An exploration of values & purpose

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I. Life Sciences

I've long felt a burning, physical desperation to make human life more resilient.

Born to three generations of biology professors, I was raised with a deep reverence for nature and for discovery. This discipline seeks to uncover the secret of life– the most miraculous explainable phenomenon in the universe.

When I first discovered fibonacci and 1.618 at age six or seven, I saw the golden ratio everywhere – my own body, the distribution of branches in trees, the double helix... all revealing a hidden harmony for those who know how to listen, a glimpse of the infinite sublime.

A few years later, I learned about Miller and Urey's landmark 1953 experiment demonstrating how the first organic molecules could have formed at the bottom of the sea floor, given the right molecular primitives and catalyzing heat from volcanic trenches. This was perhaps the origin of life on Earth, and I was utterly enthralled.

The natural partner to life is death – the great restorer of balance, the other side of the same cycle. I first began really thinking about death and what it meant around age 10 or 11. It was also then that I began to try to understand my mother's scientific research into cancer; her discoveries were vivid in my imagination and I had a long series of nightmares about people I loved in their final moments. Sometimes, the further you are from death, the more daunting it seems. How can it be that our own bodies, so intricately evolved and carefully equilibrated, continue to defeat themselves? Does life end as it begins, only in reverse? ↗

Yet, in the face of these terrible odds, I was overcome by the irrationality of our will to survive. There is a scene in Jack London's White Fang that I first read when I was 13. Man versus nature: the protagonist is stranded in a snow-covered hellscape, chased day and night by a pack of wolves. Exhausted, he makes a final stand by building a fire. Night falls; the hungry wolves close in. He whittles his remaining wood into sharp projectiles, dips them in flame, and hurls them at the beasts which dare approach. It's only in these final moments – when he comes face to face with the inevitability of his own mortality – that he becomes acutely aware of how alive he is. The way his little finger reflexively curls away from the fire is a miracle; so is the pain that keeps him sharp through his delirium.

Even as I was spellbound by the resilience of life, I was viscerally horrified by the simultaneous fragility of it. Thus, the mission to enhance human life has always been one I have desperately aligned myself with.

V0: Enhance human life.

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II. Science Fiction

Since 1904 we have generated electricity from the very heat of Earth’s core. Since 1946 we have commanded the storms in our atmosphere, creating rain from supercooled stratus clouds. Since 2012 we have leveraged a programmable enzyme to rewrite the genetic code itself.

Says Lord Krishna as he reveals his cosmic form in the Bhagavad Gita: “Time I am, the great destroyer of worlds, come to annihilate mankind." Yet, in beautiful, foolish defiance of this most rational fate, man refuses to do anything but march onward.

The second pillar of my childhood was science fiction. Perhaps my mind has been filled with too much Foundation, Three Body Problem, and Dune... but science fiction has often predicted or even charted the course of advancement (see the works of the great Jules Vernes, for example). I have been convinced, in an increasingly evidence-backed way, of this:

The future of humanity is multi-planetary. After all, why wouldn’t this be so? What distinguishes homo sapiens is that we have always strived for what is greater than us. We refuse to accept that all patterns point towards our existence being a brief flicker in the cosmic time scale, just as we refuse to accept that a single life must be an even briefer one within it. To me, this is the most inspiring spirit in the universe. It has never been about the end state. Rather, it is the very pursuit itself that is noble and defines us as a species. I want to serve this spirit.

(Parallel to the above, and not to be forgotten: we must protect our wild places and the singular beauty of Earth. There will always only be one Earth.)

Yet, this future is neither inevitable nor guaranteed. I believe that the Great Filter ↗ lies just ahead in the decades to come; it will fall within our lifetime.

Whether it is lapses in biosecurity or single points of failure in energy infrastructure, humanity now faces an unprecedented chokepoint that will dictate whether we survive and accelerate towards Kardashev 1.0 and beyond, or if we fail to surpass this obstacle and even decline towards extinction. Thus, the mission has perhaps never been as compelling as it is now.

I became certain that I want to create and prepare humanity for this multi-planetary future. I seek to make our world habitable, protect continuity of our values, and fortify the resilience of human life.

We will pass the Great Filter.

V1: Prepare human life for the multi-planetary future.

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III. Cultures

The third pillar of my life has been a heartfelt appreciation for the arts.

I am a composer, pianist, cellist, and chamber musician; I spent summers performing at classical music festivals across North America and Europe, and I still frequent the SF opera and symphony today. Few things are quite as viscerally stirring to me as music. I was also a ballet and contemporary dancer for 11 years, and for as long as I can remember, I have written poems and longer stories.

There is something indescribable during the split second of creation that feels like discovery, in the same way a scientist might experience awe in the quiet moment after a landmark result, before the full weight has arrived.

In this act of creation I have discovered profound joy. “He would tell them about the shape of the world," writes Ted Chiang in Tower of Babylon. Through my art I am perhaps forever chasing some elusive shade of truth – in the myriad ways of telling the shape of the world, I seek a way that is purely my own.

What I've seen is that the humanities speak to something truly universal. I was raised across Berkeley, Paris, and Hong Kong, but it was on the road in between these periods that I grew up. During these passages, through the beautifully manicured parts of the world and also the difficult and conflict-ridden ones, I began to catch another glimpse of the same hidden harmony I had seen before in the life sciences, at both the molecular and systems levels. Its essence resists words but there are moments that hold it whole: in 2018, I watched pilgrims from Jordan and Israel sing the same song across the river dividing their nations.

In the present, I devote myself to solving for what makes life possible by advancing the technological foundation. This is the how to live. In the future, I hope to also protect what is beautiful but fragile about the universal human experience. This is the why to live. The mission of enhancing human life on a physical level is not complete without the parallel mission of enriching the full experience of what it means to truly live and live well.

This is the future worth striving for: not just life at any cost, but life in full.

The difference mirrors that between mere happiness and the ancient Greek concept of eudaimonia. There's no direct translation of eudaimonia, but the closest approximation is something like flourishing.

V2: Enable human life to flourish.

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IV. Mission

In a way, the years that have led up to the present moment have been given over to a search, both externally and within myself. What is a mission where the outcome is non-inevitable? What is the best and truest way for me to add value?

Looking backward, I do know a few things:

Looking forward, the single most important mission of my lifetime is to make human life resilient.

At the center of this mission is the formless, timeless adversary – the one we call the emperor of all maladies.

Our fight against cancer is the longest running war in the history of our species. We first discovered cancer 4,600 years ago in ancient Egypt; today we have invented myriad ways of detecting it early (such as liquid biopsy, a minimally invasive blood test in which we measure circulating tumor DNA and cells) and treating it (such as CAR-T cell therapy, in which we modify an individual’s own immune cells to recognize and attack cancer cells).

And yet, despite remarkable advances, this fight continues. In the 55 years since Nixon’s War On Cancer, and in the 26 since we assembled our first ever draft of a sequence of the human genome, the revolution in medicine that many hoped for did not arrive.

Today, the standard of care in cancer medicine is still one-size-fits-all. It fails because every cancer is different: different DNA, RNA, proteins. Yet, as an oncologist at Dana Farber recently told me, “cancer is now more a question of money than anything else.” For those with the means to engineer a personalized solution out of what already exists, the ceiling is incredibly high. Everyone else gets “standard of care," and then when that fails, they are told they have exhausted it. Except that is almost never actually true.

In the future, medicine won’t be off-the-shelf. “Standard of care” won’t mean one-size-fits-all. Instead, medicine will be n-of-1: truly personalized to individual biology. I seek to build the infrastructure to scale this model for everyone.

At the core of all challenges is the breathtaking complexity and unpredictability of biological systems. There are those who disdain the slow progress of biology compared to the physical sciences or engineering fields, advocating that evolution is something to be hacked or defeated, if only we channeled stronger talent towards it. But unlike physics and math, biology is messy and fundamentally fuzzy. This is not a flaw– it is a beautiful thing that life is infinitely varied. The true solution to accelerating advancement is to achieve faster feedback loops. In basic science, this means better experimental methods to test our hypotheses. In medicine, this means re-imagining the clinical trial. In both, it means not losing the reverence we owe to biology itself.

The reason for this quest is inevitably personal. I seek to create the care that I would want for my loved ones, or for myself. But there are also higher layers: to challenge limits, including our own, is the most human act there is. And we must first be healthy in order to see through the other generational missions that matter: making Earth habitable, eventually making other worlds habitable, solving the civilizational problems that take decades.

But in the end, it will always be about this: I seek to extend human health span so that we can better experience the fullness of life.

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Taking a step back, I’ve been reflecting lately on a broad-strokes purpose. What am I meant to do with the time I have been given? The answer is still in the process of unspooling itself, and I suspect will continue to do so until the very end.

I am here to revel in being violently alive:
to feel life searing through my body in every breath I draw.

To live life in pursuit of discovering its meaning.

To continuously transcend my past self.

To create, so that I may contribute to what is greater than me.

To give my life over to a purpose.

To love fiercely and unreservedly.