A West Coast biotech entrepreneur says he’s secured $30 million to form a public-benefit company to study how to safely create genetically edited babies, marking the largest known investment into the taboo technology.  

The new company, called Preventive, is being formed to research so-called “heritable genome editing,” in which the DNA of embryos would be modified by correcting harmful mutations or installing beneficial genes. The goal would be to prevent disease.

Preventive was founded by the gene-editing scientist Lucas Harrington, who described his plans yesterday in a blog post announcing the venture. Preventive, he said, will not rush to try out the technique but instead will dedicate itself “to rigorously researching whether heritable genome editing can be done safely and responsibly.”

Creating genetically edited humans remains controversial, and the first scientist to do it, in China, was imprisoned for three years. The procedure remains illegal in many countries, including the US, and doubts surround its usefulness as a form of medicine.

Still, as gene-editing technology races forward, the temptation to shape the future of the species may prove irresistible, particularly to entrepreneurs keen to put their stamp on the human condition. In theory, even small genetic tweaks could create people who never get heart disease or Alzheimer’s, and who would pass those traits on to their own offspring.

According to Harrington, if the technique proves safe, it “could become one of the most important health technologies of our time.” He has estimated that editing an embryo would cost only about $5,000 and believes regulations could change in the future. 

Preventive is the third US startup this year to say it is pursuing technology to produce gene-edited babies. The first, Bootstrap Bio, based in California, is reportedly seeking seed funding and has an interest in enhancing intelligence. Another, Manhattan Genomics, is also in the formation stage but has not announced funding yet.

As of now, none of these companies have significant staff or facilities, and they largely lack any credibility among mainstream gene-editing scientists. Reached by email, Fyodor Urnov, an expert in gene editing at the University of California, Berkeley, where Harrington studied, said he believes such ventures should not move forward.

Urnov has been a pointed critic of the concept of heritable genome editing, calling it dangerous, misguided, and a distraction from the real benefits of gene editing to treat adults and children. 

In his email, Urnov said the launch of still another venture into the area made him want to “howl with pain.”  

Harrinton’s venture was incorporated in Delaware in May 2025,under the name Preventive Medicine PBC. As a public-benefit corporation, it is organized to put its public mission above profits. “If our research shows [heritable genome editing] cannot be done safely, that conclusion is equally valuable to the scientific community and society,” Harrington wrote in his post.

Harrington is a cofounder of Mammoth Biosciences, a gene-editing company pursuing drugs for adults, and remains a board member there.

In recent months, Preventive has sought endorsements from leading figures in genome editing, but according to its post, it had secured only one—from Paula Amato, a fertility doctor at Oregon Health Sciences University, who said she had agreed to act as an advisor to the company.

Amato is a member of a US team that has researched embryo editing in the country since 2017, and she has promoted the technology as a way to increase IVF success. That could be the case if editing could correct abnormal embryos, making more available for use in trying to create a pregnancy.

It remains unclear where Preventive’s funding is coming from. Harrington said the $30 million was gathered from “private funders who share our commitment to pursuing this research responsibly.” But he declined to identify those investors other than SciFounders, a venture firm he runs with his personal and business partner Matt Krisiloff, the CEO of the biotech company Conception, which aims to create human eggs from stem cells.

That’s yet another technology that could change reproduction, if it works. Krisiloff is listed as a member of Preventive’s founding team.

The idea of edited babies has received growing attention from figures in the cryptocurrency business. These include Brian Armstrong, the billionaire founder of Coinbase, who has held a series of off-the-record dinners to discuss the technology (which Harrington attended). Armstrong previously argued that the “time is right” for a startup venture in the area.

Will Harborne, a crypto entrepreneur and partner at LongGame Ventures, says he’s “thrilled” to see Preventive launch. If the technology proves safe, he argues, “widespread adoption is inevitable,” calling its use a “societal obligation.”

Harborne’s fund has invested in Herasight, a company that uses genetic tests to rank IVF embryos for future IQ and other traits. That’s another hotly debated technology, but one that has already reached the market, since such testing isn’t strictly regulated. Some have begun to use the term “human enhancement companies” to refer to such ventures.

What’s still lacking is evidence that leading gene-editing specialists support these ventures. Preventive was unsuccessful in establishing a collaboration with at least one key research group, and Urnov says he had harsh words for Manhattan Genomics when that company reached out to him about working together. “I encourage you to stop,” he wrote back. “You will cause zero good and formidable harm.”

Harrington thinks Preventive could change such attitudes, if it shows that it is serious about doing responsible research. “Most scientists I speak with either accept embryo editing as inevitable or are enthusiastic about the potential but hesitate to voice these opinions publicly,” he told MIT Technology Review earlier this year. “Part of being more public about this is to encourage others in the field to discuss this instead of ignoring it.”

Science Corporation—a competitor to Neuralink founded by the former president of Elon Musk’s brain-interface venture—has leapfrogged its rival after acquiring, at a fire-sale price, a vision implant that’s in advanced testing,.

The implant produces a form of “artificial vision” that lets some patients read text and do crosswords, according to a report published in the New England Journal of Medicine today.

The implant is a microelectronic chip placed under the retina. Using signals from a camera mounted on a pair of glasses, the chip emits bursts of electricity in order to bypass photoreceptor cells damaged by macular degeneration, the leading cause of vision loss in elderly people.

“The magnitude of the effect is what’s notable,” says José-Alain Sahel, a University of Pittsburgh vision scientist who led testing of the system, which is called PRIMA. “There’s a patient in the UK and she is reading the pages of a regular book, which is unprecedented.”  

Until last year, the device was being developed by Pixium Vision, a French startup cofounded by Sahel, which faced bankruptcy after it couldn’t raise more cash.  

That’s when Science Corporation swept in to purchase the company’s assets for about €4 million ($4.7 million), according to court filings.

“Science was able to buy it for very cheap just when the study was coming out, so it was good timing for them,” says Sahel. “They could quickly access very advanced technology that’s closer to the market, which is good for a company to have.”

Science was founded in 2021 by Max Hodak, the first president of Neuralink, after his sudden departure from that company. Since its founding, Science has raised around $290 million, according to the venture capital database Pitchbook, and used the money to launch broad-ranging exploratory research on brain interfaces and new types of vision treatments.

“The ambition here is to build a big, standalone medical technology company that would fit in with an Apple, Samsung, or an Alphabet,” Hodak said in an interview at Science’s labs in Alameda, California in September. “The goal is to change the world in important ways … but we need to make money in order to invest in these programs.”

By acquiring the PRIMA implant program, Science effectively vaulted past years of development and testing. The company has requested approval to sell the eye chip in Europe and is in discussions with regulators in the US.

Unlike Neuralink’s implant, which records brain signals so paralyzed recipients can use their thoughts to move a computer mouse, the retina chip sends information into the brain to produce vision. Because the retina is an outgrowth of the brain, the chip qualifies as a type of brain-computer interface.

Artificial vision systems have been studied for years and one, called the Argus II, even reached the market and was installed in the eyes of about 400 people. But that product was later withdrawn after it proved to be a money-loser, according to Cortigent, the company that now owns that technology.

Thirty-eight patients in Europe received a PRIMA implant in one eye. On average, the study found, they were able to read five additional lines on a vision chart—the kind with rows of letters, each smaller than the last. Some of that improvement was due to what Sahel calls “various tricks” like using a zoom function, which allows patients to zero in on text they want to read.

The type of vision loss being treated with the new implant is called geographic atrophy, in which patients have peripheral vision but can’t make out objects directly in front of them, like words or faces. According to Prevent Blindness, an advocacy organization, this type of central vision loss affects around one in 10 people over 80.  

The implant was originally designed starting 20 years ago by Daniel Palanker, a laser expert and now a professor at Stanford University, who says his breakthrough was realizing that light beams could supply both energy and information to a chip placed under the retina. Other implants, like Argus II, use a wire, which adds complexity.

“The chip has no brains at all. It just turns light into electrical current that flows into the tissue,” says Palanker. “Patients describe the color they see as yellowish blue or sun color.”

The system works using a wearable camera that records a scene and then blasts bright infrared light into the eye, using a wavelength humans can’t see. That light hits the chip, which is covered by “what are basically tiny solar panels,” says Palanker. “We just try to replace the photoreceptors with a photo-array.”

The current system produces about 400 spots of vision, which lets users make out the outlines of words and objects. Palanaker says a next-generation device will have five times as many “pixels” and should let people see more: “What we discovered in the trial is that even though you stimulate individual pixels, patients perceive it as continuous. The patient says ‘I see a line,’ “I see a letter.’”

Palanker says it will be important to keep improving the system because “the market size depends on the quality of the vision produced.”

When Pixium teetered on insolvency, Palanker says, he helped search for a buyer, meeting with Hodak. “It was a fire sale, not a celebration,” he says. “But for me it’s a very lucky outcome, because it means the product is going forward. And the purchase price doesn’t really matter, because there’s a big investment needed to bring it to market. It’s going to cost money.”  

During a visit to Science’s headquarters, Hodak described the company’s effort to redesign the system into something sleeker and more user-friendly. In the original design, in addition to the wearable camera, the patient has to carry around a bulky controller containing a battery and laser, as well as buttons to zoom in and out. 

But Science has already prototyped a version in which those electronics are squeezed into what look like an extra-large pair of sunglasses.

“The implant is great, but we’ll have new glasses on patients fairly shortly,” Hodak says. “This will substantially improve their ability to have it with them all day.” 

Other companies also want to treat blindness with brain-computer interfaces, but some think it might be better to send signals directly into the brain. This year, Neuralink has been touting plans for “Blindsight,” a project to send electrical signals directly into the brain’s visual cortex, bypassing the retina entirely. It has yet to test the approach in a person.

OPINION — For most of modern history, asymmetric conflict conjured a familiar image: guerrillas in the hills, insurgents planting roadside bombs, or terrorists striking with crude weapons. The weak have traditionally offset the strong with mobility, surprise, and a willingness to take punishment.

That world is vanishing. A new age of synthetic asymmetry is emerging, one defined not by geography or ingenuity but by the convergence of technologies that enable small actors to wreak large-scale disruption. Unlike past asymmetry, which grew organically out of circumstance, this new form is engineered. It is synthetic, built from code, data, algorithms, satellites, and biotech labs. Here, “synthetic” carries a double meaning: it is both man-made and the product of synthesis, where disparate technologies combine to produce effects greater than the sum of their parts.

The implications for global security are profound. Power isn’t just about the size of an army or the depth of a treasury. It’s increasingly about who can combine technologies faster and more effectively.

A Brief History of Asymmetry

The weak finding ways to resist the strong is as old as conflict itself, but each era has defined asymmetry differently – shaped by the tools available and the political conditions of the time.

Nineteenth and 20th century resistance fighters, from Spain’s guerrilleros against Napoleon to Mao’s partisans in China, pioneered strategies that leveraged terrain, mobility, and popular support to frustrate superior armies. These methods set the template for Vietnam, where North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces offset American firepower by blending into the population and stretching the war into a contest of political will.

The late 20th century brought new asymmetric forms. In Afghanistan, the mujahideen used Stinger missiles to neutralize Soviet air power. In Iraq, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) became the great equalizer, allowing insurgents to impose costs on heavily armored U.S. forces. Al-Qaeda and later ISIS demonstrated how transnational terrorist networks could project power globally with minimal resources, using ideology and spectacular violence to substitute for armies.

By the early 2000s, the cyber domain opened an entirely new front. The 2007 attacks on Estonia, widely attributed to Russian actors, showed that digital disruption could cripple a modern state without conventional force. Just three years later, the Stuxnet worm revealed how code could achieve effects once reserved for kinetic strikes, sabotaging Iranian nuclear centrifuges. These incidents marked the beginning of cyber as a core tool of asymmetric power.

The Arab Spring of 2011 revealed another evolution. Social media allowed activists to outmaneuver state censorship, coordinate mass mobilizations, and project their struggles globally. Authoritarian regimes learned just as quickly, harnessing the same tools for surveillance, propaganda, and repression. Asymmetric power was no longer only about insurgents with rifles; it could be exercised through smartphones and hashtags.

What began as the playbook of the weak has now been eagerly adapted by the strong. Russia weaponized social media to influence elections and deployed “little green men” in Crimea, deniable forces designed to blur the line between war and peace. Its use of mercenary groups like Wagner added a layer of plausible deniability, allowing Moscow to project power in Africa and the Middle East without formal commitments. China has fused state and private industry to pursue “civil-military fusion” in cyberspace, using intellectual property theft and digital influence campaigns to achieve strategic goals without firing a shot. Even the United States, though historically the target of asymmetric tactics, has employed them, using cyber operations like Stuxnet and financial sanctions as tools of coercion.

This adaptation by great powers underscores the shift: asymmetry is no longer just the recourse of the weak. It has become a strategic option for all actors, strong and weak alike. These episodes trace an arc: from guerrilla tactics shaped by terrain to a world where asymmetry is engineered by design.

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Convergence as a Weapon

Synthetic asymmetry is not the product of a single breakthrough. It’s a result of technologies intertwining, with emergent results exceeding the sum of the parts.

● Artificial intelligence and autonomy turn cheap drones into swarming strike platforms and enable generative AI-fueled propaganda that is instantly localized, highly scalable, and adapts in real time.

● Biotechnology, leveraged by the democratization of tools like CRISPR and gene synthesis, opens doors to agricultural sabotage, engineered pathogens, or personalized biotargeting once confined to elite labs.

● Cyber and quantum computing erode modern infrastructure–today through leaked state tools in criminal hands, tomorrow through quantum’s threat to encryption.

● Commercial space assets put reconnaissance and global communications in reach of militias and small states.

● Cryptocurrencies and decentralized finance fund rogue actors and blunt the power of sanctions.

● Undersea infrastructure opens a highly asymmetric chokepoint, where low-cost submersibles or sabotage can sever global fiber-optic cables and energy pipelines, inflicting massive economic damage.

This is less about any one killer app than about convergence itself becoming a weapon.

Asymmetric warfare has always been about imbalance, but the shift to synthetic asymmetry is an exponential leap. A single phishing email can cripple a city’s infrastructure. Off-the-shelf drones can threaten billion-dollar ships. AI-powered disinformation efforts can destabilize national elections. This new ratio of effort to impact is more disproportionate than anything we’ve seen before.

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Where Synthetic Asymmetry Is Already Here

Ukraine's defense shows what convergence looks like in practice. Commercial drones retrofitted for combat, AI-assisted targeting, crypto-based crowdfunding, and open-source satellite intelligence have allowed a middle-sized country to hold its own against one of the world’s largest militaries. The drone is to the 21st century what the AK-47 was to the 20th: cheap, accessible, and transformative.

In Gaza, reports suggest AI-driven targeting systems have accelerated lethal decision-making. Proponents say they improved efficiency; critics warn they lowered thresholds for force and reduced accountability. Either way, the software changed the calculus of war. When algorithms operate at machine speed, traditional political checks on violence weaken.

Iran has demonstrated how low-cost drone technology can harass U.S. naval forces and regional shipping. These platforms cost a fraction of the vessels and missile defenses required to counter them. Combined with cyber probes against Gulf energy infrastructure, Iran illustrates how synthetic asymmetry allows a mid-tier state to impose global strategic costs.

China’s campaigns against Taiwan go beyond military intimidation. They include AI-generated disinformation, synthetic social media accounts, and coordinated influence operations designed to erode trust in democratic institutions. This is synthetic asymmetry in the cognitive domain, an attempt to shift political outcomes before shots are ever fired.

In parts of Africa, mercenary groups operate with funding streams routed through cryptocurrency wallets, supported by commercial satellite communications. These mercenaries operate in gray zones, blurring the line between private enterprise and state proxy. Accountability vanishes in a haze of digital anonymity. Ransomware gangs, meanwhile, already display near-peer disruptive power. They freeze hospitals and pipelines, extract ransoms, and launder funds through crypto markets. Add generative AI for phishing and deepfake voices for fraud, and these groups begin to resemble stateless proto-powers in the digital realm.

The Private Sector as a Geopolitical Actor

Synthetic asymmetry also elevates the role of private companies. Commercial satellite firms provided Ukraine with near-real-time battlefield imagery. SpaceX’s Starlink network became essential to Kyiv’s communications, until its corporate leadership balked at enabling certain military uses. Crypto exchanges, meanwhile, have been both conduits for sanctions evasion and partners in enforcement.

These examples reveal a new reality: private entities now hold levers of power once reserved for states. But their interests are not always aligned with national strategies. A tech CEO may prioritize shareholder value or brand reputation over geopolitical objectives. This creates a new layer of vulnerability—governments dependent on private infrastructure must negotiate, persuade, or regulate their own corporate champions to ensure strategic alignment. The private sector is becoming a semi-independent actor in world politics.

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The Cognitive and Economic Fronts

Perhaps the most destabilizing form of synthetic asymmetry lies in the cognitive domain. Deepfakes that impersonate leaders, AI-generated news outlets, and precision microtargeting of narratives can shape perceptions at scale. The cost of attack is negligible; the cost of defense is nothing less than the integrity of public discourse. For democracies, the danger is acute because open debate is their lifeblood.

Synthetic asymmetry also reshapes geopolitics through finance. North Korea has bankrolled its weapons programs through crypto theft. Russian oligarchs have sheltered assets in opaque digital networks. Decentralized finance platforms move billions across borders beyond the reach of traditional oversight. This financial shadow world undermines sanctions, once a cornerstone of Western statecraft, and allows actors to sustain pressure that would once have been crippling.

Why Democracies are Both Vulnerable and Strong

Herein lies the paradox: democracies are more exposed to synthetic asymmetry precisely because of their openness. Their media, economies, and political systems are target-rich. Legal and ethical constraints also slow the adoption of equivalent offensive tools.

Yet democracies hold underappreciated strengths: decentralized command cultures that empower rapid adaptation, innovation ecosystems that thrive on openness and collaboration, and alliances that allow for collective defense. The task is to recognize culture itself as a strategic asset and to organize defense not around any single domain, but across all of them.

Ethical and Legal Frameworks in Flux

The rise of synthetic asymmetry is colliding with international law and norms written for an earlier era. The legal status of cyber operations remains contested: is a crippling ransomware attack on a hospital an act of war, or a crime? The Tallinn Manual, NATO’s best attempt at clarifying how international law applies in cyberspace, remains largely aspirational.

AI-driven weapons systems pose even sharper dilemmas. Who is accountable when an algorithm selects a target in error? Should lethal decision-making be delegated to machines at all? The pace of technological change is outstripping the slow processes of treaty-making, leaving a widening gap between capability and governance, a gap where much of the risk resides.

Beyond Cold War Deterrence

Traditional deterrence, threatening massive retaliation, works poorly in a world of synthetic asymmetry. Many attackers are diffuse, deniable, or stateless. They thrive in gray zones where attribution is murky and escalation is uncertain.

What’s required is not just more technology, but a new doctrine for resilience: one that integrates cyber, cognitive, biological, economic, and space defenses as a single system. That doctrine has not yet been written, but its absence is already being exploited. At ISRS, we see this convergence daily, working with governments and institutions to adapt strategies for engineered asymmetric disruption.

We are at a hinge moment in strategic affairs. Just as the machine gun upended 19th-century doctrine and nuclear weapons reordered 20th-century geopolitics, the convergence of today’s technologies is reshaping the distribution of power. The future won’t be decided by who fields the biggest army. It will be decided by who can synthesize technologies into a disruptive force faster. That is the coming age of synthetic asymmetry. The question is whether democracies will recognize it and prepare before it fully arrives.

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Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

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