Publishers Weekly
08/31/2020
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.)
From the Publisher
"Like being a fly on the wall of the world's most interesting dinner party. Spectral, scary, stupefying, and yet strangely optimistic, DECODING THE WORLD is a journey through the weirdness and wondrousness of the natural world, and our precarious place within it. Required reading for restless times."—James Nestor, New York Timesbestselling author of Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art
"YES! This is it. The Big Book of Answers you've been looking for. It's kind and funny. It explores and explains. Think of it as a guide book to the human animal for the 21st century."—Noah Hawley, creator of Fargo
"Fascinating and terrifying. Gupta and Bronson bring biotech to the people, demystifying the anxieties of our fraught and fragile times."—Fatima Bhutto, author of The Shadow of the Crescent Moon
"DECODING THE WORLD is an absolute delight. Bronson and Gupta have tackled complex, often daunting scientific topics and made them come alive for the reader in a way that amuses and enthralls, while also delivering some urgent calls to action. This is one of the most creative, entertaining, and inspiring looks into the future that you will ever find."—Ashlee Vance, New York Times bestselling author of Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future
"Buddy stories have led to number of Hollywood classics, ranging from The Odd Couple to 48 Hours. In DECODING THE WORLD, Po Bronson and Arvind Gupta take us several hundred miles up the California coast for a new buddy story that uncovers the biotech startup world. In these tales of friendship and exploration, Bronson and Gupta show us how biological engineering is emerging as a dominant technology of this century, one that will help change our world for the better."—James J. Collins, MIT and Harvard bioengineer
"In DECODING THE WORLD, [the authors deliver]...bold visions for the future...Their experiences fuel interesting discussions about pressing issues and trailblazing science. [And] ask us to rethink everything from government sugar subsidies to the ways we test for disease."—San Francisco Chronicle
"These two headed off to explore knowledge, invention, art, superstition, maybe even salvation and have emerged with what looks like the planet's first atlas of apocalypse avoidance."—Jack Hitt, author of Bunch of Amateurs
Kirkus Reviews
2020-07-22
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.
