Review by Booklist Review
Bronson (What Should I Do With My Life? 2002) and Gupta, executives at IndieBio, have teamed up to write the first book of a trilogy covering complex issues in the sciences. Creatively using media headlines as their chapter titles (e.g., "The Parasite, by a Modern Kafka," a 1985 New York Times article), the authors explore relevant topics such as COVID-19, futurism, urban planning, genetic engineering, neurology, artificial intelligence, the environment, and more. In chapters that are narrative driven and not very long, Bronson and Gupta recount their experiences in IndieBio and interactions with the book's topics. Readers will gain a wide perspective on the connections between science and globalization, and how countries respond to scientific and technological issues and innovations. For example, China is developing sophisticated technologies in manufacturing more rapidly than any other country. Biotechnology, scientific experiments, and research are made understandable for the layperson. Readers will find the authors' scientific analyses and explanations of complex, impactful topics to be insightful, timely, and written with clarity and even humor at times.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Biotech entrepreneurs Bronson and Gupta take a largely unrewarding look at big questions in science and tech, from how artificial intelligence will impact jobs, to how genetic engineering will reshape demographics. The disorganized format wanders from one topic to another, with little or no connection between them, as when a section on China's role in developing new urban infrastructure ends with the authors declaring they need to "do a chapter about plants," because people love them. Though the authors claim readers will see, over the course of the book, a "classic Hollywood role reversal" in which "Arvind learns to think slower to build bigger" and Bronson "to act faster to see further," little such development is evident. Instead, the book is dominated by a jokey and sophomoric tone, as when one author spends pages imagining a conversation with Marvel's Tony Stark character. Their conclusions are unsatisfying (they determine, for instance, that Americans who try to stand up for human rights in China will only harm themselves economically) and sometimes unsourced (they decide that there will not be any designer babies in the future because no parents will want them.) Readers interested in a thoughtful guide to serious questions can give this a pass. (Oct.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A walk on the weird side of biotech and other trends with journalist Bronson, now a partner at venture capital firm IndieBio, and Gupta, who founded the company. The San Francisco--based company funds stranger-than-fiction projects such as growing hamburger in petri dishes, and much of this book reads like a public relations vehicle for Bronson and Gupta's "supremely cool" company and its industry. Taking turns narrating, the co-authors meld bromance, corporate history, and dispatches from the wilder shores of five supertrends: "China," "Climate," the "Genetic Revolution," the "War on Truth" and "A.I. & Robots." Some of the 33 chapters--with titles that consist of bizarre real-life headlines that are sometimes only tangentially related to their contents--e.g., "Meet the Pope's Astronomer, Who Says He'd Baptize an Alien If Given the Chance"--end with screenshots of the authors' gnomic text-message conversations. With dizzying leaps, the authors jump from topic to topic: how China is bankrolling global urban development, biotech advances such as a robot drone that plants trees, gene-editing kits used in high school classrooms, and "gummy bears" made from resynthesized proteins of a wooly mammoth. Often, the authors seem too ready to accept iffy claims, some from sources with financial ties to IndieBio. Gupta describes two minutes he spent up to his neck in ice-cold water at the urging of Dutch extreme athlete Wim Hof; Gupta didn't seriously challenge Hof's view that Gupta wouldn't get sick on his flight home because the plunge "fully activated [his] immune cells"--a potentially dangerous idea in a pandemic. Elsewhere, the authors serve up an alphabet soup of scientific terms that may deter anyone who hasn't memorized the periodic table. The paradoxical result is a book--the first in a trilogy--that may daunt low-tech readers while proving too glib for the more scientifically literate. Let's hope Bronson returns to form in the second volume. An awkward mix of hard and soft science from the frontiers of genetics and other fields. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
