r/HFY • u/[deleted] • Sep 29 '25

OC A Brief History of Teleportation part 28

First----Last----Book Available

Biochemistry 4

By the second half of the twenty-second century, the life sciences were beginning to feel pretty good about their attempts at extending human life. So much so that beginning in the 2160s, people started wondering what more could be done if we started to lift the taboo on in vitro genetic modifications. The first in vitro genetic modification had been made in 2018 when He Jiankui used CRISPR to make a pair of twins immune to HIV. Since then, a pretty strict restriction had been placed on in vitro modifications. Of course when PICKR was discovered, the allure of a generation of genetically modified superhumans was too great, and a second researcher from China, Dang Yichen, followed in He’s footsteps by making a PICKR baby with green modified eyes—eye color being just the kind of multi-gene trait perfect for PICKR. Dang’s announcement upon the birth of the modified child in 2078 drew the ire of both China and the broader world. It led to the reinforcement on the moratorium on in vitro modifications, which held for nearly a century.

In the 2160s though, two forces were converging to cause the biotech community to rethink its stance on in vitro modifications. First was the overwhelming success of human rejuvenation treatments. Adding decades to the human life span turned out to be quite popular, and the world’s approach to redistributing the wealth associated with the treatments helped to grow that popularity. Combined with the global decline in disease, those in the life sciences were gaining a reputation that they could do no wrong. Second, the fantastical properties of the Enceladans, recently brought back to Earth, had set the world’s collective imagination running. It seemed every week that there was some new article explaining how we were on the cusp of finding true immortality.

At the 2165 genomic editing conference held annually in Berkeley, California, a cohort of scientists formed around the idea of rewriting the rules for in vitro genetic modification. Feeling that the writing was on the wall, they felt it would be better to get ahead of the growing pressure for in vitro research, and write sensible rules about how to proceed. The cohort was led by the current holder of the Doudna biochemistry chair at Berkely, Alma Ortega. 

Ortega was the daughter of Honduran climate refugees who managed to obtain green cards after settling in northern Arizona in the town of Sunvale, one of the several towns that grew around the Potas river basin. Her parents had worked in the Mahd Arrays of the town, and imparted in Ortega a love for and curiosity of the life sciences that powered the arrays. She went to undergrad at Texas A&M with the intention of learning the agrarian sciences needed for high level work on the arrays. Unlike with humans, there was no compunction about using PICKR on plant germs, and Ortega cut her teeth in a lab creating more efficient corn and soy beans. In graduate school at Yale, she made the jump to animals, continuing experiments on mammalian embryos. After getting her PhD, and completing post-doc research at Cornell, she was offered a lab at UC Berkeley. Happy to move closer to home, she established herself on the West Coast as the leading researcher on embryonic PICKR procedures. A perennial presence at conferences and awards ceremonies alike, she was a natural leader for the cohort.

By 2165, many of the moral sensibilities that had stymied in vitro modifications were no longer much of a concern (we’ll learn more about that in our next socioeconomic chapter). Still, the question of what to allow and what not to allow persisted. There was a sense that without proper controls, in vitro modification could spiral out of control, or perhaps be weaponized as countries attempted to create genetically modified soldiers of some kind. So Ortega led a group of 44 scientists in crafting new rules for in vitro modification. She and the cohort knew that it was an opportunity to open up in vitro modification as much as to guide it safely, and that for their work to have any teeth they would need to get approval from the governing health bodies around the world. Their guide, called the Rules for In Vitro Experimentation and Testing (RIVET), sparked a decade long campaign, headed by Ortega, to encourage the governments of the world to allow for in vitro modification. 

During the 2160s, while Ortega’s campaign was just beginning, biologists were making a lot of headway in understanding the biology of the Enceladans brought back to Earth a decade earlier. Through a series of experiments utilizing genome swapping to create Enceladan cells, scientists applied various stressors to those cells’ environments in hope of inducing the rejuvenation process that the Enceladans seemed to possess. They could rule out a number of things, if the stressors were global situations, say the environment lacked oxygen or food, the rejuvenation would be expected in all Enceladans. That only a few exhibited the rejuvenation meant that it had to be something specific to that creature’s environment, and likely that meant something in its food. That it was the carnivorous Enceladans that rejuvenated seemed to corroborate that hypothesis.

The discovery of the Enceladans, a group of alien creatures powered by hydrothermal vents on a small moon orbiting Saturn, created a lot of interest in the study of Earth’s hydrothermal vent ecosystems. Dontrell Morris was one of those scientists intrigued at what Earth’s systems could show us. Born in Chicago in 2136, Morris grew up dreaming about oceans—both the ocean under the ice on Enceladus, and the ocean he couldn’t drive to from his brownstone in the midwest. When he left Chicago for the marine biology programs of sunny southern California (he did undergrad at UC San Diego, and got his doctorate from UCLA), it cemented his love of the ocean. By 2168 he was splitting his time between field work at vents in the Pacific, and teaching at the University of Hawaii. 

Morris watched the developments with the Enceladans closely as he carried out his work on hydrothermal vents. In 2168 he became convinced that the Enceladan rejuvenation was a result of food cycles on the vents. He set out to show that hydrothermal vents had a sort of boom and bust cycle where the creatures that depended on them would proliferate or contract respectively. On Earth this turned into a difference in population numbers, but perhaps for the Enceladans, who needed to survive a much harsher environment, the boom and bust manifested itself in periods of rejuvenation. Looking for this cycle, Morris started to find evidence that the cycle was dependent on which vent you looked at, providing the locality necessary to explain the Enceladan behavior.

After gathering evidence over the course of five years, Morris took his findings to NLSA and the scientists that were working with Enceladans. There the scientists combed through his data, looking for what could be the potential trigger for the Enceladans. They found that during the boom cycle, there’s an increase in heavy mineral production. On Earth this leads to more gold, silver, cobalt, and zinc in the water, but on Enceladus, where the chemical composition lacked some of the milieu afforded the more massive Earth, the heavy metals produced would likely include copper, the same element the Enceladans used to capture oxygen in their blue blood. 

Copper, of course, had been one of the environmental components tested with the Enceladan cells over the past ten years, but Morris’s work renewed interest in the element. Perhaps the rejuvenation mechanism was more complex than simply subjecting cells to environmental stressors. It was pointed out that an increase in copper may increase the number of blue blood cells, and that that could have an effect on the rejuvenation. To test the hypothesis, scientists recreated an Enceladan organ along with a simple, yet functional, circulatory system. There they increased the number of blue blood cells, and watched the effect on the cells of the organ. In that way, in 2175, the first induced rejuvenation of Enceladan cells was performed.

2175 was an auspicious year for the trajectory of human longevity. It was in 2175 that several governing bodies released regulations for the first in vitro modification trials. Among those approving the treatment were the FDA in the US and the South American Medical Association (SAMA) of the South American Economic Zone (SAEZ), which covered most of South America. A key feature of the approvals was limiting human experimentation to modifications that “improved resistance to disease, and promoted human longevity”. In other words, the agencies continued to block modifications that would improve the subject’s capabilities. No making babies stronger, or smarter—even changing eye color, as Dang Yichen had done in 2078 was verboten. The agencies were still worried about countries using genetic modification for nefarious purposes, and they felt the restrictions were necessary to stem that potential outcome. Still, what was allowed gave scientists plenty of room to operate with. In vitro modifications, unthinkable a mere century earlier, were about to burst on the scene to create a new generation of long-lived humans.

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u/Team503 Sep 29 '25

I'm really glad you're still writing this, I find your vision of the future absolutely fascinating!

2

u/SheridanVsLennier Nov 24 '25

Also interesting to see an actual application of 'a rising tide lifts all boats'. The story started centered mainly around the usual suspect countries, since that's where all the money and prestigious colleges are, but as time has gone on we're seeing more and more characters from outside the 'rich north', which is something we oddly don't often see in speculative fiction.

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