MOLECULAR STREAMING
FOR LIFE

FREE OF DISEASE?!

Yes, a world and a life basically free from disease—not right away, but within a decade of globally deployed Universal Molecular Streaming (UMS).

UMS means anyone will be able to look at any and all molecules from around them and inside them (thus, “universal”). “Streaming” refers both to molecules moving through tiny sensors, and to digitally streaming information about the molecules.

With UMS, you’ll see viruses and microbes every time you use the bathroom. At sufficient scale, that will end most infectious disease transmission.

Next up is cancer. UMS will end the vast majority of suffering and death from cancer through extremely early accurate detection. We know that early molecular warning signs are there in everything you flush away. UMS will allow longitudinal, continuous, population-scale testing for and discovery of these biomarkers.

But what about aging? And heart disease? And what about actually curing existing cancers and infectious disease? How will just detecting molecules lead to cures and not just prevention?

All of biomedical research depends on “seeing” molecules. At the level that our technical roadmap aspires to—high-throughput, single-molecule, able to “see” anything without a special tag for each thing—this is extremely complex and expensive. Our project will vastly reduce the cost and complexity of use, essentially turning your toilet into what would now be the molecular sensing infrastructure of a million dollar research lab.

There are currently on the order of roughly one hundred thousand “million dollar biomedical research labs” on Earth. We believe UMS will be as commonplace as electricity and internet, vital utilities for the world. Out of 2.5 billion toilets, let’s ensure that a billion of them have UMS by 2045.

Based on those numbers, UMS will provide the pure data equivalent of ten thousand times the world’s current capacity for molecular information. And it will be longitudinal, personal, local molecular information, in a world where (obviously) many more people will be aware of molecular reality, and presumably many, many more people will have professional-level fluency and satisfiable curiosity in molecular biology, biomedicine, and synthetic biology.

Really think about this—it’s a major, permanent upgrade to the intellectual culture of our civilization. Keep this in the back of your mind, and in the next few days, you’ll encounter multiple things randomly that will make you think of reasons that we need to build UMS. They are all around us, and inside us.

Want to satisfy your intellectual curiosity about all of this? Check out our science page.