Team Basic Sanity
Team Basic Sanity is a phrase from the essay with which Kent Kemmish introduced Epic Quest Bio in 2025. It comes at the end of his answer to an objection, that air filters and ultraviolet lamps would prevent more disease than any new technology. Kemmish agreed, added several measures of his own, called the obstacles to all of them problems of human psychology more than of engineering, and concluded: "Even basic sanity is an epic quest!" The passage ends: "I say: do good, in the way that calls to you. We're all on Team Basic Sanity."[1]
Molecular Reality Corporation builds instruments anyway. The essay gives the reason in two sentences: "I 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."
The passage
The essay has a section titled "SOME POPULAR KNEEJERK REACTIONS & HOW I RESPOND", which takes five objections to the company's goal of utility-scale molecular sensing. Its third objection reads:
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!
Kemmish's reply opens "100% agree." It continues: "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." Kemmish then classes all four as challenges of human psychology more than of technology, and writes the line that names the section's idea, "Even basic sanity is an epic quest!", before the two sentences on technology and the closing invitation to the team.[1]
The other four objections get other treatment. "You sound like Theranos!" receives a diagnosis, Theranos Derangement Syndrome, and a prescription: "Don't worry, just take 15 milligrams of Epic Quest Bio™ for a complete recovery." A reader who has heard of smart toilets is told "No, you didn't, but you might have thought that's what you heard about." The claim that superintelligent AI will cure every disease meets "short of genie-level magic emerging from AI systems, I don't see how they'll cure all diseases without what we're building." And "There is no technology that can do what you're saying!" is answered with "Agreed!", the start of the essay's history of the Coulter counter, "The Hole Enchilada".
The measures
Ultraviolet light of the UV-C band, below 280 nanometers, inactivates viruses and bacteria by damaging their nucleic acids, and lamps that irradiate the upper air of a room have been used against airborne infection since the 1930s. Statins lower blood cholesterol and reduce heart attacks and strokes. Malaria, carried by mosquitoes, killed an estimated 608,000 people in 2022.[2] The essay's sentence on "killing all mosquitos" does not say how.
Three years earlier the company had treated ultraviolet light differently. "Our North Star", written in 2022, discussed the Nucleic Acid Observatory and listed among its defenses "passive destruction of viruses by exposure to UV-C light", then warned that "A malevolent workaround for this will be immediately obvious to anyone aware of directed evolution techniques".[3] The 2022 warning concerned deliberately engineered pathogens; the 2025 objection concerned "cancer and infectious diseases" in general.
Instruments as the answer
In the essay's theory, technology can succeed where persuasion fails because it asks nothing of the people it protects. "Our North Star" states the design rule directly: "People should not have to alter their habits or routines to use it and benefit from it." Its sensors would sit in "air handling systems, toilets, and drains", and the "sample prep workflow" would be "washing vegetables in the sink, brushing your teeth, washing your hands, taking a shower, using the toilet, breathing in and out, etc.."[3] Filters, lamps, statins and diets all depend on someone deciding to use them. A sensor in a drain depends on someone deciding to install it.
The word "quest" runs through the essay, which opens "We're on an epic quest to free mankind from disease." and later lists "the heroic roles that you can play on our civilizational-upgrade molecular adventure": Barbarian, Bytebender, Cleric, Gearhead, Ludician, Sciencer, Sparky and SpellBinder.[1] Team Basic Sanity has no character class.