The Moon Exhibition Idea Interview with Jane Metcalfe, Founder and CEO of NEO.LIFE
The Neobiological Frontier
Welcome to The Museum of Ideas.
An exhibit of the future through the lens of (human) imagination.
This interview with Jane is part of an ongoing series, The Moon Capsule Gallery Interviews, where I explore the nature of ideas with a range of creators, entrepreneurs, thinkers, and artists. The Exhibition of Ideas for the Moon is a part of a growing gallery of ideas for our time. Visit The Museum of Ideas and find me on LinkedIn and Instagram.
Video excerpt from The Moon Capsule Interview on March 19, 2024
I think we've now come to a point where we need to reconsider where our species is headed in the grand scheme of things. Yes, we may be at the top of the food chain, but it allows us to think more broadly about questions like: How do we want to preserve our environment? How do we want to preserve our personal health? And how do we want to enable the ongoing flourishing of our species? And I think we are increasingly concluding that the best way to do that would be to do that in harmony with nature, in ways that we can ride the wave of biology and ecology to a healthier, happier, more sustainable place.
—Jane Metcalfe
Portrait of an Idea with Jane Metcalfe
Jane Metcalfe recently published 25 Visions for the Future of our Species (co-edited with Brian Bergstein, the book engages thinkers and ideas about the neobiological frontier.) Jane also started WIRED magazine with Louis Rossetto. She created PROTO.Life, an online magazine with features and dispatches from the neobiological frontier which is currently on sabbatical. Jane and I set aside a half hour for our conversation and we used more than every minute of it! The interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
The Interview
SMO—I have about 15 questions. Are you ready?
Jane Metcalfe: Yes, let's do it.
SMO—Okay, first, would you like to introduce yourself briefly?
Jane Metcalfe: Sure. My name is Jane Metcalfe, and my primary claim to fame was starting WIRED magazine with my then-life partner Louis Rosseto, and that was 31 years ago based on the idea that computer technology was moving out of the lab in the basement and becoming a pervasive force for change in our society, and that it wasn't just going to change how we did business, but it was going to change how we educate, how we entertain, how we participate in civic society, and basically all the pillars of society. And so we called that the digital revolution. Since then, the digital revolution turned into shopping, running errands and sharing selfies and I sort of lost interest. I got involved in the launch of a chocolate factory. And then I started–I know that's a little random—but I started thinking about food and food as medicine and you know, chocolate has extraordinary properties. We were also approached to use chocolate as a carrier for other things. Everything from probiotics to psilocybin and everything in between and that got me thinking about health. And so about 8 years ago I became interested in the next stage of the digital revolution. What I call a neobiological revolution. It’s new biology, because it's biology that uses our engineering mindset and our digital toolset to hack our own bodies, minds, species, and evolution. So that's kind of what I think about now.
SMO—What is an idea?
Jane Metcalfe: An idea is…Wow! It's something that you have to grab…Never had to answer that question! It's a new input. It's a way of thinking about things that don’t have to be new. There are old ideas, there are good ideas, and there are bad ideas. But ideas are things that change how we think, not just what we know, but how we think. And a good idea will hopefully change how we behave. So I guess that would be my short answer.
SMO—Where do you think ideas come from?
Jane Metcalfe: Ideas are all around us. If you look at the history of science, ideas pop up at the same time all around the world, among people not connected. And so, you know, in my mind, they're discovered ... they are unleashed and some people are more receptive to them and can catch them and express them in powerful ways.
SMO—Do you think everything begins with an idea?
Jane Metcalfe: Well, I think some things begin with an idea. I suppose fear is an idea. So you know it's oftentimes things come from, you know, motivations. Other times they are just this thing that pops into your head, and you're like, wait, I've never thought that before. I've never understood things that way.
SMO—As some have said, do you think ideas without action are useless, or are they useful, just as an idea?
Jane Metcalfe: Oh, they're definitely useful, just as an idea. I think back to Eleanor of Aquitaine and the idea of courtly love—which was a radical idea during the Middle Ages which was a barbaric time in human history, and the idea that men and women are different. That's not the current idea. Then it was sort of an attempt to reclaim the idea of the essential masculine and the essential feminine, and to celebrate the differences and honor those differences. How that maps onto gender is, you know, a twenty-first-century conversation.
SMO—So for the sake of our conversation today, for the purpose of this interview, what is your idea?
Jane Metcalfe: So my idea starts from this idea that [we] humans have evolved to take advantage of everything around us. We have prehensile thumbs; we have a prefrontal cortex. Armed with these two tools, we've essentially set about making tools, and the more powerful our tools became, the more we were able to extract anything we needed from our environment to advance our species. And I think we've now come to a point where we need to reconsider where our species is headed in the grand scheme of things. Yes, we may be at the top of the food chain, but it allows us to think more broadly about questions like “How do we want to preserve our environment? How do we want to preserve our personal health? And how do we want to enable the ongoing flourishing of our species?” And I think we are increasingly concluding that the best way to do that would be to do that in harmony with nature, in ways that can ride the wave of biology and ecology to a healthier, happier, more sustainable place.
So that's my big idea—that we are no longer extracting and manipulating, but surfing, and possibly we may need to start guiding a little bit. But we need to bring with us this concept of “One Health.” You know that it's the health of people. It's the health of plants and animals. It's the health of the planet. And when I started talking to people in the One Health movement, (which is actually not that new of an idea) it's gaining currency. Now, the World Health Organization, and NGOs are coming on board. And I was like, okay, plants, animals, humans, what about bacteria? We need to protect them. So I feel like they need to be represented somehow in the One Health concept.
And then taking it down a little bit from, you know, 10,000 feet down to...So what do we need to do today?
I think we need to understand that artificial intelligence (AI) is providing us with opportunities to understand things we haven't been able to experiment on or discover, or, you know, take in when it comes to biology. And so I'm interested in using that to understand the human immune system. And I know some of the smartest scientists in the world and have the privilege, through my work, of being able to ask them very broad questions, because I'm not a scientist myself. And it's clear to me that some of the smartest medical and life science researchers are afraid of immunology. They're like, “Oh no, that's too complicated for me.” Seriously!
For some immunologists, the field itself is so complex that they tend to get heads down, and they tend to go deeper and deeper into their very specialized study.
And what we're talking about now is, let's bring together people from all these different disciplines. Because in the 21st century, that's what we need is to understand life as a complex system. And it interacts with many other complex systems. And if we ever hope to understand why somebody gets sick… why they have a negative reaction to a vaccine, why we all have cancer cells in our bodies, why does some point that trigger just start to make those cancer cells reproduce? And in some people and not in others? The only way to understand that is going to be through artificial intelligence.
And so the big idea that I chair now is an initiative to collect advanced immunological data from people all over the world. All walks of life, ages, groups, sexes, socio, economic background ... geography. And then feed that data into machine learning algorithms that can start to help us understand, if not discover, the underlying mechanisms for what's really at work in our immune system.
SMO—Wow! How long have you been thinking about this idea?
Jane Metcalfe: I was initially approached by the precursor organization that was focused more on vaccines. And the pandemic unleashed all sorts of worldwide initiatives around vaccines and the pathogens that create the need for that which freed us up to let go of the vaccine-specific conversation and start thinking more broadly about the immune system. What we're calling the Immunome and so it was really throughout the pandemic that we began to evolve the vision. In September and October of 2022, we brought together the world's leading immunologists, computational systems biologists and machine learning experts, including representatives of the Alpha fold team, industry, academia and government to say: “Can we build models of the human Immunome? And if so, what will it look like? And how will we do that?”
So since that day, it's been a daily obsession.
SMO—How do you hope this idea will make a difference for all of us? Or do you hope it will make a difference for all of us?
Jane Metcalfe: Oh, 100%. Yes, we look at various models. You know, CERN, the particle accelerator in Geneva, built an asset that has attracted physicists from all over the world to run their experiments on it. Regardless of your politics, you know your country’s income, your intellectual property, all the things that would normally be barriers became irrelevant.
Because the physicists wanted to get to CERN and run their experiments on the particle accelerator.
The other model we look at is the Human Genome Project. And the Genome Project, which is more than 20 years old now, used our most advanced, you know, biological capabilities to sequence the code of life. But it was basically based on one human and that human happened to be, you know, a European male and so much of our genomic science has been based on that profile. And fast forward 25 years we cannot hope to understand the human immune system without collecting data from all around the globe, from all kinds of people and so this will be the first diverse data.
These data sets exist. But they're small cohorts. They're largely in Western industrialized populations. And so our start is this will not succeed unless we have truly diverse data that truly represents all of the human immune expression.
And once we have that, then the possibilities are enormous. So you know, one of my favorite topics is women's health and not just women's reproductive health. Also, like the full line from birth to death. And you know, that's more than 50% of the population, and it's never been adequately studied as a separate cohort. Similarly, you know, low and middle-income countries typically don't have access to our most advanced science. And so by collecting data in low-middle-income countries, we hope to better understand disease. Better understand the effects of poverty. Better understand the effects of stress, because poverty is not just a lack of water and food. It's also extraordinarily stressful, which has enormous impacts on our immune system.
So we're hoping to understand disease in all these different populations, understand underserved populations. You know, there may be that we can identify and say, okay drug developers, you know, let's get to work coming up with solutions for these populations on a global public health basis! You know, understanding your population and the immunome of your population can help you as the Minister of Health to understand, for example, how many vaccines do we need to order? Which vaccine do we need to order?
And so to me, there's all these specific opportunities. But the bottom line is, I don't know how we'll ever get to precision medicine if we don't have these immunological models. So I think our enormous scientific advances will advance basic research. This is basic research. It will advance and transform the way we study immunology. It will transform the way we manage global public health and it will bring attention to underserved populations whose disease burden is not currently being addressed.
And ultimately, you know impacts on equality, on economic opportunity. You know health. But all of that.
SMO—Okay, so now imagine it's 2030. What impact has your idea had on humanity?
Jane Metcalfe: So, 2030 is let me check. Oh, shit! That's only 7 years from now. Yes, we will by then have built the world's largest open and pre-competitive database of advanced immunological data across diverse populations that will be useful for scientists around the world.
For drug developers around the world and for managers of public health around the world to be able to not only understand populations but also test hypotheses and theories and drugs against these various populations, which—I say that, but you know we can use digital twinning and we can use synthetic data sets. We're not talking about directly testing the drugs on these populations! We're just talking about having created that which, at that point, would be generating new drug development, new public health policies and hopefully our goal is for our impact to not strictly be restricted to, you know, the scientists involved, but to the populations who are contributing the data and to the communities in which we're working.
So we are committed to the landscape analysis and the communities where we're active to tap into existing infrastructure that can take what we're doing and spread the positive effects throughout the community.
SMO—Help me visualize how the world is better because of your idea. How will it change my life or the life of others?
Jane Metcalfe: Ultimately, we would like to have this data and these models be used on a personalized basis. It's like, you go to the doctor and you say, “Hey, doctor, how's my immune system?” And the doctor goes, “Yeah, I don't know.” “You know, we really don't have tools at the clinician level, at your family doctor level, to tell you how your immune system is.”
You know we're starting to develop some of these. I wear an Oura ring…. They now have this Resilience Factor, which I think is fantastic. I was able to see I had a virus, and I was able to watch my resilience go from extraordinary down to adequate. And now that it's clear, it's building itself back up again, so I can see exactly how my immune system is doing. And that has huge implications for the personal choices that I make. Not only in terms of medication but in terms of lifestyle. For example… You say “Okay, well, my resilience is still down.” Maybe you're not drinking for a while, you know, as opposed to… “I feel better today”, and then have a couple of glasses of wine, one at dinner, and then I feel terrible for the next 3 days, you know. It's not a hangover, but it's like that. Additional inflammation in my system is triggering my own system to not get back to baseline. So I think it's got to go from the individual all the way up to the population level.
SMO—Okay. In a billion years, when someone might find this capsule of ideas, do you think that you will have taken action on your idea, or will it remain an idea forever?
Jane Metcalfe: Oh, no, we are absolutely taking action…we have a global consortium. Yeah, we are hard at work right now. And you know, we're raising money. We've got partnerships with leading labs all around the world. You know, we're hoping to start collecting data this year. So we're hoping by the end of the year to get started, and by the end of 2 years to have made a substantial contribution.
SMO—Okay, what about the future excites you the most right now?
Jane Metcalfe: I had this moment when I was standing in the middle of a conference surrounded by MDs and PhDs and I thought… these people have all the tools of the digital revolution in addition to 10 or 15 years of specialized study in human biology and what I hope is that all of these things come together and that we're able to, on a multilateral, multidisciplinary basis to come together and manage planet Earth and Homo Sapiens, and the plant, animal and bacterial kingdoms in a way that makes sense. We can eliminate pesticides and herbicides and insecticides and fertilizers. We can transition from a carbon-based economy to a biologically based economy. We can reclaim vast tracts of land that are currently being used for agriculture into things that are locally grown and cultivated based on the season where you live, based on your current microbiome, or based on your nutritional needs. So I see this just as a great sort of reckoning where we sort of reclaim the planet and we reclaim our health. We eliminate a lot of wasteful spending because we know more precisely what we need and when.
And we're just living with a lot less stress because we've eliminated the need to earn a bunch of money in order to have less stress in our lives, you know, or, eliminate pollution. After all we don't have to pave the roads and cut down the trees and plant, and fertilize and spray and all the rest of it.
So that's my goal. And I really hope it doesn't take a billion years. There's no reason why it should…just a couple hundred years.
SMO—Now, thinking of all possible ideas, what idea do you hope will take root, even if yours, before a billion years pass?
Jane Metcalfe: I think the biggest idea that needs to take root is that we're all in it together.
Yeah, we have different needs in different locations and at different times in our lives. But the idea that together we're stronger is an idea we still haven't really accepted and I think, having frameworks for understanding where global cooperation is the most beneficial and the least threatening. I think that's something that we really need to work on. And I'm super encouraged because my kids both did engineering studies. They were very demanding schools, and it became very apparent early on that they were not going to be able to get through on their own by sitting by themselves in their rooms, that they needed to work in study groups, bringing diverse perspectives and skill sets to bear on the problems at hand.
We have plenty of research showing that diverse perspectives make for better outcomes. Whether we're talking about managing the financial portfolio, or solving an engineering challenge or whatever it may be.
So that's what we need to be working towards.
SMO—Do you have an “idea hero?” Someone that you look to for inspiration?
Jane Metcalfe: So many……so many. I'd be remiss without mentioning Steve Jobs.
You know, it takes one person with an idea to change the course of history. Just reading about the one person at the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas school who did not say, “Let's go in and fight these guys,...” It's like all it would have taken.
And Steve's idea that everybody can have this power on their own is just so powerful.
It's about agency, and that's hugely important.
But I would also be remiss in not talking about George Church because when it comes to the life sciences, George has been involved in all of the most astonishing developments of the last 25 years, from sequencing the genome to creating artificial synthetic genomes to CRISPR, to using CRISPR as a conservation tool.
He is the source of so many ideas, and the people come through his lab as well.
SMO—This is my last question. What question do you wish that I would have asked you about your idea or ideas generally that I didn't?
Jane Metcalfe: I guess I don't know what I wish you'd ask me…… but an obvious question to ask would be, what are the barriers? You know? What are the things that could stop your idea or distort your idea?
And that goes to so much of what we're dealing with. Capitalism, for example. It is a great system for allowing individual ideas to take root and flourish and be supported, and to create jobs, and to create income and wealth and advance society and our species…but by the same token, there are some walls that go up, around intellectual property and questions about which way is the money going to flow, etc. and so I think that's a big issue. It's certainly a challenge for our organization, which is called the Human Immunome Project. It's really easy to bring everybody together. But then, as you come away from that core idea, you very quickly run into very competitive pressures. Whether it's the scientist who needs to get credit for their research, and therefore they don't want to share it because their funding, their tenure, their, you know, publication needs, the needs of their institution, you know, might trump the opportunity to contribute.
SMO—So do you feel like you have an answer for that question?
Jane Metcalfe: We are weaving our way through it. And you know we were working once at our chocolate company, and our sourcing program was having tremendous impacts on farmers' lives, you know, allowing them to learn and to generate more income and to become more sophisticated.
So we were moving them up the value chain. And one of our clients said, “Okay, we love your program. So we want to do business with you.” And then they came back next year and said, “But now we're going to squeeze you on the price,” and it's like….. if you do that you're shooting yourself in the foot.
You know, the very thing you claimed you wanted is at risk if you cut the price.
So those are things we have to look out for.
…the idea that together we're stronger is an idea we still haven't really accepted and I think, having frameworks for understanding where global cooperation is the most beneficial and the least threatening. I think that's something that we really need to work on…We have plenty of research showing that diverse perspectives make for better outcomes. Whether we're talking about managing the financial portfolio, or solving an engineering challenge or whatever it may be. So that's what we need to be working towards.
—Jane Metcalfe
Learn more about Jane Metcalfe here.
Notes:
Learn about the Human Immunome Project.
Learn about George Church.
Read Proto.life.
Check out the NEO LIFE: 25 Visions for the Future of Our Species book
Visit The Museum of Ideas (by the way, I hope you’ll join the mailing list when you are there so we can keep in touch.)