[ Marginalia ] Two Hundred and Thirty-Seven. Her name in the file is Mei. Not her name, the one they gave her afterward, so she could be spoken about without being found. At four she was behind in language, in writing, in drawing. Her crayon houses had no doors. The doctors put a word on it that fewer than two hundred and thirty-seven people in the world have ever been given. A gene called CHD3, misspelled by one letter in the earliest draft of her brain. Two hundred and thirty-six others, somewhere, in rooms her parents would never enter. That was the number they held on to. A number is a kind of company. Jason kept the medical records in a folder on his desktop. He opened it more often than he needed to. In the WeChat group, forty parents, all of them awake at two in the morning, all of them typing, a name surfaced in 2023 the way a name surfaces in a city: from someone who knew someone. Shanghai. Xinhua Hospital. A laboratory that had made mice with his daughter's exact mistake inside them. He wrote the email at night. He attached everything: the scans, the reports, the sentence saying he was willing and able to bear the costs. Then he sat there, the way you sit after posting a letter you can't take back. Thirteen minutes. He has counted those thirteen minutes many times since. He has divided them, turned them over, held them up to the light. In thirteen minutes a man can boil water. In thirteen minutes a man on the other side of a country can read a child's whole life and decide what to do with it. Later Jason would understand what the speed meant, that the answer had been waiting long before the question. That somewhere a laboratory had been standing at a window for two years, watching the road, waiting for a father to walk up it carrying a folder and a checkbook. They paid. First for the mice. Then for the monkeys. Then one hundred and thirty thousand dollars into a researcher's personal account, the way you'd pay a man to fix a roof. Here is what nobody said out loud in the consent conversation, though everything else was said, carefully, at length: the worst case is that she dies. They spoke of risks the way a hotel speaks of the weather. The dose went in through the spinal fluid, adenovirus, thousands of times a vaccine's load, because you cannot edit one cell when what you need is a million. Twenty-seven years ago in Arizona there was an eighteen-year-old named Jesse Gelsinger, and on the fourth day his organs stopped, one after another, and the whole world was supposed to have learned something. Somebody did learn something. They learned where the reviews are looser. Because there are two doors in that country. One goes through the drug regulators. The other, for research the hospital calls non-commercial, curiosity's own door, goes through a committee down the hall. The committee that approved Mei never read the primate safety report. This is not an oversight. Oversights get corrected. A door that stays open for thirty years is not a door somebody forgot to close. Mei was not dying. That is the part her mother cannot put down. She was six, she was behind in drawing, she was not dying. A year after she died, the paper came out in Nature. Beautiful mice. Beautiful monkeys. A breakthrough. What had been quietly removed: the human data, and the line thanking a family in the acknowledgments. Their daughter had been edited out of the sentence that thanked them for her. So they went and asked for the paper to be pulled. Not for her. For the parents reading it that morning, in forty group chats, at two in the morning, thinking: there's hope now. Two hundred and thirty-seven, minus one. Nobody has updated the number. Nobody was ever going to. — Aric