DECODING THE WORLD

A walk on the weird side of biotech and other trends with journalist Bronson, now a partner at venture capital firm IndieBio, and Gupta, who founded the company.

The San Francisco–based company funds stranger-than-fiction projects such as growing hamburger in petri dishes, and much of this book reads like a public relations vehicle for Bronson and Gupta’s “supremely cool” company and its industry. Taking turns narrating, the co-authors meld bromance, corporate history, and dispatches from the wilder shores of five supertrends: “China,” “Climate,” the “Genetic Revolution,” the “War on Truth” and “A.I. & Robots.” Some of the 33 chapters—with titles that consist of bizarre real-life headlines that are sometimes only tangentially related to their contents—e.g., “Meet the Pope’s Astronomer, Who Says He’d Baptize an Alien If Given the Chance”—end with screenshots of the authors’ gnomic text-message conversations. With dizzying leaps, the authors jump from topic to topic: how China is bankrolling global urban development, biotech advances such as a robot drone that plants trees, gene-editing kits used in high school classrooms, and “gummy bears” made from resynthesized proteins of a wooly mammoth. Often, the authors seem too ready to accept iffy claims, some from sources with financial ties to IndieBio. Gupta describes two minutes he spent up to his neck in ice-cold water at the urging of Dutch extreme athlete Wim Hof; Gupta didn’t seriously challenge Hof’s view that Gupta wouldn’t get sick on his flight home because the plunge “fully activated [his] immune cells”—a potentially dangerous idea in a pandemic. Elsewhere, the authors serve up an alphabet soup of scientific terms that may deter anyone who hasn’t memorized the periodic table. The paradoxical result is a book—the first in a trilogy—that may daunt low-tech readers while proving too glib for the more scientifically literate. Let’s hope Bronson returns to form in the second volume.

An awkward mix of hard and soft science from the frontiers of genetics and other fields.