Josie Zayner as an example. The 1517 portfolio founder and biohacking pioneer is a mad scientist, in a manner of speaking, but she’s also an “artist and provocateur,” Danielle said. One doesn’t livestream injecting oneself with a homemade Covid vaccine if one is not prepared to pay the price for being oneself

Let’s imagine that a radical life-extension startup succeeds at developing a product for our deeply flawed, often inaccessible healthcare market, and presumably protects the intellectual property for that product from diffusing into the wider world. What would that breakthrough mean for the rest of us?

Quanta interviewed 19 current and former NLP researchers to tell that story. From experts to students, tenured academics to startup founders, they describe a series of moments — dawning realizations, elated encounters and at least one “existential crisis” — that changed their world. And ours.