A Week of Hard Science, Harder Questions
Moderna and Merck reported that their experimental mRNA cancer vaccine cut death rates in melanoma patients by 42%, reducing the risk of recurrence in a disease that kills roughly 8,000 Americans annually. At the same time, federal health agencies are pulling back from mRNA research broadly – a tension that sits at the center of where American biomedical policy is heading. Meanwhile, a new gene editor reached its first human patient, Starlink speeds in Ukraine remained capped despite public assurances otherwise, and Palmer Luckey announced a startup to genetically enhance military dogs with $200 million already in the bank. It was not a slow news week.
MIT Technology Review’s latest issue – titled the “Impossible” issue – frames this moment well: a handful of technologies that have spent years or decades stuck in the “almost there” category are finally being stress-tested against reality. The publication ran progress reports on six of them, from exercise pills to nuclear-powered spacecraft, asking experts what’s actually holding each one back. The findings will be unpacked across several days of newsletters.
Science is moving. Whether the institutions around it can keep up is a separate question entirely.
Gene Editing Goes Clinical, and Gets More Complicated
The biggest medical development of the week was the arrival of prime editing in a human patient. The technique – which rewrites DNA rather than simply cutting it – has been used in liver cells, marking a significant step beyond earlier CRISPR-based approaches that could only delete or disrupt genetic sequences. Prime editing allows researchers to make precise substitutions, correcting mutations at the letter level rather than leaving the genome to repair itself imperfectly.
That milestone landed the same week that Bloomberg reported companies are actively planning gene-edited babies, which is a reminder that clinical firsts rarely stay contained to their original medical context. The infrastructure being built for legitimate therapeutic use – the delivery mechanisms, the regulatory frameworks, the public tolerance – will eventually be tested by applications far outside what any single trial was designed to address. The prime editing achievement in liver cells is real and meaningful on its own terms. The broader landscape it enters is not straightforward.
Colossal Biosciences, the company best known for its work on de-extinction, is also entering the gene-editing conversation through a different door. The firm will assist with Palmer Luckey’s Warhound startup – a new venture that plans to clone and genetically enhance military dogs for explosive detection and troop protection. Warhound has raised $200 million from investors including Sequoia Capital. The dogs, Luckey says, will be purpose-bred for combat environments in ways that selective breeding alone cannot achieve on a useful timeline.
Starlink, Surveillance, and the Infrastructure of Trust
Donald Trump said publicly this week that Elon Musk had restored full Starlink access for Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said speeds remained capped. The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump had asked Musk to lift those speed limits – meaning the request was made and the outcome is still disputed. Satellite internet access is now a live variable in active conflict negotiations, which is a sentence that would have read as fiction five years ago.
Elsewhere in surveillance news, Dutch intelligence services reportedly hacked Jared Kushner’s iPhone, according to Vanity Fair, with the report alleging the operation was tied to investigating financial links between Kushner and foreign officials. The Pentagon, separately, is developing an AI-powered lie detector – a project MIT Technology Review has covered directly. The combination of AI-assisted interrogation tools, compromised personal devices at the highest levels of government, and contested communications infrastructure in active warzones paints a picture of digital trust that is deteriorating faster than the systems meant to protect it are being built.
On the cybersecurity front, a newly disclosed PHP vulnerability has not yet yielded successful attacks, though experts note the flaw is harder to exploit than initially feared. Officials pushed patches after related vulnerabilities forced websites offline worldwide. The catch, as The Economist noted, is that publicly disclosed fixes also give hackers a roadmap – a paradox that sits at the core of responsible disclosure debates that have no clean resolution.
Energy, Narrative, and What Gets Missed
Google announced it will pay residential customers to reduce energy consumption during peak demand periods, as part of a virtual power plant program designed to ease the load on grids strained by data center growth. The company will reward people financially for adjusting their energy usage. Google is also under scrutiny for illegally felling 250,000 trees in Finland to make space for a data center, according to the Guardian – a detail that arrived in the same news cycle as the demand-reduction program, and which illustrates how quickly green infrastructure narratives can become complicated by the actual footprint of building that infrastructure.
Fossil fuels, according to new research, may have interrupted what was otherwise a 2,000-year trajectory toward a new ice age. Modern warming reversed that long-term cooling trend entirely. The finding does not change the calculus on emissions, but it does add a layer of geological context to a debate that is usually conducted entirely in near-term economic and political terms.
MIT Technology Review editor Jessica Hamzelou attended a screening of You Can See Everything, the new documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, and came away with a concern she described as central to science journalism: that appealing narratives are easy to believe, and that even rigorous coverage has structural blind spots. The film’s title is pointed – it is, among other things, an argument that the press, investors, and regulators were each watching and still missed what was happening at Theranos. Hamzelou used the occasion to ask how science gets covered, and what readers are actually seeing when they read a story that says an experiment worked.
That question sits underneath nearly everything else in this particular week’s news: a cancer vaccine that works while the agencies funding mRNA research retreat, a gene editor reaching a patient while other labs plan edited embryos, a satellite network that is either restricted or open depending on who you ask. The most interesting technology stories right now are not about whether something is possible. They are about who gets to say what happened.
