'Glass Future' Published in Dutch Translation in Wonderwaan

Very pleased to see my Nature story 'Glass Future' published in Wonderwaan. They also asked me to do an afterword for the story, something that hasn't happened much. And as a reader I love reading these. So I'll post it here, in English:

A few elements combined when I wrote 'Glass Future.' I was reading a collection of Philip K. Dick's short stories when I became inspired to write a story about precognition. This theme occurs regularly in Dick's work ('The Minority Report' for example, but there are many others.) It's also a fascinating question for me. Are we set on the road of predestination? Sometimes I decide one way, sometimes I decide the other. 

The second element was reading about Deinococcus radiodurans which has been charmingly nicknamed Conan the Bacterium. This is one hardy microorganism. Deinococcus is an extemophilic bacterium which can survive extreme environmental conditions and has been named by The Guinness Book of Records as the world's toughest bacterium. Deinococcus has multiple copies of its genome and an extremely efficient DNA repairing mechanism. 

That got me thinking: what would happen if humans were gene-modded to have multiple copies of their genome in their cells. The final element was the situation. I wanted to combine the science and the science fiction in a very real-life situation. The ending of a relationship seemed an interesting arena to explore the notion of precognition. 

If that tempts you, you can read 'Glass Future' in Nature, the original publication here.