The Very First Sin

I. Genesis

In the principal sacred text of Christians, a story is told of creation. Of how words were spoken, and things became.

Not to make it sound dramatic, but words were uttered and swoosh… Magic! Let there be light, and there was light. Let there be water, land, plants, seasons, creatures of every kind — and there were. One by one, word by word, the world filled up. And on the sixth day of creation, the blueprint for humanity was first declared

“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (English Standard Version (ESV)).

And there was man. The very first Man. Adam.

Follow me on this thought yea… After Adam was made, he was given a task — to give identity to the world around him, of shaping meaning itself. God brought every living creature to him, and Adam named them. All of them. Every animal, every beast of the field, every bird of the air. He named them.

Which means he was thinking. Already! So what changed?

In the well-known story of the forbidden fruit, In Genesis 3, the serpent says to Eve “eat that fruit, and your eyes will be opened. You will be like God, knowing good and evil”. And they ate. Both of them. And boy, did they see thingssssss…. their eyes opened. However, that ‘awareness’ didn’t make them powerful. What followed, surprisingly, was shame. They hid. They covered themselves. They were afraid.

And this is where the thread becomes a bit harder to follow. Adam’s mind was already a mind in motion. He had already been given dominion, already gave form to creation through language. So it wasn’t the thinking that was the SIN. It was something else. Something about this particular knowledge — knowing good and evil — that broke something open in them. Made them suddenly, terrifyingly aware.

Aware of what, exactly? I don’t know. I genuinely don’t know. Aware of consequences? Of mortality? Of the gap between what they were and what they now understood themselves to be?

Whatever it was, they were afraid of it. They hid from it.

So, I suppose that was the ‘VERY FIRST SIN’. Not the sin of thinking. Not even the sin of knowing. But the sin of being afraid of what you know, and how that knowledge could ultimately lead to something…. yunno

We, humans, are a restless species. Strangely enough, that very awareness of our finiteness has become the spark that makes creation possible, the ignition point for everything we dare to build. We were terrified of what we knew. What’s worse, we’re even more terrified of being forgotten.

II. And yet, We Build…

As we move through human history, we see that we have —mostly, tried to not repeat that sin. Somehow, despite that first terror, despite generations of being told that some things were ‘JUST NOT MEANT FOR HUMAN HANDS’, we have invented, we have created,and we have marked ourselves in the sands of time. We have thought, and then we made. Fire. The wheel. Written language. The printing press. Penicillin. The transistor. The internet. Each one of these, at some point in history, felt like an overreach. Like playing God (— which we all are, if we are to go by the story of creation). Like eating the fruit again.

And maybe it was. Maybe every inventor, every scientist who pushed past the edge of what was considered possible, was reenacting something like that first sin in their own way. Reaching for knowledge they weren’t supposed to have. Building things they weren’t supposed to build. Striving beyond what had been written off as impossible.

And my oh my, the things we have built…. How extraordinary they have been! Genuinely, unmistakably extraordinary. We’ve sequenced the human genome. We can communicate across the world in seconds. We’ve sent machines to Mars. We just sent four astronauts on a 10‑day journey around the Moon and back (NASA calls it the start of a new era of exploration). We’ve built vaccines that have eradicated diseases that once tore through entire civilisations.

And still. And still……..

People are dying of things we cannot fix, of things we still haven’t found the solution for. People are dying of things, that even with the tools we have — even our best ones — continue to outsmart our understanding, our medicine, and our models. It’s almost like we don’t understand them. Surgery requires physical access. Drugs diffuse everywhere and can’t always find what they’re looking for. Diagnosis often comes too late. And for a whole category of diseases — genetic anomalies, congenital disorders, rare conditions where the body simply made something wrong at the blueprint level, we have very little to offer. Management, sometimes. Cure, rarely.

We’ve been building for thousands of years, and this gap is still very much here.

That bothers me.

III. The Gap

Looking back, we already had catastrophic asymptomatic infectious diseases like HIV. Tuberculosis. Malaria. Dengue fever. Cholera and a host of others, way before COVID. And, for some reason, we never fully committed to completely eradicating them. HIV was a gay disease. Tuberculosis belonged to the poor. Malaria was an African problem. Dengue, cholera — those were things that happened to people in certain places, certain conditions, certain bodies, certain socioeconomic class. Not everyone’s problem. Not urgent enough.

I can’t, for the life of me, tell you what made COVID-19 different. Was it because it suddenly affected everyone, crossing every demographic, irregardless of socioeconomic or sexual status? Estimates suggest that somewhere between 40 and 60 percent of COVID transmission happened from people who had no idea they were sick. By the time we could see it, it was already everywhere. The death toll alone was staggering. Suddenly, the urgency that had never quite materialised for all those other diseases came. Loudly. Globally.

“Better late than never, but never late is better”

We’re here now, at this point, and what I keep coming back to is this: we were not wrong to primarily focus on treatment. I mean, given the history, the urgency and the sheer scale of what these diseases were doing to human bodies, of course treatment came first. Drugs, vaccines, surgery - all of that was (still is) the right instinct. Extraordinary work has been done here and I won’t diminish it. However, treatment and monitoring could have been built in parallel. They didn’t have to compete. And I think the lane we largely didn’t build — monitoring at a biological, molecular level, the ability to know what is happening inside the body before it becomes a symptom, before it becomes a storm — is the gap that keeps costing us. Because if we knew earlier, more precisely, what was happening and where, we wouldn’t just catch diseases sooner, we would have a far wider menu of things to do about them. Treatment options multiply when you have time. Therapies become more targeted when you know exactly what you’re targeting. And somewhere further down that road, advances like genetic intervention — repair at the level of the code itself — becomes not a fantasy but a next step.

We can’t just keep getting better at fighting fires - they keep coming. We also have to build a smoke detector.

Set epidemics and pandemics aside for a moment. What about war zones? Remote areas? Places where hospitals don’t exist, where surgeons can’t reach, where the infrastructure for modern medicine has collapsed or never existed in the first place? From the WHO’s Universal Health Coverage materials (summarized across their UHC indicators and global health statistics): “At least half of the world’s population still does not have full coverage of essential health services.”. We have the knowledge to save lives in those places, just a muddled unclear way of delivering it.

And then there’s the question that sits beneath everything else I’ve said. Genetic disease. Congenital disorders. The weight of a genetic mistake embedded in the DNA, carried by every cell in the body. We’ve made progress with gene therapy. CRISPR-Cas9 has opened doors that felt sealed shut a decade ago. But we’re still working at the edges. We still can’t, in most cases, reach inside a living body and repair the code at the source. There are millions of people every year, for whom, what the best medicine can currently offer is not enough, sometimes nowhere close.

IV. Biomimicry- The Solution, methinks!

Nature has had 3.8 billion years to test designs through evolution. Biomimicry taps into that efficient, resilient, adaptable, and elegant library of solutions.

The human body runs a system of extraordinary complexity and precision. Only in immunology alone, we see the activities of white blood cells patrolling and identifying foreign threats at the molecular level, in the bloodstream. Macrophages engulf and destroy foreign invaders. T-cells remember past invaders and respond faster the second time. When one gets a cut, a cascade of signals fires off — platelets, clotting factors, repair. When a cell goes rogue, the immune system often catches it before it becomes anything. This is the core of immune surveillance, a concept detailed extensively in Janeway’s Immunobiology - chapters on immune surveillance and tumor immunology.

Biology already has swarm intelligence — millions of cells, each following simple local rules, producing coordinated global behavior, undergoing self-replication, self-repair, targeted delivery, and waste management. The issue is that it doesn’t always get it right. And it can’t always be directed.

And in here, is where I see an opening. Cuz what if, with all we’ve gleaned from biology, we could build something — a system that doesn’t just imitate life, but operates on the very logic life uses, at that scale, with that precision — that could be directed, guided, told where to go, what to seek, what to repair. Something that communicates the way bacteria communicate — through chemical signals, through quorum sensing, through distributed decision-making with no central authority.

Medical nanorobotics. Nanoscale robotic systems, operating inside the human body, built to navigate the bloodstream, detect anomalies at the molecular level, and deliver targeted treatment to exactly the right place. Inspired by biology itself. The distance between this and a functioning system remains, but it’s not so far off.

Monumental, yes. I will not pretend otherwise. But take a look at what we, as a species, have already accomplished.

"If you can believe, all things are possible. 
              (Mark 9:23)"

Every extraordinary thing we’ve ever built started as a sentence someone said out loud that sounded too large to be real.

And here I am, saying it OUT LOUD.

"Possibilities live within the thin space between 
         what exists and what could exist.”

V. What this series is

I couldn’t possibly write on all we have worked on, up to now, all in one post. This is huge. What we’re working on touches across domains of fluid mechanics, nanophysics, swarm intelligence, reinforcement learning, genetics, immunology, materials science, and several others, some of which we are still in the process of knowing (–I mean, what better way to learn than by doing!), some of them we’re experts in.

So this will be a series. A research paper blog, in the truest sense of the word. I’ll write what we find, what breaks, what surprises me, why certain choices and routes were taken. I’ll include results, graphs, and the occasional failed simulation. I’ll over-explain things. I’ll under-explain others and then circle back when I realise I left you behind.

It is going to be imperfect - which is why it isn’t in Nature yet .Lol!

I have committed my first sin. I do not know how it will end. Yet, we meuveeee…

Let’s see what happens.

P.S: In a bid to make things accessible, I will inevitably fall into the sin of over-explaining, and in doing so, will inevitably muddle the very thing I was trying to say. Please forgive me. I’m quite new to writing at this level of technical depth. I will improve. I promise I will improve.