I brought the science, and Sean brought the fiction. How a novel partnership built Synthetic Eden into a hard science fiction take on modern bioethics and genetic engineering.

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You are why I write this newsletter, and I'd like to say thank you with an advanced reader copy of my debut novel. You helped make this a reality, so be one of the first to read the story.

It wasn’t that long ago—2018—that the biggest bioethics story in the world was CRISPR Baby Scientist Goes to Prison . The Chinese researcher He Jiankui announced the birth of twin girls whose genomes he had edited in an attempt to confer HIV resistance. The backlash was immediate and global: scientists condemned it, governments tightened oversight, and He was tried and sentenced to three years in prison.

When we first started writing this novel, we called it On the Wings of a Pig — a placeholder name that captured the strange blend of wonder and tragedy we were building: a genetically engineered future shaped by hope, desperation, and ambition. It was a working title, a way to signal that the story was wild and unexpected.

There’s something quietly radical about the idea that a junior scientist—someone who’s never designed a CRISPR experiment before—can now walk into a wet lab and, on their very first attempt, edit the genome of a human cancer cell with precision and purpose.

There’s a moment—somewhere in the quiet space between hypothesis and imagination—when science fiction stops feeling like fiction at all. I remember it clearly. We were outlining the premise of On the Wings of a Pig , building the scaffolding of a story that spanned lightyears and lifetimes.

I first read this paper in graduate school. It wasn’t assigned. I found it on my own—probably during one of those late-night deep dives into the internet, half reading for a lab presentation, half procrastinating from a dataset that just wouldn’t behave. The paper is called “Narrative Style Influences Citation Frequency in Climate Change Science,” and it’s exactly what it sounds like.

When I set out to write On the Wings of a Pig , I didn’t expect to end up writing it with anyone else. The core idea was mine, born from years spent straddling the line between bioengineering and policy, steeped in existential frustration at how little attention we give to the collapse of the living world around us, and how much a lot of my conversations felt like science fiction. I had the science. I had the stakes. I had the vision.