Status Quo Wins, Until It Doesn't

With all that’s going on – e.g., congrats to Spain for its World Cup victory, scary about the cyclosporiasis outbreak and the Canadian wildfire smoke, dismaying but entirely predictable that the Iran-U.S. war is flaring up again – you may have missed the news that Ukrainian President Zelensky fired defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov.

Better times for President Zelensky and (former) Defense Minister Fedorov. Credit: Radio Free Europe

Now, perhaps Mr. Zelensky was worried he was inadvertently creating a future political rival, or maybe there’s some kind of corruption scandal behind the scenes, but the most common take is that the old guard military establishment disliked the acclaim Mr. Fedorov had gotten and the power he was accumulating. After all, even during war – perhaps especially during war – protecting one’s own interests often comes first.

Mr. Fedorov, who is only 35, had been in the role for just six months, having previously served as a digital transformation minister. His push for increased use of drones, and innovations in how they were used, led to his appointment. By all accounts, Ukraine leads the world in drone warfare: offensive and defensive, learning to cope with mass attacks, jamming, fiber-optic controlled drones, and other tactics no military had attempted or had to defend against before.   

He even created an Amazon-like arms procurement system that soldiers on the front lines could use to get the right weapons they needed, bypassing normal procurement channels, which were slower, more centralized, and more expensive. That helped lead to an ecosystem of young Ukrainian entrepreneurs working on military start-ups. “This level of innovation, and the way it’s been integrated into Ukraine’s fight, wouldn’t be possible without these young people,” Per Holst, the deputy defense attaché at the Danish Embassy in Kyiv, told Constant Méheut of The New York Times.

Example of Ukraine's digital procurement system

"One of the faces of the modern and technological war, it's Mykhailo Fedorov. He totally changed the rules. He's not afraid to take some risk or responsibility," said Ihor Fedirko, who leads the Ukrainian Council of Defense Industry.

The final straw that seemingly led to Mr. Fedorov’s ouster was his blocking of the purchase of artillery shells, preferring that the money be spent on his preferred weapons. The commander of Ukraine’s military, Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, felt that the “old school” weapons were still needed for the old school battlelines.

Mr. Zelensky was caught in the middle. "I wanted unity very much," Zelensky told reporters. "The sides did not find it. And that is not only their problem, but mine as well. I do not absolve myself of responsibility. And I respect the sides, I know their strengths, I know their weaknesses, and I very much want them to strengthen Ukraine. But it is what it is."

It did not go smoothly. “The season of shooting oneself in the foot has opened,” Kostyantyn Batozsky, a political analyst, wrote on social media.  Mass protests broke out, expressing support for Mr. Fedorov and distain for General Syrskyi.  They demanded Mr. Fedorov be reinstated, and General Syrskyi be removed, by July 24 or they’d hold nightly rallies.

Some raised not-so-subtle charges of what was really at stake: “You can’t even imagine what streams of funding have been cut off,” Serhiy Sternenko, an adviser to the Defense Ministry wrote on social media. He subsequently quit as well.

Mr. Fedorov held his own press conference, saying: “Today, my task is to show what we’ve done, and to talk about the risks that lie ahead for all of us. I don’t want to later look my children in the eyes and realize that I didn’t speak up on what’s really going on.” He criticized General Syrskyi for being too focused on tactics and not enough on strategy.  

Paul Adams of BBC reports that many in the Ukrainian military are “outraged” by Mr. Fedorov’s dismissal. "It is a blatant slap in the face to all service members," said one soldier. Another cynically pointed out: "If you can't come to an agreement with the old fossils, they'll eat you alive," while military analyst and former intelligence officer Ivan Stupak made it clear who the old fossil was: "Fedorov is an iPhone 16, Syrskyi is a telephone from the 1980s.”

One soldier told The New York Times: “Right now, we are facing the enemy. We believed that there were no enemies behind our backs, in our rear. As it turns out, there are.”  Another noted: “Almost all conversations right now are about this.” This is not what you want on the front lines. 

President Zelensky is likely to survive this, as he did a corruption scandal last summer. He’s holding lots of meetings, including with both General Syrskyi and Mr. Federov, who promises: “There will definitely be changes.” “Decisions regarding the army will be worked out,” the president promised in a statement.

Meanwhile, General Syrskyi defends himself:

The strangest accusation I’ve heard is that I supposedly ‘don’t want to fight with drones,’ A person who ‘does not want to fight with drones’ does not create the world’s first separate branch of unmanned systems and does not appoint a commander to it, contrary to all traditions of the military hierarchy.

Fair points. I suspect that Mr. Fedorov did push harder than the military establishment was comfortable with, while that establishment did, in fact, adopt radically new tactics out of the sheer desperation of the situation. But, at some point, push came to shove.

I have to note that, with all the lessons Ukraine has learned/taught about the new era of war, the vaunted, hugely expensive U.S. military has seemed flummoxed by the same Iranian drones Ukraine has battled for four years. Despite all the new, tech-based military start-ups across the world, experts predict that the old guard military contractors will still rake in 80% of military spending by 2033.  

Credit: Boston Consulting Group

Lockheed Martin, for example, has taken lots of criticism for how expensive its Patriot missiles are, and for how long they take to produce, so they’re introducing a new, cheaper version: it only will cost $2 million per missile. I don’t think they’re reading the room, or the battlefield, correctly.

 It’s amazing the Ukraine has held on this long, and is now even taking the fight to Russia. But no one who has attempted innovation in a big corporation or in a big industry can be surprised at this drama. Change is hard. Status quo doesn’t give up easily.

The point isn’t that the future of war is drones, or even AI drones. The point is that the future of war – and, in an AI world, the future of every industry -- is constant, rapid innovation. We are not living in a time when the status quo can hold.

Value Is in the Eye of the Beholder

The most (unintentionally) amusing story I read this week was Tim Higgin’s Wall Street Journal article Alex Karp Is Saying What Every Angry CEO Is Thinking About AI. Dr. Karp (yes, he has a Ph.D.), co-founder and CEO of Palantir Technologies, is upset about how AI companies are using relationships with their business customers to harvest data and business insights from those customers. “Something has gone completely wrong,” he fumed.

AI is collecting our data; why aren't we being paid? Credit: Microsoft Designer

Now, this is Palantir, mind you; it may not have invented surveillance capitalism but it might have perfected it. It has become essential to government and large corporations across the world. Most of us are aware of how tech companies like Meta or Google give us “free” services that exist primarily to collect more data on us, which they then use to target ads to us, but Palantir’s data collection and analysis operate at a level we often don’t recognize.  But make no mistake; it is using our data, and not necessarily in our best interests.

Mr. Higgins quotes former White House AI czar David Sacks in support of Dr. Karp’s concerns:

Anthropic has launched Claude Science, Claude Security, Claude Legal, and of course Claude Code—each expanding into categories previously served by companies building on top of their models. The pattern is consistent: Watch where value is being created, then move in directly. Dominate the model layer, then use that position to capture the most lucrative verticals.

So it is delicious irony that Dr. Karp and others are finding themselves at the wrong end of the power inequality with their data.

I find myself thinking about healthcare when I think above this new wave of data collectors/ synthesizers. It seems pretty clear that the AI companies aren’t going anywhere, and are expected to reshape most industries, including healthcare. Lots has been written about AI’s use in healthcare, including by me. It is both inevitable and, in many cases, desirable. Now this issue of AI’s insatiable appetite for data makes me wonder if we’re looking at things wrong.

I’ve worked in healthcare for longer than I care to admit, and at no point did people not complain that healthcare in general, and health insurance in particular, was too expensive. And yet, costs have kept rising. We’re closing in on $6 trillion in U.S. healthcare expenditures. No matter what kind of health insurance you have – large employer, small employer, ACA Marketplace, Medicare Advantage, even Medicare Supplements for traditional Medicare – your premiums (and/or out-of-pocket costs) are likely going up at rates we haven’t seen in years.

Two well known facts about rising costs are, one, that it is not so much we’re using too many services as it is that Americans pay way higher prices for healthcare than in most countries, and, two, that a relatively small percentage of people account for the vast majority of healthcare spending. The latter has an insidious effect on health insurance premiums, as people with fewer expenses are less likely to have or keep health insurance, making premiums for the remaining people higher. Nobody wants to pay for the people who use a lot of health care, but they want other people to help pay if they end up being one of those people. It’s a conundrum.

Now, optimists hope that AI can do a better job of identifying all the wasted, unnecessary, or inappropriate care we use – estimated as much as one-third – and help make administration more efficient; current levels are estimated as 15-30% of spending. Good goals, both of them, and it is entirely plausible that AI can help with both. But it would still remain that sick people are the “problem” with our health care spending and health insurance premiums, and I want to propose a different way of looking at them.

Healthcare generates massive amounts of data, increasing all the time. Some estimates put it well in the exabyte level, which, trust me, is way more than any of us can comprehend. We generate data when we go to the doctor, when we get lab work, when we fill a prescription, when we go to the hospital, even when we use a wearable like a smartwatch. All those health insurance claims and all those healthcare bills generate data. And, yet, most of that data isn’t effectively used, which I sure hope AI does something about.

So we have a system in which the people who use more health services generate more data, and an AI industry that craves data. This seems like it should be a match made in heaven.

Why couldn’t we have a healthcare system in which AI companies pay people generating healthcare data for that data? I.e., instead of heavy users of healthcare being drivers of spending, they become a valuable resource? And, oh-by-the-way, why aren’t we being paid for our data?

Our data, healthcare data included, is being shared, bought and sold now. Sometimes it is deidentified (supposedly), sometimes not. Either way, we’re not the ones getting paid for it. That should change.

Now, realists will point that that “value” of our healthcare data is nowhere near the costs of our health care, so paying for the latter with the former is impractical. I’ll grant that is currently true, but I’ll also ask: why is that?

I’d argue that our health data is grossly undervalued, because the companies using it are used to getting it so cheaply, and that our health services are wildly overpriced. Reorienting the system so that the former funds the latter should bring them closer into equilibrium.

If data is, as has been said, the new oil, then I’ll point out that oil was also once very cheap, until enterprising people figured out that they could control the supply and thus raise the price virtually at will. We should be those people when it comes to our data, especially our healthcare data.

So I’ll be amused at Dr. Karp being faux outraged at other data companies profiting off of his company’s data, and I’ll hope that we have a fundamental rethinking about who generates value in our data world and how that value is realized. There can’t be a better place to do this than in healthcare.

Life Not As We Know It

Well, let’s see. Laat week much of the U.S. and parts of Europe were under a crippling heat dome. The U.S. celebrated its 250^th birthday. And there’s something called the World Cup going on, for those of you who care about such things. But, I mean, really, the news of the week? SpudCell.

It may not look like much, but SpudCell is close to synthetic life. Credit: Orion Venero, Adamala Lab

OK, maybe you missed that one. If you are not a fan of science, or of synthetic biology in particular, news about it might not have shown up in your feeds, or perhaps you thought it was another ploy by the Potato Association of America to get you to buy even more potatoes. SpudCell is something truly new: “the world’s first synthetic cell with a complete life cycle, built entirely from non-living chemical components.”

Take a minute to take that description in.

“SpudCell performs the behaviors often used to tell the living from the inert — it feeds, grows, replicates its genome, divides and undergoes selection — yet it is far simpler than any natural cell and was assembled, part by part, by hand,” the project researchers wrote in a statement.

It was designed and built by researchers at the University of Minnesota, announced last week along with a preprint of their paper. The team was led by Professor Kate Adamala, and the name is either due to its supposed resemblance to a potato or it’s a play on “Sputnik.”

“This is likely the most exciting project I've ever worked on,” said Professor Adamala. “We’ve replicated in chemistry what only used to be possible in biology: the complete set of behaviors of a cell. It proves that the most fundamental functions of life, like growth and replication, do not need a mysterious magical spark.”

Scientists have been working for decades on stripping away genetic material from living cells to try to find the minimum necessary for life, but Professor Adamala and her team went the other way, gradually building up genetic material until it started behaving in ways we’d expect cells to.

The impressive thing is that the team engineered everything SpudCell does. As The Economist put it: “Everything the resulting cells do, they do because of molecules that Dr Adamala’s team put there. That leaves no room for mysteries.” That’s not true when researchers start with living cells.

Drew Endy, a synthetic biologist at Stanford University, told Carl Zimmer of The New York Times, “It’s a cell that was built, not born. It’s constructed, but it does what cells do.”

SpudCell is very basic. The human genome has about 3 million kilobase pairs (kbp); SpudCell has 90. And, instead of a single chromosome, SpudCell’s genome is split across seven separate DNA plasmids, while allows researchers to program various cell functions independently.

Whether SpudCell qualifies it as “life” is murky. Professor Adamala cautioned: “Life is not binary. That’s why I’m hesitant to call this ‘alive.’ There’s no clear line, as much as we would love it to be.”

For example, SpudCell doesn’t make its own ribosomes, using ones from e coli bacteria instead, which means it can only replicate for 5-10 generations before things degrade. It also needs some help feeding, with nutrient-carrying liposomes having to be added regularly. But, still; not bad for 90 kbp.

Other scientists are pretty impressed. “Kate Adamala’s team designed and built a nonliving synthetic cell that is much closer to being ‘alive’ than anything else produced by the bottom-up synthetic cell field,” said John Glass, who leads synthetic cell research at the J. Craig Venter Institute. ”It is dazzling that she has put these things all together.”  

“This is a stunning scientific achievement,” says Roseanna Zia, a computational cell biologist at the University of Missouri.

Prof Tom Ellis, at Imperial College London, told The Guardian the work was probably the field’s “biggest breakthrough in recent times,” further explaining: “Making a synthetic cell helps us understand the exact minimum requirements for life and how life might have emerged from chemistry. It’s also useful as it provides a fully understood system for testing biological circuits and computer models of cellular life.”

Professor Adamala admits that in some ways SpudCell is “as dumb as it gets,” and likens it to the Wright brothers’ first airplane, noting that researchers who start with real cells are “like an engineer that’s given a full Dreamliner without all the plans.” Dr. Endy also used the Wright brothers analogy, telling Mr. Zimmer: “The Wright flyer flying for 12 seconds doesn’t get you a 737. This is just the beginning.”

Professor Adamala, along with Professor Endy and two other researchers, have founded Biotic, a public-benefit nonprofit research organization to further the research. They hope to create a shared technical infrastructure for synthetic cell engineering, with a mission “to responsibly enable and steward foundational advances in bioengineering.”

To help other scientists use SpudCells in their research, the Biotic site includes detailed protocols for building SpudCells. It notes: “While our motivation for this research is to make biology a general purpose technology, usable freely by all, we are currently operating in the sandbox environment.” 

Early days.

Professor Adamala says:

This work is just the beginning. We are showing it’s possible to engineer the basic functions of the cell. To fully realize the promise of this technology – to make it robust and practical – we need combined international effort. The role of Biotic is to focus engineering efforts and make them compatible with a shared chassis. SpudCell is that chassis, and with Biotic setting the protocols for collaboration, we are eager to start applying this technology to serious challenges.

“This work demands our attention, not for what has been produced but for where it leads,” Dr. David A. Relman, a microbiologist at Stanford University, told K.R. Callaway of NYT, adding: “It is creative, disruptive and provocative in revealing what might be possible in the not-so-distant future.”

“Creative, disruptive, and provocative” -- music to my ears.

The University of Minnesota announcement makes clear the hope for synthetic biology in general, and SpudCell in particular:

Cells built from scratch could perform molecular transformations industrial chemistry cannot. That could first transform molecular medicine, building precise therapeutic molecules including drugs incorporating amino acids evolution never used. We could see materials that are grown, rather than synthesized, and manufacturing approaches that operate at biological temperatures, not industrial ones. Underneath it is a truly engineerable platform, which SpudCell provides for the first time.

OK, maybe the researchers didn’t “create life,” but the Wright brothers crashed many times before they succeeded. I love this idea of building from the bottom, and I’m rooting for SpurCell to grow up.