strong enough to bleach the
color out of glass eyes and fake fingernails.
Fisher motions to the array of pacemakers
he’s collected. Aside from the few he’s saved,
he has all the metal recycled. The money he
gets from the refiners goes toward an annual
memorial service for all donor patients as
well as the servicing of the machine; he says
COLOPHON
it ends up paying for its own upkeep. He flips AGE-RELATED CRISES THAT
a pacemaker over and holds it in front of my HELPED GET THIS ISSUE OUT:
face. “If you look at all this, you can still read
Misspelling the word “awkward” in the fifth-
the label. You can’t put these in a crematory. grade spelling bee: Akward!; having to do
the math when asked how old you are; find-
You have to cut them out.” ing out your coworker’s dad is younger
In a crematory retort, prosthetics melt than you; Marge Piercy’s “Something to
Look Forward To”; banking on Buffy reruns
or burn or, in the case of a pacemaker’s and Weezer to drown out a quarter-life cri-
lithium-ion battery, explode. Titanium sis; gum recession; dealing with pressure
about changing your last name; starting
ball-and-socket hip joints don’t come out up yoga again—and realizing yoga is a lot
harder when you are 20 years older; being
polished like a pristine mirror as they do in super proud when fraudsters try to scam
Fisher’s cupboard, they come out battered your mom with the “grandparent scam” but
she befuddles them because she is a jour-
with carbon. The silicon breast implant nalist (and grandma) who wrote about the
that Fisher jiggles in his hand (“We call grandparent scam; having to Google the
verb “stan”; kid’s first pimple; male-pattern
them jellyfish”) has already spent a good baldness in your twenties; getting mail from
few years inside a woman and four hours AARP; when your age says you owe your
nieces and nephews red envelopes for
inside the machine, but would melt like gum Lunar New Year but your budget says no;
when you’re too old to join a bone marrow
in a crematory. Other implants, like plastic registry (but please #spitforriley).
urinary pessaries or penile pumps, would
WIRED is a registered trademark of Advance
never even be seen by a crematory worker. Magazine Publishers Inc. Copyright ©2018
Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Printed in
They melt and escape into the atmosphere the USA. Volume 26, No. 4. WIRED (ISSN
1059–1028) is published monthly by Condé
through the chimney along with the mer- Nast, which is a division of Advance Mag-
cury in your teeth. azine Publishers Inc. Editorial oice: 520
Third Street, Ste. 305, San Francisco, CA
In the corner of the room, the Resoma- 94107-1815. Principal oice: Condé Nast,
1 World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007.
tor’s cycle is nearing its end. The noise is Robert A. Sauerberg, Jr., President and Chief
Executive Oicer; David E. Geithner, Chief
more intense; the pump beats like a straining Financial Oicer; Pamela Drucker Mann,
heart. Fisher lets me press the red button to Chief Revenue & Marketing Oicer. Periodi-
cals postage paid at New York, NY, and at
open the door, and Alex Rodriguez, Fisher’s additional mailing oices. Canada Post Pub-
lications Mail Agreement No. 40644503.
right-hand man, swings it open. There on Canadian Goods and Services Tax Regis-
tration No. 123242885 RT0001.
the tray, amid steam, lies the skeleton of a
POSTMASTER: Send all UAA to CFS (see DMM
90-year-old woman who donated her body 707.4.12.5); NONPOSTAL AND MILITARY
to the medical school. Rodriguez delicately FACILITIES: Send address corrections to
WIRED, PO Box 37706, Boone, IA 50037-
picks up the larger bones and places them 0662. For subscriptions, address changes,
adjustments, or back issue inquiries: Please
in a tray. As he does so, he tells me what he write to WIRED, PO Box 37706, Boone, IA
50037-0662, call (800) 769 4733, or email
knows about her from her bones alone: that subscriptions@WIRED.com. Please give
she had no teeth when she died, because both new and old addresses as printed on
most recent label. First copy of new sub-
there are none here. That she had osteo- scription will be mailed within eight weeks
after receipt of order. Address all editorial,
porosis, which turns your bones to dust business, and production correspondence
to WIRED Magazine, 1 World Trade Center,
before the cremulator. That she was small. New York, NY 10007. For permissions and
reprint requests, please call (212) 630 5656
If you’re interested in donating your body or fax requests to (212) 630 5883. Visit us
26.04_WIRED_APR_2018_THE_LIFE_ISSUE

one day, Fisher will explain alkaline hydroly- online at www.WIRED.com. To subscribe to
other Condé Nast magazines on the web,
sis to you personally. He’ll stand you in front visit www.condenet.com. Occasionally, we
make our subscriber list available to care-
of this silver machine and tell you exactly how fully screened companies that ofer prod-
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it works. And later, he will slide you in, quickly interest our readers. If you do not want to
and quietly turning your body back into the receive these ofers and/or information,
please advise us at PO Box 37706, Boone,
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0 9 8
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