Epic Quest Bio™ is a role-playing game that serves as the management system

1Epic Quest Bio™ is a role-playing game that serves as the management system of the real-life biotech startup Molecular Reality Corporation.

3We're on an epic quest to free mankind from disease.

5All sentient beings subject to disease are welcome to play.

7I'll explain here what Molecular Reality Corporation is building, how it could eradicate disease, why we're managing the project in the form of a game, and how to play. Then you'll see the enrollment form, and you'll be able to start playing right away.

9SEEING MOLECULES--THE KEY TO IT ALL

11Today if you think you've got covid, you might buy a test kit from CVS, stick a long cotton swab deep in your nose, spin it three times, pull it out, put it in a placard, drop some buffer into a hole above the cotton to immerse whatever you plucked from your sinus abyss into a mix that then creeps up the length of a thin strip of paper coated with molecules that grab parts of SARS-CoV-2 so you'll see a stripe of color form if there's enough of it there. And if you don't see the color you're left in the dark and it can tell you nothing else.

13And in 2025 that's the state of the art for over the counter molecular detection of viral infections.

15For cancer, there are many molecules to look for, but nothing you can easily buy or easily use to look for them.

17In 2025, if you might have cancer, you endure a gauntlet of doctor's appointments and tests performed by technicians using large, expensive instruments. You might also take blood tests that, despite much hype, more often than not fail to detect early stages. If you're lucky you have the insurance or wealth to cover the multi-thousand-dollar cost of your possibly slightly reduced uncertainty.

19As for aging (the main contributor to cancer and the biggest cause of biological suffering, by far) everybody has a death sentence, and you can't count on a pardon from future biotech. (We haven't been to the moon in five decades. Progress is not inevitable!)

21Right now, if you hope to mitigate the suckiness of aging, you might order blood tests and change your diet. Avid life extensionists might go above and beyond, starving for the faint hope offered by caloric restriction. If you're wealthy, you might pursue obsessive luxury regimens. But despite it all, whether anything beyond a simple healthy diet, good sleep, and regular exercise will matter in the long run is far from assured.

23What all these problems have in common is the need to "see" things too small to see with your own eyes—the constituents of molecular reality.

25For covid, it's the little spiky monsters that killed seven million people in the last half decade.

27For cancer, it's many different things, some of them well-known and very strongly predictive, some of them still obscure, and many still to be discovered. Many of them exist in urine which is nicer than having to get poked with a needle, but over-the-counter tests are still at least a few years away, and will only warn of a few specific cancers.

29For aging, the problem isn't warning; in 2025, there's no advanced molecular assay that beats the bathroom mirror. The problem is the hopelessness of intervention by known means, rooted in how little biomolecular complexity we grasp. And when we do, someday soon, hopefully, get real rejuvenation medicine, it will be highly personalized, so you'll still need to "see" lots of molecules.

31We should be "seeing" molecular reality, from everyone and everywhere, right at home. Every day, we flush the secrets of human biology, the keys to predicting and treating diseases, down billions of toilet drains.

33But what if that wasn't the case, and cheap, robust, powerful devices in toilet drains could get all that information, and you could see it all yourself?

35What if those devices could replace any and all liquid lab tests you might ever need, so cancer and infectious disease would never catch you by surprise?

37And what if, when enough of us use such devices every day, all clinical trials become fully personalized, and we let the whole world of biomedical researchers study the data?

39If I'm right about what that would mean for all of us, no amount of money, effort, time, attention, and struggle is too much to achieve it. It seems to me an essential part of human destiny, like getting to the stars, but even deeper than that.

41We would rapidly find ourselves in a world in which infectious agents have a very hard time spreading between people. But when something does get into you that you don't want in you, you'll see that you've caught it before you even feel symptoms, and when you do that early enough, your odds of surviving go way up and how long you'll feel sick goes way down. If that's all we were trying to do here, it would be one of the most important things we've ever done as a species. But, it's just the beginning.

43Not long after that, cancer would go from being an Emperor of Maladies to a manageable inconvenience. Extremely early detection would be the norm.

45And a few years beyond that, we would have a world in which biological aging, and all the suffering that comes with it, becomes optional.

47The devices themselves won't cure people—people will cure people. But the people will have access to more and better data they've ever dreamed of having.

49And, with the equivalent of an advanced biomedical laboratory, in your toilet, YOU just might be the scientist who saves you, especially if you've built up the background that you'll gain from playing this game with us in the coming years.

51WHAT WE'RE BUILDING PHYSICALLY

53Our technical mission is to build "utility-scale solid-state universal high-throughput single-molecule sensing". You could also call it "a billion biomedical labs" (functionally equivalent!) or Universal Molecular Streaming™ (for the marketing team! Better suggestions welcome). Let's break this down:

55Utility-scale: Like electricity or running water, this will be a seamless part of daily life. By 2040, observing molecular reality could be as effortless as turning on a faucet. Every bathroom could host a portal to another universe. People will look back in horror at our era—where almost all of us are blind to the nanoscale, suffering the consequences of that blindness.

57Solid-state: Devices won't require special binding molecules to detect targets (a dead-end approach for robust, cheap, universal tech).

59High-throughput single-molecule sensing: Current lab tests need millions of identical molecules to "see" anything. We'll detect and count molecules one at a time (single-molecule) and enough of them in a short period of time (high-throughput) to get statistically valid information.

61Universal: Detect virtually any water-soluble molecule, even unknown ones. With analytically universal sensors (nearly synonymous with solid-state), you'd never fear mirror-life, engineered pandemics, or biochemically alien microbes on Mars.

63We'll drill into the "how" of all of this in a moment. But, first:

65SOME POPULAR KNEEJERK REACTIONS & HOW I RESPOND

67When I describe this vision, there are a handful of predictable immediate objections.

69"You sound like Theranos!"

71You may have a case of Theranos Derangement Syndrome. Don't worry, just take 15 milligrams of Epic Quest Bio™ for a complete recovery.

73What Theranos tried to do was entirely in the realm of the possible. Trying was not the crime. Tens of thousands of honest people, in labs, startups, and corporations all over the world, work toward similar goals. More people should know this!

75"I already heard about such-and-such company selling Smart Toilets that do this!"

77No, you didn't, but you might have thought that's what you heard about. What you actually heard about was any of various products and prototypes that use well-established technologies to measure things like body weight, hydration levels, pH, blood oxygenation, heart rate, and a small number of known biomarkers for certain infections or diseases. That's cool, and complements what we're doing, but our goals are radically more ambitious.

79"If we just installed more air filters and UV-C lights we'd have a huge impact on cancer and infectious diseases without some big epic quest for new technology!"

81100% agree. Clean filtered air with UV lamps to kill viruses would save millions of lives every year. So would banning ultraprocessed foods, getting more people to take statins, and killing all mosquitos. These are not technological challenges, they're human psychology challenges. Even basic sanity is an epic quest!

83I want all that to happen, but I don't know how to do it with the status quo. I'm pretty sure I know how to develop technologies that do an end-run around human self-subversion.

85I say: do good, in the way that calls to you. We're all on Team Basic Sanity.

87"This is a waste of time, superintelligent AI will cure all diseases and is the only thing worth working on!"

89An ocean of talented humans with ungodly resources are betting their lives on that, but short of genie-level magic emerging from AI systems, I don't see how they'll cure all diseases without what we're building.

91The scenarios where I'm wrong are apocalyptically unpredictable anyway, and outcomes range from paradise to hell. There are people trying to do something about all that, and I wish them luck.

93Full-speed ahead with human-led biotech!

95"There is no technology that can do what you're saying!"

97Agreed! There is no technology yet that can measure, identify, characterize, discover, and count any type of molecule in a compact, affordable, durable, easy-to-use device one can install in a toilet. There are no sci-fi level "portals to molecular reality".

99But there *is* a clear (but epic!) path to such a technology, based on decades of work and tens of thousands of research papers, and even our own early proofs-of-concept at Molecular Reality Corporation. We already have mountains of evidence that Universal Molecular Streaming™ can be built, but even so it will still take several years and thousands of caring creative nerds to actually build it. That's the whole enchilada! Or, rather...

100

101THE HOLE ENCHILADA

102

103There was once an inventor named Wallace Coulter. A few years after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he got to thinking about how radiation sickness could be diagnosed quickly in a large population of survivors. It would require taking blood samples and counting specific blood cells, particularly white blood cells and platelets, to assess bone marrow damage. He had watched how this was done back then in hospital labs: a technician would stare through a microscope and count individual blood cells, one at a time, with a small handheld device they clicked to increment a mechanical counter. This process was a slog, and would obviously fail for a horde of survivors in desperate need of triage.

104

105To automate the process of cell counting, Coulter invented the Coulter Counter.

106

107Coulter Counters are based on a simple idea. If you put two electrodes into a salt solution and apply a voltage, you get a current running between the electrodes. The current is carried by the anions and cations from the dissolved salt. If you insert a thin, insulating barrier, the current stops, because there's no path for the ions to carry the charge from one electrode to the other.

108

109But if you then poke a tiny hole in the barrier, a tiny current flows again.

110

111If you then add blood, and if the hole is not too big or too small, and you gently suction one side of the apparatus, you'll pull single cells through, and as they pass, each one displaces its own volume of charge-carrying saltwater. If you're measuring the current with an oscilloscope, you'll see blips as the current drops with each passing cell.

112

113If you're Wallace Coulter and his brother Joseph in a makeshift lab in the basement of your home in Chicago in 1948, you're trying this for the first time in human history. The first insulating barrier you test is made of cellophane from a pack of cigarettes. You make the first hole by poking a needle through the cellophane. You prick your finger to get blood, maybe with the same needle. You use a battery to apply the voltage, and an oscilloscope to measure the current. You watch the oscilloscope screen as you add the blood, and see the first blip that tells you it's working like you imagined it would.

114

115Fast forward seventy-seven years, and it turns out you pioneered the most heavily used medical diagnostic test on the planet: the complete blood count (CBC). Tens of thousands of hospital labs on Earth use it every day. Almost all the instruments that perform it are still, essentially, Coulter Counters. It has saved millions of lives.

116

117Outrageously, you didn't win a Nobel Prize in Medicine for it. You merely established the basic technological concept by which Universal Molecular Streaming™ will lead to a world free from disease.

118

119Let us now let Wallace Coulter and his brother Joseph rest in glory, and describe how far beyond CBCs their concept has taken us in the seventy-seven years since they poked the cellophane.

120

121JOURNEY TO ANGSTROMIA

122

123As decades passed, researchers figured out how to use holes thousands of times smaller, holes the size of single proteins and even smaller.

124

125If you're not 15 years into hiding under a rock to avoid popular science articles, you've heard about one of the types of holes, protein-based nanopores, that form from natural proteins. The star of the show was alpha-hemolysin, a toxin that bacteria use to punch holes in red blood cells. Turns out, if you stick one of these protein pores in an artificial membrane and thread DNA through it, you can read the genetic sequence as it passes. Oxford Nanopore Technologies turned this trick into a multi-billion dollar business, making DNA sequencers the size of USB sticks.

126

127But biopores are not going to get us to Universal Molecular Streaming™. They're fragile. They don't last for more than a few days. They need very specific conditions. They can only detect certain types of molecules. They're like having a key that only opens one lock, when what we need is a skeleton key for the entire molecular universe.

128

129Solid-state pores range in size from the macroscopic ruby apertures used to measure moon dust down to sub-nanometer pores through which single-stranded DNA can just barely squeeze. They can last indefinitely under the right conditions, can be fabricated and regenerated in some cases using only electricity, and can even be mechanically adjusted in size and shape in real-time (Molecular Reality Corporation actually pioneered one particular form of that).

130

131In the past few decades, heroic scientists (if you've ever been in the trenches in one of these labs, you know why I say "heroic"—this stuff requires heroic endurance, persistence, and patience) have done many very heroic (and not at all yet off the shelf or easy!) things with nanopores.

132

133Nanopore scientists have figured out how to trap a single molecule and send it back and forth through the same pore hundreds of times. Each pass gives a slightly different signal, and averaging them together creates measurements so precise they can detect differences smaller than a hydrogen atom.

134

135Proteins are flamboyant. They're not just different sizes; they tumble, spin, stretch, and fold into different shapes. Nanopore scientists have found ways to track such gymnastics, along with measuring size, shape, electrical charge, which way they're facing, and how fast they're spinning. You can even catch proteins folding, the still-mysterious process whereby floppy strings of amino acids somehow assemble into functional shapes.

136

137Some researchers built nanopores with built-in quantum dots made of silicon. These dots can electronically "taste" individual amino acids as they slide past, potentially reading protein sequences letter by letter. Others flipped the whole measurement scheme sideways, measuring current across the pore walls instead of through the hole. This opens up entirely new ways to read molecular information.

138

139The thinnest nanopores are made from graphene, a sheet of carbon just one atom thick. Other nanopores use tiny gold structures that concentrate light into the sensing zone, amplifying faint signals. Some are decorated with DNA origami structures that work like molecular bouncers, only letting certain guests through the door.

140

141Each breakthrough brings us closer to devices that can identify any molecule, but it's going to take Epic Quest Bio™ to reach the finish line.

142

143EVERYTHING IS HARD, or, HOW YOU COULD SPEND $500M & NOT MAKE A DENT IN THIS PROBLEM

144

145There's a common metaphor that's really strange if you think about: describing really complex things as "rocket science". You could probably give an intuitive understanding of rockets to a caveman with pantomime and stick drawings in the sand. They're just tubes that you point up at the sky, they're stuff inside that makes a big boom, fire comes out of the bottom, and off it zooms into the sky. What's so hard about that? I did my first successful launches as a six year old with matches, tin foil, and a paperclip launching pad. Why would anyone ever need billions of dollars and a team of thousands to figure this stuff out?

146

147Of course, that's not how real life works. You could absorb a long bookshelf of dense technical volumes about rocket science and engineering and still watch your rockets explode repeatedly on the launch pad, even with all the money and talent in the world trying hard not to do that.

148

149Likewise, I've made nanopore tech sound simple, but it's taken billions of dollars and millions of mind-hours to get us where we are.

150

151But nanopore sensing as an R&D challenge has one advantage over other holy-grail technology development paths like nuclear fusion and quantum computers: a solid-state nanopore R&D lab can fit in the palm of your hand. That's what the MR1 Molecular Streaming Device is, basically.

152

153If you have $300 and want one of the first ones, we'll put your order in the queue. If you can't afford it yet, play Epic Quest Bio™ and help us reach our goal of being able to give the first thousand of them away.

154

155ABOUT ME, TO SOME EXTENT

156

157Before we get into the game itself, you should know who's behind all this, and get a chance to see some cool stuff that may draw you further in.

158

159I've used "we" here to refer to the early contributors to our mission, and aspirationally, to the thousands of geeks and gamers and dreamers and visionaries like you I hope to recruit to play our game.

160

161But who am I? Call me "Kemmishtree." It's partly my actual name, and partly a silly pun that a lab partner gave me years ago. You may ask: where did I go to school?... what are my credentials?... who have I worked with and where?... You can easily find all that out, but it's not what matters.

162

163Name-dropping makes Kemmishtree sad. Never mind the impressive people I've worked with, the august institutions, the cloud capp'd towers. Nevermind affiliations, credentials, all the meretricious social proof signalling that buzzes like a Harrison Bergeron implant when people like me flex with all such blah-blah-blah. Let me SHOW you some of the things I (and/or We) have either done or helped do.

164

165If some of the nano/techno eye candy you'll glimpse doesn't fill you with wonderment, you probably won't have *fun* playing Epic Quest Bio™. But if you see the kind of stuff, and you just have to know more, you're in the right place.

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168

169HOW TO PLAY EPIC QUEST BIO™

170

171Not long after I realized that an army of Player Scientists™ was a better way to build analytically-universal compact molecular sensing at home (Universal Molecular Streaming™!), I realized that even the entire coordination structure needed was better served by a game than by a standard-issue VC-backed biotech startup.

172

173I realized that *everything* we need to do as a startup can and should be gamified, and so I started designing Epic Quest Bio™.

174

175I was partly inspired by the Dungeons & Dragons campaigns I played as a child to realize that all the roles that one can play in a biotech startup can be thought of as "character classes", just like those in D&D.

176

177The enrollment form will ask you to choose two character classes, one as a "major" and one as a "minor".

178

179Pick your character classes based on a mixture of two things: what you're actually best at in real life, and what you want to learn about and get better at.

180

181EPIC QUEST BIO™ CHARACTER CLASSES

182

183Barbarian

184What did you think the fighter/warrior type class would do in a startup roleplaying game? Obviously, getting that almighty dollar! In the red-in-tooth-and-claw world of biotech startup fundraising, you've gotta be a bit barbaric. If you're going to be a Barbarian, you must eat crushing rejection for breakfast, while laughing about it. Where more sensitive souls get clinically depressed at the first "we'll be cheering from the sidelines", hollow and patronizing investor speak just amuses you. You'll storm the gates of finance, armed with nothing but the coolest idea in all of biotech and your fierce moral and intellectual courage. You're the treasure-hunting champion who ensures the guild never has to pursue advanced biotech toolkit development while living in cardboard boxes on Skid Row.

185

186Bytebender

187You can code. Whatever form that takes, whatever is needed. Whether it's helping finish the tile-world MMORPG that thousands of future Epic Quest Bio™ players will navigate, working on the advanced machine learning algorithms we'll feed millions of nanopore experiments into, managing exabytes of raw signal data over three years of collective experimentation, upgrading the onboard software in the MR1 Molecular Streaming Device, or further developing the code behind Maxine's Quest (the platform that gamifies data collection on the MR1), you've got powers that no modern epic quest of any kind can succeed without.

188

189Cleric

190Every epic quest needs its healers, and Clerics heal organizational wounds before they fester. You handle the stuff that makes everyone else's eyes glaze over but would kill us if ignored. You're the one who remembers that startups need things like "insurance" and "contracts" and "not violating federal law." While Sciencers dream of molecules and Sparkys obsess over circuits, you juggle the thousand boring things that let everyone else focus on the one exciting thing. You're part therapist, part lawyer, part accountant, part lobbyist, part patent lawyer, part parent. In D&D terms, you keep the party from dying of dysentery. In startup terms, you keep the organization from dying of dysfunction.

191

192Gearhead

193You love beautiful machines and making them. Give you a problem and access to a machine shop, and you'll figure it out. In this quest, you're making the widgets and boxes and actuators that let the rest of the world send molecules through tiny holes and measure what happens. You're basically the party's blacksmith, except your forge runs on 3D printer filament and G-code.

194

195Ludician

196You design games, and you understand why they matter, not in some abstract "gamification increases engagement" MBA bullshit way, but because you understand that fun might be the most powerful motivator in the universe. You transform grinding data collection into thrilling adventures, turn tedious calibration into boss battles, and make your fellow Player Scientists™ feel like heroes saving the world (because they are). Without you, we're just another boring biotech company. With you, we'll eventually be the world's first biotech company that millions of people will feel like they're a part of.

197

198Sciencer

199There's an obscure rhetorical term called "anthimeria". One example is when you use a noun as if it's a verb. When Matt Damon's character in The Martian says "I'm gonna have to science the shit out of this", that's anthimeria. The character class name "Sciencer" anthimeriates "science" full circle, from noun to verb and back to noun. In Epic Quest Bio™, Sciencers science. All kinds of relevant hard science: molecular and cellular biology and genetics, nanopore science, physics, materials science, chemistry, bioinformatics, zoology, botany, virology, microbiology, astrobiology. If you have professional expertise and/or a passionate interest in any of these, definitely choose "Sciencer" as your major class. Everyone who plays Epic Quest Bio™ is a Player Scientist™, and everyone will science, but Sciencers will science the most sciencely.

200

201Sparky

202You command the logic of lightning trapped in arcane patterns by the spellbooks of Faraday, Maxwell, Nyquist, Shannon, Keithley, Widlar, Carver Mead, Neher & Sakmann, and Horowitz & Hill. When we tell you we'll need to measure femtoamp currents through nanometer holes while swimming in a sea of 60 Hz hum and switching noise, you don't flinch, you start sketching guard rings and calculating how many dB of shielding we'll need. We need you because molecules must speak to us in electrical tongues only you can hear and translate.

203

204SpellBinder

205SpellBinders practice the ancient human magic of making other humans pay attention. Someone has to make people actually care about this stuff. That's you. Maybe you make music. Maybe you make memes. Maybe you do interpretive TikTok dances about nanopores (please keep them PG-rated). You will take our extremely nerdy mission and make normal humans understand why it matters. You're equal parts educator, propagandist, and showman. Without you, we're just weirdos with weird futuristic devices in our hands. With you, we might actually inspire the masses. Every quest needs someone who can charm the locals into helping instead of throwing rocks.

206

207--

208

209Now that you've glimpsed the heroic roles that you can play on our civilizational-upgrade molecular adventure, you're probably itching to know: How do I actually PLAY this thing? Where's my character sheet? When do I roll for initiative against a rogue protein?

210

211When you peek behind the curtain here, I'll show and tell you some incredibly cool stuff that's not yet ready for the whole world to see. It's what Epic Quest Bio™ will look and feel like when it's thousands of players, a fleshed out MMORPG. We're not ready to ship that yet, but if you're here this early, you might be play in the campaign that gets it ready. I'm eager to tell you about it when the time comes. It's very, very cool, and way more graphic and game-like than what you're seeing here. For now, think of Epic Quest Bio™ as having a classic tabletop mechanic—with me as the gamemaster, directly communicating with all players while we're still small enough to do it that way.

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213The best D&D campaigns I ever played were me and some friends in a basement with graph paper and crayon-smeared dice. That's where we are now. We'll coordinate play through whatever works: email, group chats, phone calls, google meets, maybe even some actual in-person meetups for those of us in the same places. It'll be messy and improvised, like the start of a real adventure should be.

214

215Aside from the ad hoc game mechanics, i.e., simply communicating with each other, there is one main stat every Player Scientist™ should know about: XP.

216

217XP stands for eXperience Points. These are points you earn for attempting and/or successfully completing missions within the game. It's analogous to vesting advisory stock, a common mechanism by which startups recruit and compensate outside help. Yes, there is the possibility, far-flung and far-off, that you could get rich from playing this game. But there is absolutely no guarantee of that, and if that's why you sign up to play, you've got the wrong idea. XP is ****NOT**** A CRYPTO TOKEN, and will have zero monetary value until we're phenomenally successful. How this works legally is simple: under US corporate law, a corporation (like Molecular Reality Corporation) can give advisory stock for any effort an advisor makes to help the corporation. Your playing of the game represents an advisory contribution to our mission, and someday, we hope, we will be able to turn everyone's XP into actual corporate stock. As a startup management idea, assigning XP is actually a better idea than traditional advisory stock vesting, which happens automatically in calendar time and usually does not account at all for what the advisor actually contributes. YOU READ THIS FAR AND SHOULDN'T BE HERE YET BUT IF YOU ARE EMAIL ME AT KENT AT MOLECULARREALITY DOT COM