In the suburbs of Boston stood a research institute covering hundreds of acres.
The institute had originally been a partner organization of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, controlled by a pharmaceutical company with a market value of roughly 2 billion US dollars.
Until last year, its research had primarily focused on clinical biology.
But now, Boston First National Bank, which had acquired it, had given it a new mission. All research directions had been shifted toward Human Cryopreservation Hibernation Technology, with the Cancer Medical Research Foundation providing 1 billion US dollars in funding. The goal was to send terminally ill patients who could not be properly treated in this century to a future where they could be cured.
The Cryobiology Research Institute was now managed by SpaceX and had been merged with SpaceX's Cryogenic Hibernation Laboratory.
The reason the partnership had gone so smoothly was, first, that both sides had the same need for Cryogenic Hibernation Technology—one for spaceflight, the other for medicine.
As for the other reason...
Naturally, it was because they shared the same patron—the young leader of the Boston Consortium, David Lawrence.
It was not just this Cryobiology Research Institute.
He had invested in most of SpaceX's projects that he favored, even though many of them did not appear particularly profitable...
At that moment, inside the Cryobiology Laboratory.
A massive cylindrical culture chamber stood between two computers, connected by all kinds of tubes and cables. A test monkey lay quietly in the middle of the chamber. If not for the fluctuating line on the ECG monitor, it would have been impossible to tell whether it was alive or dead just by looking at it from outside.
After staring at the monkey for a long time, David Lawrence asked.
"How is the research progressing?"
Standing beside him, Elon