Every week, two million people across the world will sit for hours, hooked up to a whirring, blinking, blood-cleaning dialysis machine. Their alternatives: Find a kidney transplant or die.

In the US, dialysis is a roughly 40-billion-dollar business keeping 468,000 people with end-stage renal disease alive. The process is far from perfect, but that hasn't hindered the industry's growth. That's thanks to a federally mandated Medicare entitlement that guarantees any American who needs dialysis—regardless of age or financial status—can get it, and get it paid for.

The legally enshrined coverage of dialysis has doubtlessly saved thousands of lives since its enactment 45 years ago, but the procedure’s history of special treatment has also stymied innovation. Today, the US government spends about 50 times more on private dialysis companies than it does on kidney disease research to improve treatments and find new cures. In this funding atmosphere, scientists have made slow progress to come up with something better than the dialysis machine-filled storefronts and strip malls that provide a vital service to so many of the country's sickest people.

Shuvo Roy, UC San Francisco

Now, after more than 20 years of work, one team of doctors and researchers is close to offering patients an implantable artificial kidney, a bionic device that uses the same technology that makes the chips that power your laptop and smartphone. Stacks of carefully designed silicon nanopore filters combine with live kidney cells grown in a bioreactor. The bundle is enclosed in a body-friendly box and connected to a patient’s circulatory system and bladder—no external tubing required.

The device would do more than detach dialysis patients—who experience much higher rates of fatigue, chronic pain, and depression than the average American—from a grueling treatment schedule. It would also address a critical shortfall of organs for transplant that continues despite a recent uptick in donations. For every person who received a kidney last year, 5 more on the waiting list didn’t. And 4,000 of them died.

There are still plenty of regulatory hurdles ahead—human testing is scheduled to begin early next year¹—but this bioartificial kidney is already bringing hope to patients desperate to unhook for good.

Innovation, Interrupted

Kidneys are the body’s bookkeepers. They sort the good from the bad—a process crucial to maintaining a stable balance of bodily chemicals. But sometimes they stop working. Diabetes, high blood pressure, and some forms of cancers can all cause kidney damage and impair the organs' ability to function. Which is why doctors have long been on the lookout for ways to mimic their operations outside the body.

The first successful attempt at a human artificial kidney was a feat of Rube Goldberg-ian ingenuity, necessitated in large part by wartime austerity measures. In the spring of 1940, a young Dutch doctor named Willem Kolff decamped from his university post to wait out the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in a rural hospital on the IJssel river. There he constructed an unwieldy contraption for treating people dying from kidney failure using some 50 yards of sausage casing, a rotating wooden drum, and a bath of saltwater. The semi-permeable casing filtered out small molecules of toxic kidney waste while keeping larger blood cells and other molecules intact. Kolff's apparatus enabled him to draw blood from his patients, push it through the 150 feet of submerged casings, and return it to them cleansed of deadly impurities.

In some ways, dialysis has advanced quite a bit since 1943. (Vaarwel, sausage casing, hello mass-produced cellulose tubing.) But its basic function has remained unchanged for more than 70 years.

Not because there aren’t plenty of things to improve on. Design and manufacturing flaws make dialysis much less efficient than a real kidney at taking bad stuff out of the body and keeping the good stuff in. Other biological functions it can’t duplicate at all. But any efforts to substantially upgrade (or, heaven forbid, supplant) the technology has been undercut by a political promise made four and a half decades ago with unforeseen economic repercussions.

In the 1960s, when dialysis started gaining traction among doctors treating chronic kidney failure, most patients couldn't afford its $30,000 price tag—and it wasn’t covered by insurance. This led to treatment rationing and the arrival of death panels to the American consciousness. In 1972, Richard Nixon signed a government mandate to pay for dialysis for anyone who needed it. At the time, the moral cost of failing to provide lifesaving care was deemed greater than the financial setback of doing so.

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But the government accountants, unable to see the country’s coming obesity epidemic and all its attendant health problems, greatly underestimated the future need of the nation. In the decades since, the number of patients requiring dialysis has increased fiftyfold. Today the federal government spends as much on treating kidney disease—nearly $31 billion per year—as it does on the entire annual budget for the National Institutes of Health. The NIH devotes $574 million of its funding to kidney disease research to improve therapies and discover cures. It represents just 1.7 percent of the annual total cost of care for the condition.

But Shuvo Roy, a professor in the School of Pharmacy at UC San Francisco, didn’t know any of this back in the late 1990s when he was studying how to apply his electrical engineering chops to medical devices. Fresh off his PhD and starting a new job at the Cleveland Clinic, Roy was a hammer looking for interesting problems to solve. Cardiology and neurosurgery seemed like exciting, well-funded places to do that. So he started working on cardiac ultrasound. But one day, a few months in, an internal medicine resident at nearby Case Western Reserve University named William Fissell came up to Roy and asked: “Have you ever thought about working on the kidney?”

Roy hadn’t. But the more Fissell told him about how stagnant the field of kidney research had been, how ripe dialysis was for a technological overhaul, the more interested he got. And as he familiarized himself with the machines and the engineering behind them, Roy began to realize the extent of dialysis' limitations—and the potential for innovation.

Limitations like the pore-size problem. Dialysis does a decent job cleansing blood of waste products, but it also filters out good stuff: salts, sugars, amino acids. Blame the polymer manufacturing process, which can’t replicate the 7-nanometer precision of nephrons—the kidney's natural filters. Making dialysis membranes involves a process called extrusion, which yields a distribution of pore sizes—most are about 7nm but you also get some portion that are much smaller, some that are much larger, and everything in between. This is a problem because that means some of the bad stuff (like urea and excess salts) can sneak through and some of the good stuff (necessary blood sugars and amino acids) gets trapped. Seven nanometers is the size of albumin—a critical protein that keeps fluid from leaking out of blood vessels, nourishes tissues, and transports hormones, vitamins, drugs, and substances like calcium throughout the body. Taking too much of it out of the bloodstream would be a bad thing. And when it comes to the kidney’s other natural functions, like secreting hormones that regulate blood pressure, dialysis can’t do them at all. Only living cells can.

“We were talking about making a better Bandaid,” Roy says. But as he and Fissell looked around them at the advances being made in live tissue engineering, they started thinking beyond a better, smaller, faster filter. “We thought, if people are growing ears on the backs of mice, why can’t we grow a kidney?”

It turned out, someone had already tried. Sort of.

Dialysis, Disrupted

Back in 1997 when Fissell and Roy were finishing up their advanced training at Case Western, a nephrologist named David Humes at the University of Michigan began working to isolate a particular kind of kidney cell found on the backend of the nephron. Humes figured out how to extract them from cadaver kidneys not suitable for transplant and grow them in his lab. Then he took those cells and coated the inside of hollow fibre-membrane filled tubes similar to the filter cartridge on modern dialysis machines. He had invented an artificial kidney that could live outside the human body on a continuous flow of blood from the patient and do more than just filter.

The results were incredibly encouraging. In clinical trials at the University of Michigan Hospital, it improved the mortality rates for ICU patients with acute renal failure by half. There was just one problem. To work, the patient had to be permanently hooked up to half a hospital room’s worth of tubes and pumps.

The first time Roy saw Humes’ set-up, he immediately recognized its promise—and its limitations. Fissell had convinced him to drive from Cleveland to Ann Arbor in the middle of a snowstorm to check it out. The trip convinced them that the technology worked. It was just way too cumbersome for anyone to actually use it.

In 2000, Fissell joined Humes to do his nephrology fellowship at Michigan. Roy stayed at the Cleveland Clinic to work on cardiac medical devices. But for the next three years, nearly every Thursday afternoon Fissell hopped in his car and drove three hours east on I-90 to spend long weekends in Roy’s lab tackling a quintessentially 21st century engineering problem: miniaturization. They had no money, and no employees. But they were able to ride the wave of advancements in silicon manufacturing that was shrinking screens and battery packs across the electronics industry. “Silicon is the most perfected man-made material on Earth,” Roy says from the entrance to the vacuum-sealed clean room at UCSF, where his grad students produce the filters. If they want to make a slit that’s 7 nanometers wide, they can do that with silicon every time. It has a less than one percent variation rate.

The silicon filters had another advantage, too. Because Roy and Fissell wanted to create a small implantable device, they needed a way to make sure there wasn’t an immune response—similar to transplant rejection. Stacks of silicon filters could act as a screen to keep the body’s immune cells physically separated from Humes’ kidney cells which would be embedded in a microscopic scaffold on the other side. The only thing getting through to them would be the salt and waste-filled water, which the cells would further concentrate into urine and route to the bladder.

By 2007 the three researchers had made enough progress to apply for and receive a 3-year $3 million grant from the NIH to prove the concept of their implantable bioartificial kidney in an animal model. On the line was a second phase of funding, this time for $15 million, enough to take the project through human clinical trials. Roy moved out west to UCSF to be closer to the semiconductor manufacturing expertise in the Bay Area. Fissell worked on the project for a few more years at the Cleveland Clinic before being recruited to Vanderbilt while Humes stayed at the University of Michigan to keep working with his cells. But they didn’t make the cut. And without money, the research began to stall.

By then though, their kidney project had taken on a following of its own. Patients from all over the world wanted to see it succeed. And over the next few years they began donating to the project—some sent in five dollar bills, others signed checks for a million dollars. One six-year-old girl from upstate New York whose brother is on dialysis convinced her mother to let her hold a roadside garden vegetable sale and send in the proceeds. The universities chipped in too, and the scientists started to make more progress. They used 3D printing to test new prototypes and computer models of hydraulic flow to optimize how all the parts would fit together. They began collaborating with the surgeons in their medical schools to figure out the best procedure for implanting the devices. By 2015 the NIH was interested again. They signed on to another $6 million over the next four years. And then the FDA got interested.

That fall the agency selected the Kidney Project to participate in a new expedited regulatory approval plan intended to get medical innovations to patients faster. While Roy and Fissell have continued to tweak their device, helped along by weekly shipments of cryogenically frozen cells from Humes’ lab, FDA officials have shepherded them through two years of preclinical testing, most of which has been done in pigs, and shown good results. In April, they sent 20 agency scientists out to California to advise on their next step: moving into humans.

The plan is to start small—maybe ten patients tops—to test the safety of the silicon filter’s materials. Clotting is the biggest concern, so they’ll surgically implant the device in each participant’s abdomen for a month to make sure that doesn’t happen. If that goes well they will do a follow-up study to make sure it actually filters blood in humans the way it’s supposed to. Only then can they combine the filter with the bioreactor portion of the device, aka Humes’ renal cells, to test the full capacity of the artificial kidney.

The scientists expect to arrive at this final stage of clinical trials, and regulatory approval, by 2020. That may sound fast, but one thing they’ve already got a jump on is patient recruiting. Nearly 9,000 of them have already signed up to the project’s waitlist, ready to be contacted when clinical trials get the green light.

These patients are willing to accept the risk of pioneering a third option, besides transplants, which are too expensive and too hard to get for most people, and the drudgery of dialysis. Joseph Vassalotti, a nephrologist in Manhattan and the Chief Medical Officer for the National Kidney Foundation says “the more choices patients have the better,” even though he’s skeptical the device will become a reality within the next few years. An implantable kidney would dramatically improve their quality of life and be a welcome innovation after so many years of treatment status quo. “During World War II we didn’t think dialysis would be possible,” Vassalotti says. “Now half a million Americans are being treated with it. It’s amazing the progress just a few decades makes.”

¹Correction: 12:50pm ET The Kidney Project is now slated to begin clinical trials in early 2018. A previous version of this article incorrectly stated they would take place later this year. Changes have also been made to correctly identify the size and timing of grants to the Kidney Project.

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Blame the wind, if you want. In Southern California they call it the Santa Ana; in the north, the Diablos. Every autumn, from 4,000 feet up in the Great Basin deserts of Nevada and Utah, air drops down over the mountains and through the canyons. By the time it gets near the coast it’s hot, dry, and can gust as fast as a hurricane.

Or blame lightning, or carelessness, or downed power lines. No one yet knows the cause of the more than a dozen fires ablaze around California, but fires start where humans meet the wild forests, where people build for solitude or space or beauty. Things go wrong in those liminal spaces, at the interface between the wilds and the built.

So blame sprawl, or civilization’s cycling of wilderness into rural into exurban into suburban—urban agglomerations with an ever-expanding wavefront.

Blame all of it. There’s a reason the great Californian writer Raymond Chandler called it the Red Wind—winds “that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch.” Those winds blast down from the mountains and fan small fires into infernos, and sometimes those infernos maim or kill a city. In 1991 it was in the hills of Oakland. And this past weekend it was Napa and Sonoma, and the town of Santa Rosa. At least 15 people are dead. More than 1,500 houses are gone. The skies of the West are full of dust and ash.

Pushed by the wind, fires can throw burning embers a mile and a half ahead. The fire front starts moving faster than anyone can respond, jumping from ridgeline to ridgeline.

A fire’s progress through the forests and wildlands of North America isn’t exactly formulaic, but scientists understand it reasonably well. In the city, though? “Most wildland firefighters are not trained in structural protection, but the urban fire departments are not trained to deal with dozens or hundreds of houses burning at the same time,” says Volker Radeloff, a forestry researcher at the University of Wisconsin. “When these areas with lots of houses burn, the fires become very unpredictable.”

Buildings, the material bits of cities, don’t burn like woodlands. “A wildfire typically doesn’t last in one spot more than a minute or two. In grass it can be like 10 seconds,” says Mark Finney, a US Forest Service researcher at the Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory. “But structures can burn for a long time. That means they have a long time to be able to spread the fire, to be able to ignite adjacent structures.” They throw off embers as they decompose, and those wide walls emit and transfer heat.

In Southern California, Santa Ana fires push into populated areas more frequently. They kill more people and destroy more buildings. Diablo-powered fires aren't as common in the state's northern half, but they're not unknown.

Fires happen without Santa Anas too, of course, but “they typically don’t grow bigger,” says Yufang Jin, an ecosystem dynamics researcher at UC Davis and lead author on a 2015 paper about the difference. “During summertime in southern California, the typical wind pattern blows from the ocean to inland. The wind speed is usually not that strong, and the relative humidity is usually high.” That can tamp a fire down.

During Santa Ana season, conditions are the opposite. And the particularly bad Diablo winds in the north this year come after the end of a drought that left plenty of fuel. Fire researchers sometimes fight about whether meteorology or fuel conditions are more important to wildfires; this past weekend had both—the perfect firestorm. Cal Fire, the agency responsible for wildfires in the state, has issued another Red Flag Warning for the same conditions later this week. According to a spokesperson, roughly 4,000 firefighters are already deployed.

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California housing policies are more likely to push single-family houses out into the edges of communities than encourage the construction of dense city centers. Climate change makes wet seasons wetter and hot seasons hotter—which builds fuel. “Based on analysis using climate model projections, the frequency of Santa Ana events is uncertain,” Jin says. “But all the models agree that the intensity of Santa Ana events is going to be much stronger.”

Models say the same thing about sea level rise and hurricanes. A continent away from the fires in California, cities along the Gulf of Mexico and in the Caribbean have been battered by tropical cyclones, one after the other. This year, ocean water heated by a warming climate, unusually wet weather, and a lack of the vertical wind shear that can tame a big storm combined to produce an anomalous season. It has already been a fire season and a hurricane season that are, as researchers say, consistent with models of a changing climate.

Cities are not immortal. Economics and wars can kill them, but so can storms and fires. That’s especially true if cities aren’t built to resist—if cities are built in ways that make the change worse instead of fighting it.

So keep thinking about blame as northern California rebuilds—if regulations get brave enough to insist on denser cities, less flammable materials, different ornamental vegetation, underground power lines. The risk of fire will never be zero, but everyone knows what would knock a few points off. Whether anyone will make those changes—well, the red wind makes people do crazy things.

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Daniel Kish sees more than you might expect, for a blind man. Like many individuals deprived of sight, he relies on his non-visual senses to perceive, map, and navigate the world. But people tend to find Kish's abilities rather remarkable. Reason being: Kish can echolocate. Yes, like a bat.

As a child, Kish taught himself to generate sharp clicking noises with his mouth, and to translate the sound reflected by surrounding objects into spatial information. Perhaps you've seen videos like this one, in which Kish uses his skills to navigate a new environment, describe the shape of a car, identify the architectural features of a distant building—even ride a bike:

Impressive as his abilities are, Kish insists he isn't special. "People who are blind have been using various forms of echolocation to varying degrees of efficiency for a very long time," he says. What's more, echolocation can be taught. As president of World Access For the Blind, one of Kish's missions is helping blind people learn to cook, travel, hike, run errands, and otherwise live their lives more independently—with sound. "But there’s never been any systematic look at how we echolocate, how it works, and how it might be used to best effect."

A study published Thursday in PLOS Computational Biology takes a big step toward answering these questions, by measuring the mouth-clicks of Kish and two other expert echolocators and converting those measurements into computer-generated signals.

Researchers led by Durham University psychologist Lore Thaler performed the study in what's known in acoustic circles as an anechoic chamber. The room features double walls, a heavy steel door, and an ample helping of sound-dampening materials like foam. To stand inside an anechoic chamber is to be sonically isolated from the outside world. To speak inside of one is to experience the uncanny effect of an environment practically devoid of echoes.

But to echolocate inside of one? I asked Kish what it was like, fully expecting him to describe it as a form of sensory-deprivation. Wrong. Kish says that, to him, the space sounded like standing before a wire fence, in the middle of an infinitely vast field of grass.

This unique space allowed Thaler and her team to record and analyze thousands of mouth-clicks produced by Kish and the other expert echolocators. The team used tiny microphones—one at mouth level, with others surrounding the echolocators at 10-degree intervals, suspended at various heights from thin steel rods. Small microphones and rods were essential; the bigger the equipment was, the more sound they would reflect, reducing the fidelity of their measurements.

Thaler's team began the study expecting the acoustic properties of mouth-clicks to vary between echolocators. But the noises they produced were very similar. Thaler characterizes them as bright (a pair of high-pitched frequencies at around 3 and 10 kilohertz) and brief. They tended to last just three milliseconds before tapering off into silence. Here's a looped recording of one of Kish's clicks:

The researchers also analyzed the spatial path that the sound waves traveled after leaving the echolocators' mouths. "You can think of it as an acoustic flashlight," Thaler says. When you turn a flashlight on, the light distributes through space. A lot of it travels forward, but there's scattering to the left and right, as well." The beam patterns for clicks occupy space in a similar fashion—only with sound instead of light.

Thaler's team found that the beam pattern for the mouth-clicks roughly concentrated in a 60-degree cone, emanating from the echolocators' mouths—a narrower path than has been observed for speech. Thaler attributes that narrowness to the brightness of the click's pitch. Higher frequencies tend to be more directional than lower ones, which is why, if you've ever set up a surround sound system, you know that a subwoofer's placement is less important than that of a higher-frequency tweeter.

Thaler and her team used these measurements to create artificial clicks with acoustic properties similar to the real thing. Have a listen:

These synthetic clicks could be a boon for studies of human echolocation, which are often restricted by the availability of expert practitioners like Kish. "What we can do now is simulate echolocation, in the real world with speakers or in virtual environments, to develop hypotheses before testing them with human subjects," Thaler says. "We can create avatars, objects, and environments in space like you would in a video game, and model what the avatar hears." Preliminary studies like these could allow Thaler and other researchers to refine their hypotheses before inviting echolocation experts in to see how their models match the real thing.

These models won’t be perfect. To keep measurements consistent, Kish and the other echolocators had to keep still while inside the chamber. “But in the real world, they move their heads and vary the acoustic properties of their clicks, which can help them gain additional information about where things are in the world,” says Cynthia Moss, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University whose lab studies the mechanisms of spatial perception. (Thaler says her team is currently analyzing the results of a dynamic study, the results of which they hope to publish soon.)

Still, Moss says the study represents a valuable step toward understanding how humans echolocate, and perhaps even building devices that could make the skill more broadly achievable. Not everyone can click like Kish. “I’ve worked with a guy who used finger-snaps, but his hand would get tired really fast,” Moss says. Imagine being able to hand someone a device that emits an pitch-perfect signal—one that they could learn to use before, or perhaps instead of, mastering mouth-clicks.

I ask Kish what he thinks about a hypothetical device that could one day produce sounds like he does. He says it already exists. About a third of his students are unable or unwilling to produce clicks with their mouths. "But you pop a castanet in their hands and you get instant results," he says. "The sound they produce, it's like ear candy. It's uncanny how bright, clear, and consistent it is."

But Kish says he's all for more devices—and more research. "We know that these signals are critical to the echolocation process. Bats use them. Whales use them. Humans use them. It makes sense that those signals should be studied, understood, optimized." With the help of models like Thaler's, Kish might just get his wish.

On the last Monday of September, 32 field workers stepped onto a 15-acre experimental plot in an undisclosed part of Washington and made apple harvest history. The fruits they plucked from each tree were only a few months old. But they were two decades and millions of dollars in the making. And when they landed, pre-sliced and bagged on grocery store shelves earlier this month, they became the first genetically modified apple to go on sale in the United States.

The Arctic Apple, as it’s known, is strategically missing an enzyme so it doesn’t go brown when you take a bite and leave it sitting out on the counter. It’s one of the first foods engineered to appeal directly to the senses, rather than a farmer’s bottom line. And in a bid to attract consumers, it’s unapologetic about its alterations.

The apple has courted plenty of controversy to get where it is today—in about a hundred small supermarkets clustered around Oklahoma City. But now that it’s here, the question is, will consumers bite? Dozens of biotech companies with similar products in the pipeline, from small startups to agrochemical colossuses like Monsanto and Dupont are watching, eager to find out if the Arctic Apple will be a bellwether for the next generation of GMOs, or just another science project skewered on the altar of public opinion.

Neal Carter bought his first apple orchard in 1995, up in the gently sloping valley of Summerland, British Columbia. When he started, the future president of Okanagan Specialty Fruits didn’t have grand plans for upending the industry. But in his first few seasons he was struck by just how many apples (and how much money) he had to throw away on account of browning from the routine bumps and jostles of transit and packaging. Most years it was around 40 percent of his crop.

When you cut an apple, or handle it roughly, its cells rupture, and compounds that had been neatly compartmentalized come in contact with each other. When that happens, an enzyme called polyphenol oxidase, or PPO, triggers a chemical reaction that produces brown-colored melanin within just a few minutes. Carter thought there had to be a way to breed or engineer around that. So when he came across Australian researchers already doing it in potatoes, he wasted no time in licensing their technology, a technique known as gene silencing. Rather than knocking out a gene, the idea is to hijack the RNA instructions it sends out to make a protein.

The problem, Carter found out later, was that apples were a lot more complicated, genetically speaking, than the potato. In taters, the browning enzyme was coded into a family of four sub-genes that were chemically very similar. All you had to do was silence the dominant one, and it would cross-react with the other three, taking them all down in one go. Apples, on the other hand, had four families of PPO genes, none of which reacted with the others. So Carter’s team had to design a system to target all of them at once—no simple task in the early aughts.

To do it, the Okanagan scientists inserted a four-sequence apple gene (one for each member of the apple PPO family) whose base pairs run in reverse orientation to the native copies. To make sure it got expressed, they also attached some promoter regions taken from a cauliflower virus. The transgene’s RNA binds to the natural PPO-coding RNA, and the double-stranded sequence is read as a mistake and destroyed by the cell’s surveillance system. The result is a 90 percent reduction in the PPO enzyme. And without it, the apples don’t go brown.

It took Okanagan years to perfect the technique, which was subject to regulatory scrutiny on account of the viral DNA needed to make it work. Today, with the arrival of gene editing technologies like Crispr/Cas9, turning genes on and off or adding new ones has become much more straightforward. Del Monte is already growing pink pineapples, Monsanto and Pioneer are working on antioxidant-boosted tomatoes and sweeter melons, J.R. Simplot has a potato that doesn’t produce cancer-causing chemicals when it’s fried. Smaller startups are busy engineering all kinds of other designer fruits and veggies. And it’s not obvious how exactly this new wave of gene-edited foods will be regulated.

Gene editing gets around most of the existing laws that give the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture authority over biotech food crops. In January, the Obama administration proposed a rule change that would look more closely at gene-edited crops before automatically approving them. But earlier this month the USDA withdrew that proposed rule, citing science and biotech industry concerns that it would unnecessarily hinder research and development.

Carter, whose fruits were cleared by the USDA and the FDA in 2015, says his Arctic Apples are evidence the existing process works. But there were times when he wasn’t sure they were going to make it. “It took us close to 10 years, where we had the apples, we had the data, we kept submitting answers to questions, and then wouldn’t hear anything back,” says Carter. “It’s a bit of a black hole, and that whole time you’re not sure if you’re going to even be able to pay your electricity bills and keep your lights on.”

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Talking to Carter, Okanagan still feels like a small family business, especially when he says the word “process” with that endearing, long Canadian “O”. This year’s Arctic Apple harvest amounted to 175,000 pounds—just a drop in the apple bucket. But shortly after its US regulatory approvals, his company was acquired by Intrexon Corporation, a multinational synthetic biology conglomerate that owns all the other big-name GMOs you might have heard of. Like Oxitec’s Zika-fighting mosquitoes, and the fast-growing AquAdvantage salmon.

That’s one reason customers might be wary of the Arctic Apple. Another is transparency. While Carter says they’re taking that literally—the bags have a plastic see-through window to view the not-brown slices for yourself—others say Okanagan hasn’t gone far enough in telling people how its apple was made. The letters G-M-O don’t appear anywhere on the bag. Instead, in accordance with a 2016 GMO food labeling law, there’s a QR code, which you can scan with a smartphone to get more information online.

Some consumer groups think that doesn’t go far enough, but scientists counter that they’re focusing on the wrong things. “Breeding technologies are just a distraction from the big questions,” says Pam Ronald, who studies plant genetics at the University of California and who is married to an organic farmer. “Like, how do we produce enough food without using up all our soil and water? How do we reduce toxic inputs? Those are the grand challenges of agriculture today, that technology can help address.”

Ronald works on food crops designed to fight food insecurity in the developing world—like drought-resistant corn and vitamin-enriched rice. When she first heard of the Arctic Apple at a conference in 2015, she wasn’t that impressed. It’s not exactly a famine-fighter. But when Carter sent her a box of fruits a few weeks later, her kids had a different take. They brought them into school to show to their biology classes, and according to Ronald, their classmates just went wild. “Kids really hate brown apples, and it made me realize I don’t really like them either,” she says.

Living where food is abundant, most people don’t really grasp how GMOs touch their lives. “It’s that distance that consumers are removed from agriculture that creates the fear,” says Ronald. “But if you see a brown apple you’re probably aware that you throw it away, and maybe you feel guilty about that. Connecting biotechnology to something you can see and feel and taste like that could be transformational.”

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