Adjacent Possible

QUOTE

Thomas Edison once said…

“To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.”

(American inventor and businessman)

CONCEPT

Adjacent Possible

The Adjacent Possible is the set of new combinations that become reachable the moment something novel appears.

Each breakthrough—biological, technological, cultural—unlocks a door, revealing more doors that were inaccessible seconds earlier. Progress therefore tends to be incremental and combinatorial: smartphones needed cheap touch-screens and fast mobile chips; TikTok required ubiquitous cameras and 4G; etc.

In hindsight the next step looks “inevitable” because once the pieces exist, the nearest unlocked door is the easiest to walk through.

STORY

Twenty Weeks … or Twenty Years?

On January 10, 2020, Chinese researchers quietly uploaded the 29,903-base genome of a mysterious coronavirus to a public server. Within 30 minutes Dr. Barney Graham at the U.S. NIH had forwarded the file to a small Massachusetts biotech—Moderna.

Forty-eight hours later, software there generated a 33 KB mRNA design encoding the virus’s spike protein.

That lightning pace rested on years of unrelated advances.

In the 1990s, Hungarian biochemist Katalin Karikó stubbornly pursued synthetic mRNA despite losing grants and a faculty position. Her 2005 paper showing that swapping pseudouridine for uridine tames immune reactions attracted little notice, but it made therapeutic mRNA safe. In Vancouver, chemists were perfecting lipid nanoparticles (fat bubbles 100 nm wide) that could ferry delicate RNA into cells. Meanwhile, high-speed fillers built for cosmetics learned to load 200 vaccine doses per minute.

None of those inventors aimed to combat a pandemic, each simply opened the nearest door in front of them. When SARS-CoV-2 arrived, their rooms suddenly connected.

The first volunteer received Moderna’s shot 63 days after the genome post—a timeline that had taken 20 years for the polio vaccine. By December 2020, Phase III data showed 94% efficacy. By the end of 2021, more than 700 million mRNA doses had saved an estimated 14 million lives worldwide.

What looked miraculous was really the adjacent possible unfolding: decades of quiet, disparate tweaks had stacked doors in a row—ready for humanity to step through the moment crisis turned the handle.