The Sneezing Problem

by Douglas Adams

The thing that changed everything was not, as you might expect, a grand project. It was not the result of a government initiative, or a military programme, or a multinational pharmaceutical conspiracy, or any of the other large organised efforts that humanity has traditionally relied upon to produce its most significant catastrophes. It was a man in his kitchen on a Sunday afternoon with a nasal spray.

His name was Nigel Antrobus. He was an allergist. He lived in Swindon. He wanted to stop sneezing.

It is possible that the fate of civilisations has rested on less, but you would have to go back quite far in history to find a convincing example, and even then you would probably find that the person in question had at least been trying to do something moderately ambitious, like found an empire or discover fire, rather than simply wanting to get through a summer afternoon without making a small wet explosion every time the sun caught his face at the wrong angle.

Nigel sneezed in sunlight. About a quarter of all humans do. The condition has a medical name—Autosomal Dominant Compelling Helio-Ophthalmic Outburst Syndrome—whose acronym is ACHOO, and if you think that’s a coincidence, you have a more generous view of medical researchers than the evidence supports. Someone sat in a meeting and reverse-engineered that acronym from the symptom, and everyone else in the meeting let them do it, and the paper was published, and peer-reviewed, and cited, and at no point did the system that humanity has developed to ensure the sober reliability of scientific nomenclature raise any objection whatsoever. This is worth bearing in mind as context for what follows.

There is a school of thought—held primarily by people who have never been responsible for naming anything—that names don’t matter. That a thing is what it is regardless of what you call it. These people have clearly never met a child, or a dog, or a country that changed its name, or anyone who has ever been called the wrong name at a party. Names are the first story we tell about a thing, and first stories set expectations, and expectations determine what you notice and what you don’t, and what you don’t notice is usually the thing that gets you.

ACHOO set the expectation that the photic sneeze reflex was cute. That it was trivial. That it was the kind of thing you could make a pun about and move on. And so people made a pun about it and moved on, and nobody looked at it very hard, because things that are cute and trivial do not get looked at very hard, and things that do not get looked at very hard do not get understood, and things that are not understood are exactly the things that will surprise you, because they are the things about which your expectations are wrong.

The sneeze itself was harmless. It had been harmless for the entire forty-seven years of Nigel’s life. It would have continued to be harmless for the rest of his life and for the lives of every other photic sneezer on the planet, which numbered approximately two billion people, none of whom had ever been harmed by it, and most of whom had made their peace with it in the way that one makes peace with any minor biological absurdity: by pretending it wasn’t happening and hoping no one noticed.

Nigel had not made his peace with it. Nigel had declared war.

This is worth noting because the vast majority of humanity’s problems are caused not by the people who make peace with things but by the people who cannot, and the things they cannot make peace with are almost never the things you’d expect. History is full of people who accepted poverty, injustice, plague, and the total absence of indoor plumbing with equanimity, and then declared absolute war on a dripping tap, a neighbour’s hedge, or—in Nigel’s case—a sneeze.

The technology that Nigel used to prosecute this war was not his own. He had acquired it through the usual channels by which dangerous things move through the world, which is to say: through a relative.

His brother-in-law, Trevor, worked at a biotech firm in Cambridge called Heliogene. Trevor had once described his job as “making molecular mailmen,” which was the kind of simplification that made actual molecular biologists wince and actual investors write cheques, and which was, in the way that most useful simplifications are, not exactly wrong but wrong in a direction that mattered.

What Heliogene had developed was a gene-editing delivery system that could spread from cell to cell on its own. You introduced it into a small number of cells, and it replicated, and it drifted to neighbouring cells, and those cells replicated it and drifted it further, and so on, in the manner of gossip, or a cold, or a particularly catchy song that you hear once in a supermarket and then cannot stop humming for three weeks despite the fact that you actively despise it and everything it represents.

The system was built from components that already existed inside the human genome—remnants of viruses that had infected our ancestors millions of years ago and whose genetic instructions had been silently riding along in our DNA ever since, doing nothing in particular, like passengers on a bus who missed their stop in the Pleistocene and couldn’t be bothered to get off. Heliogene’s engineers had reactivated these passengers and given them new luggage to carry: specifically, the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing machinery and whatever genetic instructions the company wished to deliver.

The system was called CascadeX, which is a name that conveys momentum and dynamism and sounds like either a next-generation gaming console or a range of high-performance waterfalls. It does not convey “once you let this go you absolutely cannot get it back,” which would have been a more useful thing for a name to convey, but nobody in the naming meeting suggested it, because nobody in naming meetings ever does. This is a structural flaw in the meeting, not in the people.

Trevor mentioned CascadeX over Christmas dinner, in the particular offhand way that people mention work things over Christmas dinner when they are two glasses of wine past professional discretion and one glass short of total incoherence. The conversation that followed—between an allergist who understood noses and a molecular engineer who understood delivery platforms and neither of whom, critically, understood the thing they were about to create by combining these two specialities—lasted approximately forty-five minutes and would later be characterised in the forensic report as “the most consequential discussion in recorded history to take place in proximity to a half-eaten Christmas pudding.”

The target gene was CHD7, on chromosome 8.

CHD7 is the kind of gene that does many things, which is to say it is a normal gene. The idea that genes do one thing each—the gene for eye colour, the gene for height, the gene for whether you sneeze when you look at the sun—is one of those simplifications that was useful once and has since become a trap. Most genes are more like stagehands in a theatre: they don’t do any single dramatic thing, but they move scenery between acts, and if one of them calls in sick, the audience may not notice at first, but by Act Three the castle has been replaced by a submarine and no one can work out why the love interest is wearing a diving helmet.

CHD7’s day job included, among many other things, supervising the migration of neural crest cells during embryonic development. Neural crest cells are the ones that, in the early weeks of a foetus’s existence, set off from the emerging spinal cord like colonists heading for new territory and fan out through the body to become, among other things, parts of the heart, the adrenal glands, the pigment cells of the skin, and—relevantly, though Nigel Antrobus did not know this and had no reason to know it—the branching structure of the facial nerve.

The facial nerve does many things. It allows you to close your eyes, to wrinkle your forehead, to purse your lips, to wiggle your ears if you are the kind of person who can wiggle their ears, which most people claim they can and most people can’t. It also allows you to smile, and it allows you to smile in two quite different ways, and the difference between those two ways turns out to be a load-bearing wall in the architecture of human society, and nobody knew this until Nigel Antrobus accidentally demolished it.

The first kind of smile is involuntary. It is the smile that happens when you are genuinely happy—when something delights you, when you see someone you love, when a dog does something unexpected with a tennis ball. This smile is generated deep in the brain’s emotional circuitry and travels to the face along pathways that are very old and very robust and completely beyond conscious control. You cannot produce this smile on purpose any more than you can decide to dilate your pupils or tell your pancreas to take the afternoon off.

The second kind of smile is voluntary. It is the smile you produce when someone points a camera at you, or when your manager tells you about the new open-plan office layout, or when an acquaintance shows you photographs of their holiday and you are required by the social contract to appear interested in what is, by any honest assessment, a slightly out-of-focus picture of a beach that looks exactly like every other beach. This smile is generated in the motor cortex—the conscious, deliberate part of the brain—and it uses a slightly different set of neural pathways to reach the face, pathways whose precise routing depends on the branching pattern of the facial nerve, which depends on the migration of neural crest cells, which depends on CHD7.

Nigel’s guide RNA targeted a region of CHD7 that a genome-wide association study had linked to the photic sneeze reflex. The study, which Nigel had read on his phone in bed at eleven o’clock on a Wednesday night, had identified the association with a statistical confidence of p = 0.03, which is the scientific equivalent of “probably, possibly, in certain populations, under specific conditions, maybe.” It is the kind of result that other scientists describe as “suggestive” and that Nigel, who was not a geneticist and who very much wanted to stop sneezing, described as “good enough.”

He administered the spray on a Sunday in March. He went outside and looked at the sun. He sneezed.

He went inside, checked his protocol, went back out, and looked at the sun again. He sneezed again.

He would continue to sneeze for the rest of his life. The guide RNA had missed the photic sneeze variant entirely—it was on a different region of the gene, several thousand base pairs away—and had instead neatly and precisely edited the portion of CHD7 that influenced neural crest cell migration into the zygomatic branch of the facial nerve.

Nigel did not know this. What Nigel knew was that the spray hadn’t worked, and he was irritated, and he went inside and had a cup of tea and kissed Moira, his wife, who was reading the paper at the kitchen table, and said “Bloody thing doesn’t work,” and Moira said “Mm,” in the way that she said “Mm” to most of Nigel’s projects, which was with the precise degree of non-commitment that keeps a marriage functional.

The kiss lasted perhaps two seconds.

It was enough.

CascadeX did what CascadeX was designed to do, which was spread.

It spread from Nigel to Moira through that kiss. It spread from Moira to her colleagues at the estate agency through shared coffee cups and the ordinary closeness of people who spend eight hours a day in the same small office. It spread from the estate agency to the clients who came to look at houses and who sat in Moira’s car and breathed her air while she pointed out original features and south-facing gardens and the proximity to good schools. It spread from those clients to their families, and from their families to their workplaces, and from their workplaces to the pub, and from the pub to everywhere, because pubs are the lymph nodes of British society and anything that passes through them reaches the entire organism within weeks.

From Swindon to Reading. From Reading to London. From London to Heathrow. From Heathrow to everywhere else.

There is a popular idea, widely held and almost entirely wrong, that the important things in life announce themselves. That significant moments feel significant when they’re happening. That you know, at the time, that the conversation you’re having, the decision you’re making, the person you’re kissing, is the one that will matter. This idea persists because it’s comforting and because it’s the way stories work, and people who have been raised on stories—which is everyone—tend to expect life to follow the same rules.

Life does not follow the same rules. Life is the thing that happens while you’re trying to follow the rules of stories. The significant moment almost never feels significant. It feels like a Sunday afternoon. It feels like a kiss in a kitchen. It feels like nothing, because “nothing” is what most moments feel like from the inside, and the ones that turn out to have been everything are indistinguishable from the ones that turn out to have been nothing until afterwards, which is too late to do anything about it, which is the whole problem.

Nigel’s kiss felt like nothing. It was nothing—a two-second domestic contact so routine that neither he nor Moira registered it as an event, in the same way that neither of them registered breathing as an event, or blinking, or any of the other involuntary biological processes that keep a person alive and that, in this particular case, were also keeping CascadeX alive, nudging it out of Nigel’s respiratory epithelium and into Moira’s, where it settled and replicated and began its quiet, patient, spectacularly effective work.

The edit didn’t kill anyone. It didn’t cause disease. It didn’t produce visible symptoms. What it did was so subtle that six months passed before anyone noticed, and when they noticed, what they noticed was not a medical problem but a social one.

People were having difficulty smiling.

Not all smiling. Genuine smiles worked perfectly. The involuntary, emotional, deep-brain smile was untouched—it ran on different neural hardware, older and more fundamental, the kind of wiring you don’t disrupt by fiddling with a surface gene because it was laid down in evolutionary time when smiling was a matter of not getting killed by your peers, and natural selection does not mess around with infrastructure that important.

The voluntary smile—the posed, the performed, the professionally deployed—was the one that had broken. The zygomatic branch of the facial nerve had been subtly rerouted by the altered neural crest migration, not enough to cause paralysis or pain but enough to sever the precise connection between intention and expression that allowed a human being to arrange their face into a shape that communicated happiness without actually feeling it.

If you tried to smile on purpose, what came out was a kind of twitch—a one-sided, effortful contraction that looked less like warmth and more like the expression of someone trying to pass a difficult piece of furniture through a narrow doorway. It was not frightening. It was not grotesque. It was simply, unmistakably, fake, and it was fake in a way that the human brain—which has spent hundreds of thousands of years developing an exquisitely sensitive apparatus for detecting facial sincerity—could no longer overlook.

The first industries to notice were the ones that ran on fake smiles, which turned out to be most of them.

Stock photography collapsed. Eighteen million images in the commercial archives featured people smiling at cameras, and every one of those smiles had been performed on command, and every one of them now looked, to the newly recalibrated human eye, like evidence of something not quite right, like a letter from a friend that had been written by someone else.

The diplomatic service went next. An ambassador’s primary skill, more fundamental than languages or protocol or the ability to eat surströmming without visible distress, is the smile that says “I am delighted to see you” to a person you would happily never see again. Without it, bilateral relations devolved within weeks into a kind of startling honesty that no foreign ministry had been designed to process.

Customer service followed, then hospitality, then air travel, then politics—the entire cascade of professions in which the gap between what you feel and what your face says you feel is not a flaw but the foundational technology.

Dating was affected in a way that nobody had anticipated and that, in retrospect, should have been the first thing anyone anticipated. The entire apparatus of online dating had been built on photographs, and photographs had been built on posed expressions, and posed expressions had been built on the fake smile. Remove the fake smile and what you had was millions of profile photographs in which people looked exactly the way people actually look when they are sitting alone in their bathroom holding a phone at arm’s length and trying to seem attractive to strangers: which is to say, uncertain, slightly desperate, and very much aware that the lighting is wrong. The dating apps didn’t collapse—humans are too determined about reproduction for any technology to prevent it—but they changed. People started posting photographs of themselves laughing at something genuinely funny, or looking at something they actually liked, because these were the only photographs that looked right anymore, and the result was that profiles became, for the first time, informative. You could see what made a person happy. You could see what they loved. You could not see what they looked like when they were pretending to be happy, because they couldn’t pretend anymore, and the absence of the pretence turned out to contain more useful information about a person than the pretence ever had.

Funerals, surprisingly, were unchanged. Nobody had ever been expected to smile at a funeral, and the discovery that one of the few social occasions humans had designed correctly was the one organised around death was the kind of observation that, once you noticed it, made you wonder about all the others.

And it was a technology. That was the thing that people found hardest to accept. The fake smile was a tool that the species had developed, refined, and deployed for so long that it had become invisible, in the same way that chairs are invisible and clothing is invisible and the number zero is invisible—things so fundamental to how we live that we forget they were invented, that there was a time before them, and that someone, somewhere, had to come up with the idea.

Nigel Antrobus had not uninvented the fake smile on purpose. He had uninvented it by accident, while trying to do something else entirely, and the thing he had been trying to do—stop sneezing—he had failed at.

The investigation took four months. The committee that oversaw the investigation took three weeks to agree on what kind of emergency it was dealing with, because different kinds of emergency unlocked different kinds of funding, and different kinds of funding required different forms, and someone at the WHO pointed out that there was no form for “a man in Swindon has accidentally made it impossible for the human race to be polite,” and someone else pointed out that this probably fell under “novel biological threat,” and someone else pointed out that it wasn’t exactly a threat, because nobody was dying, and someone else pointed out that the French Ambassador to the United Kingdom had physically lunged across a negotiating table after attempting to smile at the British delegation and producing instead an expression that the British delegation interpreted as “aggressive contempt,” which was in fact very close to what the French Ambassador was actually feeling, which was rather the point.

While the committee debated categories, a graduate student at Imperial College named Priya did the work.

Priya sequenced the CHD7 edit from affected individuals across six countries and found it was identical in every case—same edit, same vector, same self-spreading platform. She traced the platform to a licence held by Heliogene Ltd. She traced Heliogene to Cambridge. She traced the connexion to Trevor. She traced Trevor to Nigel.

The trail was not difficult to follow. Nigel had used his own email to log into Heliogene’s internal systems. He had ordered synthetic DNA to a PO Box registered in his own name. He had assembled the construct in a laboratory that Trevor had signed out under his own access code. The entire operation had been conducted with the security protocols of someone organising a surprise birthday party—which is to say, with the absolute conviction that nobody was looking, combined with a total failure to take any measures that would have actually prevented anyone from looking.

Nigel was arrested at his practice on a Thursday morning. He was in the middle of administering a skin prick test. He came quietly. He was bewildered in a way that his arresting officers later described as “almost endearing, if you could forget what he’d done,” which they could not, because one of them had recently been unable to smile at his daughter’s school play and his daughter had noticed, and the conversation that followed had been the kind of conversation that nobody has voluntarily and that Nigel Antrobus had made unavoidable.

The trial took place in The Hague, partly because no single country’s legal system was equipped to handle a crime that had been committed in Swindon and experienced in Seoul, and partly because international trials are held in The Hague in the same way that difficult conversations are held in restaurants: the formality of the setting is supposed to prevent anyone from raising their voice, and it never does.

The charge was “reckless modification of the human genome,” which had been drafted specifically for the occasion by a legal team that included experts in bioethics, international law, and the particular kind of criminal jurisprudence that deals with acts so unprecedented that the law has to be built around them like scaffolding around a building that has already fallen down. The defence argued that Nigel had not intended to modify anyone’s genome other than his own. The prosecution argued that intent was irrelevant when you had used a self-spreading technology, in the same way that intent is irrelevant when you light a fire in a forest: you may have intended only to toast a marshmallow, but the forest does not care about your marshmallow.

The marshmallow analogy proved unexpectedly persuasive. Nigel was found guilty. The judge, in passing sentence, made a remark that was widely quoted afterward and that seemed to summarise, for a great many people, the essential problem not just with Nigel Antrobus but with the entire relationship between human beings and the tools they invent. She said: “The defendant did not intend to change the world. The world changed anyway. We have not yet developed a legal framework for accidents of this magnitude, and I am not confident that we will, because the gap between what our technology can do and what our institutions can manage is growing faster than our institutions can grow, and it has been growing faster for some time, and the defendant is not its cause but merely its most vivid illustration.”

This was, for a sentencing remark, unusually philosophical, and it received the reception that unusually philosophical remarks always receive in legal settings, which is that everyone agreed it was profound and then immediately returned to arguing about the length of the prison term.

“I just wanted to stop sneezing,” Nigel said, and this was true, and the truth of it was the part that no one could quite process, because the expectation—the deeply held, almost religious human expectation—is that consequences should be proportional to intentions. Big intentions should produce big consequences. Small intentions should produce small consequences. A man who merely wanted to stop sneezing should not, by any reasonable accounting, have dismantled the mechanism by which the entire species maintained social cohesion. But he had, because the universe does not share humanity’s conviction that consequences should be proportional, or fair, or in any way related to what you meant to do. The universe is interested in what you actually did, and what Nigel actually did was kiss his wife.

A year later, things had changed.

Not entirely. Humans are resourceful. They had built the fake smile once and they would build replacement structures: new social protocols, new ways of signalling non-aggression, new professional techniques for the hospitality industry that did not depend on a facial expression that no one could produce anymore. These were being developed. They were awkward and self-conscious and would remain so for a generation.

But the thing that no one had predicted—the perpendicular outcome, the one that arrived from an angle no model had accounted for—was that the removal of the fake smile had made it possible, for the first time in the history of the species, to be certain when someone was genuinely glad to see you.

This turned out to matter enormously.

It mattered in marriages, where the difference between “I love you” accompanied by a genuine smile and “I love you” accompanied by nothing had forced a renegotiation of millions of relationships, and the renegotiations had, against all precedent, not all gone badly. Some people discovered that their partner really did love them—had loved them all along—and the proof was in the smile that still worked, the involuntary one, the one that couldn’t be faked, the one that happened whether you wanted it to or not when the right person walked into the room.

It mattered in politics, where candidates who could no longer simulate warmth were forced to either develop the real thing or drop out, and both outcomes were improvements.

It mattered in medicine, where doctors who had relied on a reassuring smile to compensate for a poor bedside manner were suddenly required to actually reassure, with words and attention and the slow, unfashionable work of being present with someone who was frightened.

And it mattered at the garden centre in Swindon where Nigel Antrobus now worked, having served three years of a five-year sentence and having discovered, in prison, that he was good with plants and that plants had the decency not to require him to smile at them.

The garden centre was called Greenfingers, which was the kind of name that could only have been chosen by a committee, and which the staff tolerated in the way that employees of all establishments with terrible names tolerate the name: by never using it and referring to the place exclusively by its location, which was “the one on the A419, past the roundabout.” Nigel worked in the perennials section, which suited him, because perennials are plants that come back year after year without being asked, and there was something in this that he found reassuring—the idea that some things in the world simply continued, not because anyone had engineered them to continue or decided they should continue, but because continuing was what they did.

He had become, in his quiet way, the most popular employee in the garden centre. Customers liked him. They liked him specifically because he did not smile at them when they arrived, and he did not smile at them when they asked questions, and he did not smile at them when they left, and the absence of the smile—which would once have been read as rudeness or indifference—was now understood, by a species that had learned to read faces without the cheat sheet, as honesty. Nigel was honest about geraniums. He was honest about drainage. He was honest about the fact that the clematis you wanted would not grow on a north-facing wall no matter how much you wanted it to, and his honesty, delivered without any facial performance to soften it, was the kind of honesty that people trusted, because it was clearly costing him nothing to produce. He was not being honest at you. He was simply being honest, in the way that the perennials were simply growing, because that was what he did.

Moira visited on Tuesdays. She brought sandwiches. They sat on a bench behind the greenhouse and talked, or didn’t talk, and when one of them said something funny the other one smiled, and the smile was real, and it had always been real between them—it was the one part of the whole disaster that was exactly the same as before, because their marriage had not been built on the fake smile but on the other kind, the old kind, the one that Nigel’s edit had not been able to touch because it ran deeper than any gene he knew how to reach.

Nigel still sneezed when he looked at the sun. He had stopped trying to fix it. He had, in fact, stopped trying to fix anything. This was not despair; it was something more like the beginning of wisdom, which arrives, when it arrives at all, in the form of a willingness to let things be what they are rather than what you think they should be, and which looks, from the outside, a great deal like someone sitting on a bench behind a greenhouse, eating a sandwich, while the sun makes them sneeze.

He sneezed.

Moira said, “Bless you.”

Nigel said, “Thanks.”

The sun continued.

Swindon, 2031

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