The Second Century
In a reimagined Midwest shaped by biotech, one young woman steps into a future grown from code, community, and courage
I used to think the future arrived with a bang. A gleaming city skyline, a countdown clock, maybe even a voice-over narration about progress. But the truth is, it came quietly - on a warm spring morning in Iowa, when I was late to my first real job, staring at a cornfield that wasn’t quite… corn.
They called it Glycine Max Aegis - Aegis beans for short. Their root systems filtered PFAS from groundwater, their stalks flexed in storms like living carbon-fiber, and they grew three harvests a year without needing nitrogen fertilizer. My grandfather used to say the future would either be edible or hostile. I think these beans were trying to be both.
I was the first in my family to go into bioengineering. And not just the first to study, the first to be hired straight into the new National BioCommons. Not Washington, not Boston. Right here in Cedar Rapids, at one of the biomanufacturing pre-commercial testbeds they built after Congress passed the Biotech Resilience Act.
There were no marble columns, no Pentagon-like buildings. Just glass, steel, and bioreactors humming like a low symphony. My team was tasked with something that sounded like science fiction just five years ago: localizing biomineral extraction using symbiotic mycoenzymes.
In plain terms: we were growing tiny fungi that pulled rare earth metals out of soil that mining had written off as waste. And we were doing it in the back lot of a former ethanol plant.
This is a science fiction story inspired by this week’s release of the final report from the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology. This may be fiction, but it’s my way of exploring the world around me. Lets make this happen.
It’s easy to forget how close we came to losing it all.
I was still in high school when China cut off gallium exports, crashing our solar chip supply. Then came the WuXi blockade, the biotech equivalent of OPEC in the ’70s. Over a single weekend, they froze exports of recombinant insulin precursors, AI-model-generated cancer therapeutics, and even the base strains for our antiviral bioreactors. I remember watching my diabetic neighbor ration her doses while protesters flooded the streets, holding signs that said: “Release the Cure.”
That was before the shift - before America remembered how to move fast.
We established the National Biotechnology Coordination Office. Declared biotech part of our critical infrastructure. Stood up secure, sovereign biofoundries in all fifty states. And most importantly, we invested in people. That’s how I got here - not just because I was smart, but because the BioFuture Corps paid for my community college, gave me housing while I trained in Illinois, and guaranteed a placement when I graduated.
Now, I work on a team with a machinist from Detroit, a former Army medic from Georgia, and a CRISPR algorithmist from Nairobi who immigrated through the Global Talent Accord. We sit around the same whiteboards, sketching protein folds and debating regulation pathways like it’s poetry. Because here, it kind of is.
The first time I saw a bioengineered organ print in real time, I cried. It wasn’t even dramatic - just a small segment of vascularized tissue, printed using someone’s personalized genomic data.
It was for a child in Des Moines who’d been waiting months for a transplant. His parents watched on a screen as the lattice grew, layer by layer, under aseptic blue light. No donors. No rejections. Just time, code, and care.
My father used to say that biotechnology wasn’t real until it grew from dirt or bled red. He changed his mind when his arthritis medication got replaced by a personalized therapeutic grown from his own microbiome. Now he calls it “midwestern magic.”
Of course, not everyone’s on board.
There are still protests. Some people don’t want “CRISPR cows” in their food supply, even if they produce milk that naturally contains antiviral peptides. Others say our new biosensing wearables, capable of predicting strokes and autoimmune flares violate privacy, even though all data is sovereign and stored on-chip thanks to the biological data standards embedded in the Web of Biological Data (WOBD).
And then there’s the international stage. The Office of Global Competition Analysis still publishes monthly briefings. Tensions flare. Trade routes freeze. Even now, rumors circulate that the People’s Liberation Army has fielded neural-symbiotic troops, blending genomic enhancements with real-time biofeedback from drones. They call it “intelligent warfare.” We call it terrifying.
But I also know what we’ve built.
We’ve turned former strip mines into living factories. We’ve reclaimed our pharmaceuticals. We’ve formed alliances where we trade biotherapeutics with Norway, biofuels with Brazil, and bioplastic precursors with Kenya. We’ve made ourselves too complex, too resilient, too decentralized to be taken out with a single chokehold.
And we’ve begun to dream again.
Yesterday, I was promoted to lead my own project. A pilot initiative to build a distributed network of rural bio-satellites, localized modular units that can produce everything from emergency insulin to soil-regenerating microbes, powered by algae-derived fuel and maintained by augmented reality overlays.
I named it “Plowshare.” Because even if we’re racing to win, I still believe biotechnology is a tool of peace. And I want to build something my grandmother would’ve recognized, not as magic, but as work.
Honest, hard work.
There’s a mural across the hall from my lab. It was painted last year, on the day the first organ printed in Iowa was successfully transplanted.
It shows an old farmer handing a petri dish to a young child. The words beneath it read:
“The Second Century Begins Here.”
I believe that.
Not just because it’s the world I live in, but because it’s the world we chose to build.
And today, as I step into the light of a thousand humming bioreactors, wearing the name patch of a nation reborn in resilience, I know this much is true:
The future didn’t arrive with a bang.
It arrived with a pulse.
And it’s still growing.