Skin in the Game

Perfume makers in the France of Louis XIV developed a method for capturing the fragrance of plants and flowers that involved placing samples of botanical matter atop a layer of odorless fat, like tallow, and letting the fragrant compounds seep into it over several days until the desired bouquet was achieved. This technique, known as enfleurage, was famously used in Patrick Süskind’s widely acclaimed debut novel, Das Parfum, about a maladapted orphan named Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, whose macabre repurposing of the 18th century innovation bears an uncanny resemblance to the petri dishes of living human skin pictured on the website of Michael Polansky’s AI-driven, drug discovery company Outer Biosciences or simply, Outer Bio.

Brainchild of biotech entrepreneur David James Coon, Outer Bio’s in vitro technology platform Yuna, is an “organ-on-chip” human emulation system, that works somewhat like a concept used in aerospace engineering known as a digital twin, where an aircraft’s physical specifications are replicated in a cybernetic environment to predict structural issues. Similarly, organ-on-chip technologies turn human biological functions into machine-readable clones, that can be used to simulate disease and discover potential treatments.

Coon was part of the research team that developed the organ-on-chip emulation system at Harvard’s Wyss Institute led by Dr. Donald Ingber. Originally part of a collaborative research initiative of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) to address the ethical challenges surrounding human testing during clinical trials, the project was expanded to develop “tissue chips” in 2012, with a $37 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). 

In 2014, Coon and other members of the Wyss Institute’s program formed a spinout company called Emulate, where he served as CEO and planted the first seeds of Outer Bio with business consultant Adam Kolom. A former director of the Cancer Vaccine Acceleration Fund (CVAF), the Cancer Research Institute’s venture capital arm, Kolom had been working with Sean Parker – the notorious co-founder of Napster and Facebook’s first president –, since 2012 to create the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy (PICI).

Michael Polansky, a PICI board member and one of Parker’s closest business associates, co-founded Outer Bio with Coon in 2021, which became the first of nearly fifty biotechnology startups Polansky has since funded through his venture capital firm, Hawktail, – roughly half of its entire portfolio and largest investment category, by far. Hawktail’s laser focus on the sector is a function of its inextricable links to Sean Parker’s PICI, and its network of oncology experts and Big Pharma executives that Kolom put together, who often occupy leadership positions at many of the companies backed by Hawktail. 

Kolom himself runs the company that owns one of the biggest drug research pipelines in Hawktail’s portfolio. A massive undertaking called Danger Bio, which is comprised of more than 100 drug discovery, biology, and clinical specialists, in partnership with a major contractor of the U.S. Department of Defense. It is one of two research pipelines Kolom’s company, Related Sciences, feeds into its proprietary machine learning research platform. Notable company advisors include PICI co-founder and former president, Dr. Jeffrey Bluestone, and Jeff Kindler, former chairman and CEO of Pfizer.

Outer Bio was reorganized as a stock corporation in 2024, relegating James Coon’s participation to a branch of the restructured company, and bringing Polansky’s then fiancé Stefani Germanotta, a.k.a. Lady Gaga, into the mix. Now married, Polansky’s high profile wife has brought some dubious attention to the startup. Tik-Tokers and other branded creatures of the attention economy have latched on to the pop star’s insensitivity to the Palestinian cause and an investor’s problematic ties to Israeli apartheid, to suggest that the company obtains its samples of organic flesh from Israel’s controversial skin bank. Salacious tabloid fodder that only serves to conceal the real villains of this story, which are the structural inequalities of American style capitalism.

Interlocking interests like the ones so evidently on display through Hawktail and PICI are part of the systemic realities that maintain capital flowing in the direction deemed most beneficial for its preservation instead of the collective benefit of humanity. Shared profit incentives create class solidarity among the billionaire vultures and their minions, who protect the rights of a company like Outer Bio to commercially exploit any medical breakthroughs that may come from publicly funded technologies through a web of foundations, political lobbies, and think-tanks, that they themselves fund to make sure that the system remains in place.

In 2013, Sean Parker and Michael Polansky co-founded a “non-partisan” D.C.-based, policy think tank, called the Economic Innovation Group (EIG), to spread libertarian-coded media narratives and annotated attacks on social safety net programs, like Medicaid and Medicare. One of EIG’s most successful policy heists was the infamous Opportunity Zones legislation, which was crafted by EIG’s first CEO and former economic advisor to Barack Obama, Steve Glickman, who claimed the tax scheme was designed to promote investment in low income communities, but which turned out to be nothing more than another tax break for billionaires.

Lofty goals and egalitarian language often accompany modern capitalist narratives. From curing cancer to saving the rainforest, the real aims are always revealed in time. After leaving EIG in 2018, Glickman joined a company called Aspiration Partners, whose founder Joe Sanberg had been on EIG’s board of directors since 2016. Originally established as an “eco-friendly” digital bank, Aspiration pivoted to the sale of carbon credits in 2021 following a failed SPAC deal to take the company public, that resulted in the abrupt ousting of its co-founder and the first inklings of Sanberg’s fraudulent business practices. 

While Glickman presided over the company’s partnership with the World Bank to create a blockchain-enabled carbon offsets program, Sanberg was making arrangements with the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, Steve Balmer, to circumvent the NBA salary cap for basketball superstar Kawhi Leonard, through bogus sponsorship agreements. A story that has been covered extensively in recent months by the sports podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out. In a related scandal, Sanberg was prosecuted by the Justice Department late last year for defrauding Aspiration’s investors to the tune of $145 million, and is now serving a 14-year prison sentence in a federal correctional facility.

Carbon credits and other instruments of climate finance are part of the so-called Fourth Sector economy, an emerging capitalist paradigm which seeks to integrate social and environmental objectives into the financial markets. An ambitious rebranding of old colonial systems, that hides its exclusionary nature behind a facade of ecological sustainability. Hawktail has a few investments in the space with companies like Loam, Normative, NCX, and Heirloom Carbon. Loam’s soil nourishment technology is an interesting solution to the very real problem of soil fertility around the world, that has been caused by our decades-long dependance on chemical fertilizers and pesticides. But, no solution will ever be viable on a planetary scale as long as the primary way to measure its value is tied to capital markets. 

In Süskind’s dark masterpiece, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille commits unspeakable crimes in his quest to be loved. An allegory for the human ego that could just as easily be read as a biography for the lives of billionaire oligarchs today. People like Elon Musk, who claim to be on a mission to save the planet, while actively threatening its survival. Or even Sean Parker himself, who is never shy about making grandiose statements about his contributions to humanity, despite helping to spawn one of the most toxic social media platforms on the Internet, and partnering with a fascist misanthrope to do so in Peter Thiel.

Thiel’s shadow looms large over Polansky as well, who got his start as a venture capitalist at the Founders Fund, leading the firm’s Consumer Internet Investment division. Today, Thiel’s tentacles stretch all the way into Outer Bio and Hawktail, through former Palantir employee Garry Tan, whose VC firm Initialized is one of Outer Bio’s biggest investors, and Alda Leu Dennis, who was Thiel’s general counsel at Founders Fund, and is now Hawktail’s managing partner.

Michael’s father, Steven Polansky, published a debut novel of his own back in 2010. The Bradbury Report takes place in a future where the healthcare system revolves around human cloning technology, and people are given a choice to have a spare version of themselves to use “for parts”, or accept only marginal medical attention. Inspired by conversations the author had with his own son on the subject of genetic replication, the story took shape as the implications of such technology unleashed in the “free market” raced through his mind.

Sixteen years later, watching his own genetic offspring bring that dystopian vision closer to reality might seem like irony. But, it feels more like a tragedy for those of us have to keep putting our own skin in the game, so that the privatized healthcare and insurance rackets can continue to generate untold profits for a handful of billionaires cosplaying Iron Man.