In this, the Secret Service has one big advantage over the Center for Disease Control: Its principle responsibility is the protection of a specific person. This makes it possible to build specific biosensing technologies around the president’s genome. We can use his living cells to build an early warning system with molecular accuracy.
Live cell cultures taken from the president could also be kept at the ready — a biological equivalent to data backups. The Secret Service already carries several pints of the president’s blood with the motorcade, just in case an emergency transfusion is necessary. These biological backup systems could be expanded to include “clean DNA,” essentially verified stem cell libraries suitable for bone marrow transplantation or to provide enhanced antiviral or antimicrobial capabilities. As tissue-printing technology improves, the president’s cells could even be turned into ready-made, standby replacement organs.
Yet even if we were to implement all of these proposed measures, there is no guarantee that the presidential genome could ever be completely protected. As hard as it may be, the Secret Service might have to accept that they’re not going to be able to fully counter all biothreats any more than they could guarantee the president will never catch a cold.
In light of this fact, one possible solution — not without its drawbacks — is radical transparency. Either release the president’s DNA and other relevant biological data to a select group of security-cleared researchers or, the far more controversial step, to the public at large. These ideas may seem counterintuitive, perhaps even startling, but we have come to believe that open-sourcing this problem — and actively engaging the American public in the challenge of protecting their leader — might turn out to be the best defense available.
For starters, cost is a factor. Any in-house protection effort is going to be exceptionally pricey. Certainly, considering what’s at stake, the country would bear the expense, but is this the best solution? After all, over the past five years, DIY Drones, a not-for-profit, online community of autonomous aircraft hobbyists (working for free, in their spare time), produced a $300-dollar Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) with 90 percent of the functionality of the military’s $35,000 Raven. This kind of price reduction is typical of open-sourced projects, which is why open-sourcing presidential biosecurity may turn out to be the best way to pay for presidential biosecurity.
Moreover, doing biosecurity in-house means attracting and retaining a very high level of talent. This puts the Secret Service in competition with industry, a fiscally untenable position, and academia, where many of the more interesting problems now lie. But tapping the collective intelligence of the life science community — our first scenario — enlists the help of the group best prepared to address this problem, at a price we can afford (free).
Open-sourcing the president’s genetic information to a select group of security-cleared researchers brings other benefits as well. It would allow the life sciences to follow in the footsteps of the computer sciences, where so-called “red team exercises” or “penetration testing,” are extremely common security practices. In these exercises, the red team, usually a group of faux black-hat hackers, attempts to find weaknesses in an organization’s (blue team) defenses. A similar environment could be developed for biological war games. Samples of presidential DNA (live cells) could be provided to two teams of trusted and vetted researchers. The blue team tries to develop strategies for protection; the red team tries to attack. In this way, actual risks can be assessed and real defensive strategies — for example, combination drug therapies (genetically personalized like today’s cancer drugs) — can be evaluated.
One of the reasons this practice has been so widely instituted in the computer world is because the field’s speed of development far exceeds the ability of security experts to keep pace. Because the biological sciences are now advancing significantly faster than computing, little short of an internal Manhattan-style project could put the Secret Service ahead of this curve, to say nothing of keeping them there. The FBI has far greater resources at its disposal than the Secret Service (almost 36,000 people work there, compared to roughly 6,500 at the Secret Service), yet, five years ago, the FBI concluded the only way it could keep up with biological threats was by involving the whole of the life science community in the endeavor.
So why go further? Why take the seemingly radical step of releasing the president’s genome to the rest of the world instead of just a security-cleared group? As the aforementioned Wiki-leaked, State Department cables makes clear, the surreptitious gathering of genetic material has already begun. It would not be surprising if the president’s DNA has already been collected and analyzed and our adversaries are merely waiting for the right opportunity to exploit the results. The assault could even be homegrown, the result of increasingly divisive party politics and the release of unscrupulous attack ads.
In the November 2008 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, Drs. Robert Green and George Annas warned against this possibility, writing that soon “advances in genomics will make it more likely that DNA will be collected and analyzed to assess genetic risk information that could be used for or, more likely, against presidential candidates.” It’s also not hard to imagine a biological analogue to the computer hacking group Anonymous arising, with the goal of providing a transparent picture of world leaders’ genomes and medical histories. Sooner or later, even without open-sourcing, the president’s genome will end up in the public eye.
So the question becomes: Is it more dangerous to play defense and hope for the best, or to go on offense and prepare for the worst? Neither choice is terrific, but even beyond the important issues of cost and talent-attraction, open-sourcing, as Dr. Claire Fraser, director of the Institute for Genomics at the University of Maryland points out, “would level the playing field, removing the need for intelligence agencies to plan for every possible worst-case scenario.”
It would also allow the White House to avoid the media storm that would likely occur if someone else leaked the president’s genome, while simultaneously providing a “normal” presidential baseline against which future samples can be compared. In addition, this would produce an exceptional level of early detection of cancers and other metabolic diseases. And, if such diseases were found, it could likewise accelerate personalized therapies.
The largest factor to consider is time. Currently, some 14,000 Americans are working in labs with access to seriously pathogenic materials; we don’t know how many tens of thousands more are doing the same overseas. Outside of those labs, with equipment now extremely cheap, the fundamental tools and techniques of genetic engineering are accessible to anyone interested. Not all that interest will be built around peaceful intentions. On December 8, 2011, Saudi Arabian prince Turki bin Faisal, who has twice served as an ambassador to the US, called for his country to acquire WMDs, including biological weapons, to defend against Iran and Israel’s nuclear ambitions.
Back in 2003, a panel of life science experts convened by the National Science Foundation for the CIA’s Strategic Assessment Group pointed out that because the processes and techniques needed for the development of advanced bio agents are “dual-use” — they can be used for both good or ill — it will soon be extremely difficult to distinguish legitimate research from the production of bioweapons. As a result, the panelists argued, a qualitatively different relationship between the government and the life science communities might be needed to effectively grapple with future threats.
In our view, it’s no longer a question of might. Advances in biotechnology are quickly and radically changing the scientific landscape. We are entering a world where imagination is the only brake on biology, where dedicated individuals can create new life from scratch. Today, when a difficult problem is mentioned, a commonly heard refrain is, “There’s an app for that.” Sooner than you might believe, “applications” will be replaced by synthetically created “organisms” — as in, “There’s an org for that” — when we think about the solutions t
o many of our problems. Crowdsourcing the protection of the presidential genome, in light of this coming revolution, may prove to be the only way to protect the president. And in the process, the rest of us.
The God of Sperm
THE CONTROVERSIAL FUTURE OF BIRTH
Most of the innovators we’ve covered in these pages emerged from beyond the mainstream. Whether it’s Dezso Molnar and his flying motorcycle or William Dobelle and his artificial vision implant or Craig Venter and his synthetic genome — all three are much more maverick outsider than cozy insider. And the main character in this, our final story, is no different.
Cappy Rothman started out his career as a courier for the mob — literally a bagman. But one thing led to another, and today’s he’s the most powerful man in the fertility industry and, by extension, arguably the person on this planet with the most influence over the future of childbirth. And this fact, in all of its staggering implications, is the point.
Our technology has begun keeping pace with our imagination. Equally astounding, access to that technology has become so democratized that maverick outsiders can now take on challenges that two decades back were the sole province of large governments and major corporations and two millennia back belonged only to the gods.
“Follow your weird,” said author Bruce Sterling. Well, mission accomplished. We followed, all right. Out of the muck and onto the land. Down from the trees and over the veldt. Across oceans and continents, then skies and stratospheres. We’ve chased it back in time and into distant space, and don’t get me started on other dimensions. We tracked it out of science fiction and into science fact and we’re not done yet. Oh yeah, we followed our weird. Followed it right into Tomorrowland.
1.
The world’s largest collections of stored genetic materials are found in Sussex, England; Spitsbergen, Norway; and Los Angeles, California. Sussex hosts the Millennium Seed Bank, which houses some 750 million species of plant seed. Spitsbergen, an island less than 600 miles from the North Pole, is the site of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which safeguards — inside a tunnel, inside a mountain — every variety of the earth’s twenty-one major food crops. And Los Angeles is home to the California Cryobank, the largest sperm bank in the world, which stores enough human seed to repopulate the planet several times over. The first two of these projects are international efforts to preserve our genetic future; the last is a private enterprise run by a man known to many as the King of Sperm.
The King wears Buddy Holly glasses. He is of medium height and medium build, balding, sixty-nine years of age, with a penchant for flashy shirts and comfortable shoes. His name is Dr. Cappy Rothman and “Cappy” is not a nickname. It is the colorful moniker given to him by his colorful father — if by colorful one means mobbed up.
The King of Sperm began his career in casinos. His father, Norman “Roughneck” Rothman, ran the San Souci Club in Havana, so Dr. Rothman spent his teenage years in Cuba. One of his earliest jobs was ferrying money — in a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist — between Cuba and banks in the States. One of his later jobs was working as an organizer for Jimmy Hoffa — to raise extra cash for medical school at the University of Miami.
Medical school led Rothman to a residency at the University of California in San Francisco, where he studied under the legendary urologist Frank Hinman Jr. Hinman liked to assign his students yearlong research projects on medical mysteries. How sperm got from testicle to outside world was Rothman’s assignment for his first year of medical school. In his second, it was the mechanism of erection. Both are considered infertility problems. “I loved infertility immediately,” says Rothman. “There was so much we didn’t know. I felt like a pioneer.”
By 1975, that pioneer was board-certified in urology and took a job at the Tyler Clinic, becoming Los Angeles’ first male infertility specialist. A few years later, the Tyler clinic folded and Rothman went out on his own. The California Cryobank was born.
In 1977, Rothman published the very first article on sperm banking in the Journal of Urology. That was also the year a prominent US senator’s son was killed in a car crash. The statesman contacted Rothman and asked if his boy’s sperm could be saved. In 1978, because of the work he’d done on the senator’s son, he published the first article on postmortem sperm retrieval, later appearing on Oprah to explain the procedure.
Despite these accolades, what Rothman remembers most about starting up his business was a young couple who came to see him. “The man was infertile and the woman was angry. In the middle of that discussion, she turned to her husband and said, ‘Because I married you, I’ll never be a mother.’ It was a statement I never wanted to hear again. Then and there, I decided to open a sperm bank.”
2.
If you adjust for size, the distance sperm must swim from testicle to ovum is the equivalent to that of a human running from Los Angeles to Seattle. Because of serious concern about transmission of diseases like AIDS to unborn children, and the drastic rise of what is known as “single mothers by choice,” the human seed in the King of Sperm’s collection now travels much farther — serving women in all fifty states and some twenty-eight countries.
This is no thin slice of the pie.
In the United States, the fertility industry is an annual $3.3 billion business, with sperm banking accounting for $75 million of that. Thirty percent of that business flows through the California Cryobank, but even these numbers do not truly capture Rothman’s influence. Frozen sperm and eggs — which the California Cryobank also stores — are the first step in assisted reproduction, so wherever the sperm-and-egg-bank business goes, so goes the rest. As Rothman himself points out, “When California Cryobank makes a decision, some six months later the rest of the industry tends to follow.”
Increasingly, these decisions are no small thing. For almost four decades, the sperm banking industry has operated almost completely without outside influence. Beyond a series of somewhat bizarre FDA rulings (more on these later), there is no top-down governance. The industry is, as it has always been, self-policing. Which means that California Cryobank and a few other key players wield enormous influence over the future of childbirth.
Right now, that future is uncertain. A growing pile of ethical, legal, and biological issues now surround the industry: the problem of donor anonymity; rules involving genetic diseases occasionally passed on by sperm and egg banks; the prevention of accidental incest between half brothers and half sisters; and strange quandaries resulting from a government increasingly using science to play politics. Will the government step in is the question. Because, until they do, the people profiting most from the future of childbirth are actually the people shaping the future of childbirth.
3.
California Cryobank’s headquarters sit in a two-story office building in West LA, specifically designed by Rothman to resemble a set from Star Wars. But it’s a little bit of overkill. Seriously, who needs sci-fi window dressing, when there’s actual sci-fi technology.
Outside the building, for example, stands a 6,000-gallon nitrogen tank and a backup generator capable of providing six months of emergency power. Inside, just past the receptionist, sits a large, rectangular room: the home to ten cryotanks, each containing 20,000 color-coded ampoules of sperm. Each ampoule holds up to 60 million sperm, with the color-coding determining the ethnicity of the donor. In other words, just off the lobby of the California Cryobank, is enough sperm to refertilize the earth several times over.
Just down the hall from the cryotanks are the masturbatoriums — the little rooms where prospective donors jerk off. There are three masturbatoriums to choose from: erotic, less erotic, and not so erotic. Perhaps because Rothman is a bit old-fashioned, or perhaps because the masturbatoriums were designed by a woman from the marketing department, the photographs that wallpaper these rooms, especially when measured against today’s Internet porn standards, are downright tasteful.
“For some guys,” notes Rothman, “it doesn’t take much.”
> It may not take much to finish one’s business in these rooms, but it takes quite a lot to get into them in the first place. To become a donor at California Cryobank, one must submit to what Rothman calls “the most rigorous prescreening process in the field.”
This process begins with a college education because, without one, California Cryobank doesn’t want your sperm. A long conversation follows, where donors are filled in on the obligations that come with the job — specifically its year-and-a-half-long commitment. During that commitment, donors are paid seventy-five bucks a pop, with two to three pops a week required, meaning a guy stands to earn anywhere from $11,000 to $17,000 for his services.
If those terms are acceptable, two separate semen samples are taken and analyzed. “We’re looking for very fertile men,” explains Rothman. Normal sperm count is 20 million to 150 million sperm per milliliter of semen. By “very fertile,” Rothman means over 200 million sperm per milliliter. Sixty percent of those sperm must be motile and must look as sperm are supposed to look.
If all of this is shipshape, a three-generation genetic history is taken. More semen is obtained and screened for diseases. Most sperm banks test for 23 variations of the mutation that causes cystic fibrosis, while California Cryobank, known for their rigor, looks for 97. Jewish donors are screened for Tay-Sachs, African American donors for sickle-cell anemia. A complete physical is then taken, followed by a six-month quarantine to assure that slow-developing HIV is not lurking in the sperm — one of those ideas that originated at California Cryobank and has since spread to the rest of the industry.
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