In 1941, Oxford policeman Albert Alexander was dying from an infected scratch. Within a day of receiving penicillin, he was sitting up. But the entire supply amounted to a few spoonfuls, brewed in laboratory bedpans. His doctors recovered it from his urine, but after five days it ran out. They could not make enough to save him.
Eighty-five years later, we can trace sickle cell disease to one broken letter in a person's DNA, edit their own blood stem cells to work around it, and return those cells as medicine. Casgevy is the first approved treatment to do this. Its US list price is $2.2 million.
Medicine changed. The system for making it did not. Between a discovery and a patient lie years of reconstruction. A process that works in one laboratory is rebuilt in a factory, then rebuilt again in the next. Its proof begins almost from zero each time. Every step is recorded, reviewed, and signed by hand.
That system was designed for pills: one process, repeated a million times. A medicine grown from a patient's own cells is one process, run for one person. When the proof starts over, so does the wait.
We are developing intelligence that learns from every run, so each treatment learns from the last. To make the medicine each person needs—not just those we can mass-produce.