Futureworld brings you Mindbullets: News from the Future, to spark strategic thinking about leadership, innovation and digital disruption. These fictitious scenarios aim to challenge conventional mindsets and promote understanding of the future context for business.
September 15 2029
Farmers and “pharmas” are the unsung heroes of bringing the Covid-19 pandemic to its knees in developed and developing economies. Enabled by the most prolific marketing campaign the world has ever seen, the phrase “eat your greens” has taken on a new meaning.
For decades, “big pharma” has successfully scaled vaccines and antibodies to fight the world’s most infamous diseases, including smallpox and MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella), through bacterial and animal-based systems. Late in the 20th century, vaccine development was still widely regarded as having a research & development (R&D) lead time of 10 years. But in 2020 and 2021, the Covid-19 pandemic exponentially accelerated the process to only several months.
At face value, this seemed remarkable, but the new vaccines lacked global penetration. Inconsistent vaccination rates led to further virus mutations, which has fuelled temporal resurgences every other quarter over the past nine years.
Since the Covid-19 outbreak, pharma has also been developing and testing a vaccine that can be delivered by plant molecules in gene-edited leafy greens, such as your average household butter lettuce, a method that would increase global vaccine accessibility and acceptance by more than 30%.
In a bid to ramp up production of the lettuce hosting its breakthrough vaccine, pharma rapidly needed to access plant-producing factories and fields in all corners of the globe. This is where pharma truly met farmers, and in a meeting of minds, Pharma entrusted the “CRISPR Vax-lettuce” to the gentle hands of commercial and emerging farmers.
The worldwide production of these special leafy greens drove exponential adoption by communities and households, shifting global penetration of the Covid-19 vaccine to an effective rate of 72%, and stopping the virus in its tracks.
Today, alliances are being forged between major pharma producers and farmers globally to create the perfect fruit salad, suited to the deployment of common cancer treatments and cell regeneration therapies. It’s safe to say that the proof will be in the pudding.
Date published: November 4 2021
Your vaccine needs a software update
It is easy to install the latest antivirus patch
February 5 2026
You’ve got the latest multiprotection vaccine — or so you thought, but now it turns out there’s a new mutation of the SMERS-CoV-6 virus that needs a tweak to the inoculation. But don’t despair, because there’s an update in the works.
Now that bio-printed medications and vaccines are fully digitally designed and constructed, with the help of advanced “quantum” intelligence, it’s only a matter of isolating the troublesome “bug” in the mRNA code, and recoding the assembler routine.
If that’s a little confusing, you’re excused. But the way these things work now, it’s all software. The software of life, DNA, and the “apps” that apply the fixes, messenger RNA or mRNA, are the tools we use to defend people from new infections and diseases. Including viruses.
It’s like a hotfix for your operating system. If it’s not performing optimally, perhaps it needs a refresh; only thing is, we’re talking about a refresh of you yourself — your personal operating system, which keeps you breathing.
But it’s not all that critical, it’s just a minor update, and things should be fine afterwards. Millions of users, I mean people, have already applied the fix, and reports are coming in of 99.999% success. One or two failures in a million are quite within the norm.
There’s just one problem. You can’t roll back to a previous version. Once you’ve swallowed the new pill, the installation is permanent, there’s no going back. This update can’t be uninstalled.
So, if your antivirus is out of date, check your version carefully before you install the new one.
Date published: February 4 2021
• Despite appearances to the contrary, Futureworld cannot and does not predict the future. The Mindbullets scenarios are fictitious and designed purely to explore possible futures, challenge and stimulate strategic thinking.
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