(2019-02-01) The Death Of A Dreamer Quillette

The Death of a Dreamer. At school, back in North Carolina, Austen Heinz had been bullied, sometimes badly—the combination of his physical slightness and social illiteracy had seen to that.

But now, at the age of 30, he was living a few blocks from his own laboratory

Among the Silicon Valley cognoscenti, Heinz was seen as a major rising talent. His idea and his company, Cambrian Genomics, was about to change everything.

Not everyone was convinced of the viability of Heinz’s ambitions. Some found his speculations about the possibilities offered by synthetic genomics hopelessly quixotic. But others continue to believe that history will one day crown Heinz one of the heirs of information age visionary Douglas Engelbart—a restless, optimistic, socially-maladjusted prophet of the oncoming Synthetic Age in which the project isn’t to augment human intelligence, but humans themselves.

he was sure he knew how to do it. This was at the end of 2014. In less than six months, he would be dead.

As a kind of trial run for his technology, he and some colleagues decided to create a glowing shrub by copying some DNA code from a firefly, printing it out, and inserting it into the cells of a plant. Their test worked

He founded Cambrian Genomics and raised $10,000,000 from venture capitalists including PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel.

He also became a frequent guest at tech conferences, and it was at one of these that a chain of events was set in motion that would lead eventually to his death.

Welcoming one of these partners onstage, Gilad Gome of Petomics, he talked about the idea of changing the smell of faeces and gastric wind and using it as an alert that a person was unwell. “When your farts change from wintergreen to banana maybe that means you have an infection in your gut,” he said. He introduced Sweet Peach as a similar project. “The idea is to get rid of UTIs and yeast infections and change the smell of the vagina through probiotics,” he said.

In the audience, a journalist from Inc.com decided that what he was hearing was “astonishingly sexist.”

“These Startup Dudes Want to Make Women’s Private Parts Smell Like Ripe Fruit” ran the headline at Inc.com later that day. The story zipped around the web, being swapped and swapped and swapped again on social media, the outrage rapidly amplifying

“It was pretty heart-wrenching to see him suffer like that in the media,” Heinz’s sister, Adrienne, told me.

She says he couldn’t stop talking about it.

Because of what was going on in the media, investors began backing out of Cambrian Genomics. One of Heinz’s business advisors compared his reputation in the industry to that of Bill Cosby. He’d been trying to raise a second round of funding and now he thought he’d have to start laying people off. The timing was terrible: they’d been encountering difficulties with the laser and needed all the brains they could get

By the end of 2014, Heinz was suffering physically. “He was like a walking corpse,” said Adrienne. “He’d stopped eating, stopped sleeping

In March, Heinz ordered a selection of ropes from the internet and tried to hang himself in his apartmen

The family took him on a break to wine country and staged an intervention.

They had him committed in San Diego.

On 27 May 2015, a member of the Cambrian Genomics team opened up the laboratory after the long weekend, and discovered his body. Austen Heinz had hanged himself. He was 31. (suicide)

Adrienne: “He never received a formal diagnosis of bipolar disorder,” she said, citing his medical records. “I was bothered that this was published and not fact-checked. The only formal diagnosis he received was major depressive disorder. Austen saw mental-health providers at various points in his early adult life.