Finally Todd arrives to usher the seven into the cool bright space. Carmen, Kierk, and Alex start barraging him with questions, and he raises his hands for them to desist.

“Okay, so clearly there’s a lot of interest here. Very exciting for me. But maybe the best way to do this is to give a general tour. You can ask your questions as they come up. Okay?”

There is a brief chastised silence. Carmen notices in her peripheral vision that Jessica just rolled her eyes at Mike, and also that the two have been standing close together the whole time. Leon interrupts her thoughts by clearing his throat loudly above the humming of fans and equipment—“I think we all agree.”

“Alright. Everybody follow.”

While Todd talks them through the rows of shelves and open lab spaces, Carmen steals the occasional glance at Greg, who seems less talkative than usual—she wonders if he somehow knew the email to her had been sent.

“On the methodology. First we take the fibroblast samples from your skin. We take those skin cells and reprogram them. Basically we induce pluripotency again. We do this by using retroviruses to insert genes that encode transcription factors into the cells. These genes are then read by the cell’s own internal machinery, and then revert back to pluripotency. Effectively, we’ve transformed an adult cell back into its original embryonic state. Which means that from there it can differentiate into anything.”

“What happens if you just let it grow?” Carmen asks.

“It develops into a teratoma—a cancer basically, a big cell mass, but it would still manage to produce the normal germ layers: endoderm, mesoderm, and ectoderm. You might find some hair or teeth or something, some stuff that looks like gut. For the cerebral organoids we removed the part that differentiates into the central nervous system and grow it separately.”

They’re all grouped outside the door to a Faraday cage, waiting for Todd as he continues describing the process, until finally Carmen yells—“Just let us in!” to general laughter.

As they enter—“The organoids grow in Matrigel, which is just this substance that gives it all the nutrients it needs to develop. Once it’s grown enough to attach to the dish we transplant it into a separate bioreactor.”