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Today: Nathan Munn, writer, musician, and author of QUÉBEC.

Issue No. 387

Living Things
Nathan Munn

HYDRANYM No. 13: Vote!
The Editors

Living Things

by Nathan Munn

Extracting Value: One Startup’s Quest to Monetize Your Biology

Jules Stringham, New York

I’m looking around the fashionably cluttered apartment of Akari Kato while she cooks, admiring the floor-to-ceiling shelves brimming with books on biochemistry, brining, oenology, mycology, and natural medicine; collections of kimono silks and hand-dyed linens are stacked in neat rows. Her slight frame is draped in a nearly see-through black blouse, her legs sheathed in jeans. I watch as she leans over a pan simmering on her stovetop, the sauce inside a vibrant red. A sweet smell of tomato, basil, and an odd but not-unpleasant hint of copper reaches my nostrils. Finally, after a few minutes of seasoning and tasting, she nods, skims off a spoonful of the red mixture, blows softly on it a few times—she’s very courteous—and approaches me smiling with the spoon outstretched.

“Try this,” she says. “It’s made from something my coworker is coming down with.”

In normal circumstances, I would swat a spoon away upon hearing those words, but Akari’s sauce—infused with the refined essences of bacteria and viruses she acquired from a colleague on the verge of sickness—is the reason I’m here. I close my eyes, say a silent prayer, and sip gingerly from the spoon.

Remarkably, the sauce is delightful: sweet, tangy, lightly acidic, deeply flavorful. I smile in spite of myself, and Akari smiles back.

Akari is a biocollector. She gathers samples of organic material from her friends, family, and coworkers, with the goal of distilling those materials (which include saliva, mucus, earwax, as well as our most intimate secretions) into highly nutritious—and tasty!—food additives.

While your stomach may be protesting right now, Akari is not alone. Following in the tradition of lacto-fermentation, probiotics, and other forms of cultured edibles, biocollecting has exploded in popularity. An open source process allows anyone with a few simple tools and a taste for adventure to remove harmful elements from our biological breadcrumbs while maintaining their core bacterial, fungal, and viral properties, and biocollectors use these unconventional ingredients to liven up meals and supercharge their health. One study by nutritionists at Stockholm University found bacteria-based cultures like the one Akari is using, properly prepared, can deliver a full day’s worth of vitamins and trace minerals at a fraction of the energy cost of producing animal protein or synthetic supplements. Biocollected materials also produce “hyperproteins”, strange new complex structures that true believers say promote rapid bone and muscle growth, though those claims have not been proven.  

But despite the hype, all is not well in the esoteric world of biocollecting. Akari’s artisanal trade has predictably been seized upon by other, less mindful practitioners in the burgeoning field: people uninterested in the savory delights hidden within our bodies, and more in the questionable pseudo-medical applications—and expected profits—they believe are waiting to be exploited through biocollection.

Jules had been staring down at the keyboard of her laptop when she startled and looked around. The apartment was quiet. No sign of Francis, even though it was nearly seven-thirty. She rubbed her eyes and squinted at the screen. She hadn’t touched her document in eight minutes.

She got up from her desk, stretched, and padded to the kitchen where she fixed herself a drink, and glanced downward. The cat looked at her and blinked sagely, its long brown hair a mess.

“Where’s Francis?” she asked. “Where could he be?”

The cat stared at her for a moment before turning away. It slunk to its bowl, curled its tail around itself and began to eat. Jules sipped her drink as she watched him, a blooming heat spreading through her body.

“Have you heard about this Seigler guy?” 

Christopher floated the question with a mild arrogance, and Jules, in his Midtown office for their weekly one-on-one, resisted the urge to smirk. She’d been working on this piece for the better part of two weeks. How would she not have heard of Brenden Seigler, founder of sensaae™, the biocollection startup that had drawn hundreds of millions in seed funding with a vague promise to “unlock the unprecedented medical applications” of biocollecting. Stanford dropout, rumoured philanderer, known berater of subordinates, Seigler fit the mold of tech luminaries past, but because he’d been diagnosed with a rare blood disorder as a child he’d successfully marketed himself as uniquely invested in the hot new crusade. 

“Uh-huh. I’m meeting him this afternoon.”

“Good!” Christopher said with surprise. “Nice work. Try not to piss him off. Keep me posted. And Jules, I expect you to deliver on this. Mark wanted the story, you know.” 

“I know. Thank you. I will,” Jules said. “I promise.”

After weeks of runaround, Seigler’s assistant had finally set a meeting at a McDonald’s, saying the choice of location “would make for a more authentic experience with Brenden.” In the shuddering subway car on the way to the meeting, Jules mentally combed through what she knew about him, things he’d said to other interviewers. 

To TechCrunch: “As a species, we have always been biocollectors. sensaae™ has simply organized and monetized the process.” 

To The New Yorker: “Many ancient cultures understood the value of what the human body produces, no matter how revolting these substances may seem to us.”

To the New York Times: “There are literally trillions of dollars of value to be extracted from humanity, if we do it right—the sensaae™ way.”

The claim of monetization wasn’t strictly true, as Jules had gleaned from corporate filings: the company had yet to create a product or generate any revenue. She’d be asking him about that.

The photo of him on her phone showed a slight figure with a boyish, unsmiling face and colorless hair, slicked back, against the rough walls of the 200-year-old brick factory that had been elegantly redesigned as sensaae™’s headquarters. Jules wasn’t sure if the traces of brutishness she perceived—around his eyes, at the corners of his mouth—were real or in her imagination.

Seigler’s pitch worked: his company drummed up $240 million in seed funding from top investment firms. Suddenly, it seemed sensaae™ employees could be found everywhere, biocollecting: in a public park, hurrying to scoop up a heavy tissue dropped by a toddler; waiting patiently as a vagrant finished urinating on a wall, eager to swoop in with a gathering cloth. 

When we met for lunch, Seigler told me that regardless of a sample’s provenance, he was always excited to discover which rare and strange microbes would be found in a sample, what value could be unlocked.

I asked him about the unsettling manner in which sensaae™ went about gathering their samples and he brushed me off. “Only a troglodyte would be upset that we collect used tissues off the street,” he said. “The cities should be paying us!” 

When I mentioned the increasing demands for compensation from people who unwittingly contributed biological samples to sensaae™’s growing viral and bacterial data bank, he smiled thinly before replying. 

“We have a collector program,” he said, referring to how the company is paying a small pool of donors of personal samples a very small “contributor fee.” 

“That’s not the same thing,” I pushed back, but he’d already left the table to order his dessert, a vanilla milkshake.

On the eight-block walk to sensaae™’s headquarters, Seigler told me the story of his diagnosis as a five-year-old, a time he described as “scary, but ultimately an evolutionary step for me.” I found the company’s expansive lab complex disorienting: Here were rooms occupied by scientists working at machines that looked like something from Star Trek: The Next Generation; in another, a team of marketing employees were doing a synchronized k-pop routine in front of a massive screen; in another, uniformed researchers were following a group of drooling toddlers around a playroom, stumbling over themselves as they collected droplets from the babbling children. “We’re building something special here,” Seigler told me.

But his mood soured when I asked about analysts’ concerns about his company’s dearth of revenue. “sensaae™ is doing more than developing a range of products and diverse revenue streams, though of course we are doing those things,” he said with exaggerated patience. “We’re primarily in the business of saving lives. I myself am a survivor of a debilitating disease; moving the needle on illness is where my passion lies. First we must heal humans at scale. Then we worry about revenue.”

After the interview, Jules had sought refuge in a nearby cafe and ordered an iced cappuccino, idly reflecting on her subject.

When they’d met at McDonald’s, Seigler had casually passed a $20 bill to a homeless man seated near the doorway before holding the grimy door open for Jules. 

“That was nice of you,” she’d said sincerely, and Seigler shrugged. 

“Some of us are luckier than others,” he said. “We have to share the love.” 

She collected her thoughts and tried out a few different approaches to the ending of her story, but the looming visit to her father in a few hours was causing her chest to tighten, distracting her. 

It had been eight months since Dad’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis; he was deteriorating quickly. First he was losing track of his wallet or keys, then his words, his memories. Within weeks, the family had managed to find him a spot in a long-term care home, and ever since, Jules, her mother, and her aunts and uncles had visited him on a rotating schedule, each reunion a little emptier, a little sadder than the last. Dad. Jim Stringham. The brilliant, kindhearted engineer and adored parent of her childhood had recently mistaken her for a girlfriend from his youth, and remarked on how her blouse “showed off her knockers.” She’d been so hurt and embarrassed that she hadn’t returned for weeks, and the discomfort mixed with her anxiety about the looming deadline for the biocollecting story created a roiling cloud of insomniac dread. Oddly, when she couldn’t sleep Jules had taken to thinking of Akari alone in her small apartment, peacefully conjuring up her strange concoctions—an image that prompted feelings of relaxation, comfort, and something like envy. 

By the time she looked up from her screen the light coming in the windows of the cafe had already changed, the afternoon was giving way to evening.

She checked her phone; nothing. The lack of any texts from Francis left her feeling at once abandoned and exhilarated. 

Two hours later, the competing odors of cleaning products and illness hit Jules in an overpowering wave the moment she entered the heavy swinging doors of the nursing home. 

She stopped at the open door to her father’s room and was steadying herself to enter when she was startled by a woman’s voice from behind.

“You came!” the voice said brightly. Jules turned to see Maria, her father’s regular care nurse, standing behind her in blue scrubs, holding a covered dinner tray. She was beautiful, with dark eyes and freckles across her cheekbones, and younger than Jules, but she moved with a competence and ease that made Jules feel childlike and useless in her presence.

“Hi! Yes, I know it’s been a while.”

“I don’t blame you for staying away after what happened last time,” she said with a knowing look. “I was just about to bring him his dinner. Come in!”

The setting sun was beaming in the window. 

“Well, hello there!” Maria said as she stepped into Dad’s line of sight. “Ready for dinner?”

“Hmm… Yeah, I guess so,” Jules’ father replied. Jules cleared her throat.

“Hi, Dad.”

It took an eternity for her father to turn around to see her, his only child. The tears sprang up the moment she saw his face, gaunt and ghostly pale, as if he’d never seen the sun, though he’d been an athlete who’d raced sailboats as a young man. But his eyes were still vivid green in spite of his pallor and his furrowed, confused expression. 

“Who’s that now?” her father said, looking distrustful.

“Don’t start kidding, David,” Maria chided him gently. “That’s your beautiful daughter, Jules. The journalist! Remember?”

“Journalist?” 

“Yes. Your daughter. She comes to visit all the time.”

He stared at Jules for a moment, then smiled weakly. “How are you, sweetie?”

Jules embraced her father. Her tears soaked into his flannel shirt as he patted her head.

“Oh dad,” she whispered. “Oh, daddy.”

“It’s okay, honey,” he said as Maria busied herself with the curtains. “It’s okay.”

After chatting about a sensaae™ competitor that had received millions in funding from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s investment arm, and rumors that China was building a secret biocollection superlab in Mongolia, we fell into a comfortable silence. I took a breath and asked Seigler about another rumor circulating online—that in the early days of sensaae™, he’d been dumped by his longtime girlfriend after she caught him surreptitiously recovering her used tampon from the garbage to use for a sample. He leaned forward, looked me dead in the eye, and after a long moment grinned.

“What can I say? I’m crazy about stem cells.” 

With that he stood up, wished me a nice afternoon and ended the interview. 

Whether or not sensaae™ will ever bring a useful product to market or generate a dollar in profit seems besides the point. In the accelerating vortex of Silicon Valley culture, the goal of starting a company is no longer to create a sustainable enterprise that improves people’s lives. The question for every CEO is: Can you do something audacious, disruptive, and technically dazzling without any regard for the consequences? You’d better hope so.

It’s a fair bet that Brenden Seigler’s company will change the world, for better or worse. But Akari Kato is changing the world, too, in her own way.

There is no denying that her sauce was delicious.

HYDRANYM No. 13: Vote!

by The Editors

HYDRANYM is the weekly word game for Flaming Hydra subscribers (here are the RULES).

It is time to VOTE for your favorites from the best of this week's entries, as judged by a panel of Flaming Hydra editors. Winners will receive wild acclaim, and their name and winning entry will be posted on the ANNALS of HYDRANYM page.

There are some fine ones this week for sure.

Come back on MONDAY to learn the fate of the HYDRANYM

Jennie Rose Halperin, this is very cool

Joe MacLeod

Kim Kelly

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