Outside Magazine

She flew down early on a Monday without telling her husband or kids where she was going or what she was doing. By the time she landed in Bogotá it was late. The sky was hazy and dark, the air surprisingly cool, the roads crowded and chaotic.

Her hosts had prepared a bed at their apartment, but she couldn’t really sleep. The two gene therapies she would receive the next day—contained in dozens of vials packed in dry ice—had just arrived from the U.S., and everyone stayed up late talking about how they could change the course of history. When they drove her to the clinic on Tuesday morning, she stared through the window and tried to tune out the world, and then she hunched over her phone and texted her kids: “I love you.” Few people involved in the experiment, if any, even knew she was a mother.