Who am I? I’m nobody. I was cut from every team in high school. I didn’t go to an Ivy League college. I don’t make six figures. My wife constantly cheats and recounts it to me. My teen-age children do not speak to me.
All I have in the world is a paternal aunt and a tank of fish that love me. And my work. I’m nobody.
But every day for the past forty years, I’ve got up in the morning and tried to figure out how to get tiny shards of plastic into human testicles. Specifically, into the testicles of one very resilient test subject, Leonard W.
I’m not sure when we humans first decided to give a genuine try to getting a piece of plastic inside a man’s testicles. The 1971 horror film “Little Plastic Army Man in My Testicles” may have planted the idea, although that film deserves no other accolades, and should probably be categorized as a hate crime for its portrayal of the Vietnamese. But it proved to put a bee in the bonnet of the United States government, which has given us more than five hundred million dollars to get a piece of plastic into a man’s testicles, ideally before the Russians do.
This story is from the August 26, 2024 edition of The New Yorker.
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This story is from the August 26, 2024 edition of The New Yorker.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
Drug of Choice - The natural world contains many billions of potential medications. The question is how to find the ones that work.
AI. is transforming the way medicines are made. Bacteria produce numerous molecules that could become medicines, but most of them aren’t easily identified or synthesized with the technology that exists today. A small percentage of them, however, can be constructed by following instructions in the bacteria’s DNA. Burian helped me search the sequence for genes that looked familiar enough to be understandable but unfamiliar enough to produce novel compounds. We settled on a string of DNA that coded for seven linked amino acids, the same number found in vancomycin. Then Burian introduced me to Robert Boer, a synthetic chemist who would help me conjure our drug candidate.
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