Saturday, August 31, 2013

Intercepted Calls Prove Syria Army Used Nerve Gas

Last Wednesday, in the hours after a horrific chemical attack east of Damascus, an official at the Syrian Ministry of Defense exchanged panicked phone calls with a leader of a chemical weapons unit, demanding answers for a nerve agent strike that killed more than 1,000 people. Those conversations were overheard by U.S. intelligence services, The Cable has learned. And that is the major reason why American officials now say they're certain that the attacks were the work of the Bashar al-Assad regime -- and why the U.S. military is likely to attack that regime in a matter of days.

But the intercept raises questions about culpability for the chemical massacre, even as it answers others: Was the attack on Aug. 21 the work of a Syrian officer overstepping his bounds? Or was the strike explicitly directed by senior members of the Assad regime? "It's unclear where control lies," one U.S. intelligence official told The Cable. "Is there just some sort of general blessing to use these things? Or are there explicit orders for each attack?" 

Nor are U.S. analysts sure of the Syrian military's rationale for launching the strike -- if it had a rationale at all. Perhaps it was a lone general putting a long-standing battle plan in motion; perhaps it was a miscalculation by the Assad government. Whatever the reason, the attack has triggered worldwide outrage, and put the Obama administration on the brink of launching a strike of its own in Syria. "We don't know exactly why it happened," the intelligence official added. "We just know it was pretty fucking stupid."

American intelligence analysts are certain that chemical weapons were used on Aug. 21 -- the captured phone calls, combined with local doctors' accounts and video documentation of the tragedy -- are considered proof positive. That is why the U.S. government, from the president on down, has been unequivocal in its declarations that the Syrian military gassed thousands of civilians in the East Ghouta region. 

However, U.S. spy services still have not acquired the evidence traditionally considered to be the gold standard in chemical weapons cases: soil, blood, and other environmental samples that test positive for reactions with nerve agent. That's the kind of proof that America and its allies processed from earlier, small-scale attacks that the White House described in equivocal tones, and declined to muster a military response to in retaliation.

There is an ongoing debate within the Obama administration about whether to strike Assad immediately -- or whether to allow United Nations inspectors to try and collect that proof before the bombing begins. On Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney called the work of that team "redundant ... because it is clearly established already that chemical weapons have been used on a significant scale." 

But within the intelligence community, at least, "there's an interest in letting the U.N. piece run its course," the official said. "It puts the period on the end of the sentence."

When news about the Ghouta incident first trickled out, there were questions about whether or not a chemical agent was to blame for the massacre. But when weapons experts and U.S. intelligence analysts began reviewing the dozens of videos and pictures allegedly taken from the scene of the attacks, they quickly concluded that a nerve gas, such as sarin, had been used there. The videos showed young victims who were barely able to breathe and, in some cases, twitching. Close-up photos revealed that their pupils were severely constricted. Doctors and nurses who say they treated the victims reported that they later became short of breath as well. Eyewitnesses talk of young children so confused, they couldn't even indentify their own parents. All of these are classic signs of exposure to a nerve agent like sarin, the Assad regime's chemical weapon of choice. 

Making the case even more conclusive were the images of the missiles that supposedly delivered the deadly attacks. If they were carrying conventional warheads, they would have likely been all but destroyed as they detonated. But several missiles in East Ghouta were found largely intact. "Why is there so much rocket left? There shouldn't be so much rocket left," the intelligence official told The Cable. The answer, the official and his colleagues concluded, was that the weapon was filled with nerve agent, not a conventional explosive.

In the days after the attacks, there was a great deal of public discussion about which side in Syria's horrific civil war actually launched the strike. Allies of the Assad regime, like Iran and Russia, pointed the finger at the opposition. The intercepted communications told a different story -- one in which the Syrian government was clearly to blame.

The official White House line is that the president is still considering his options for Syria. But all of Washington is talking about a punitive strike on the Assad government in terms of when, not if. Even some congressional doves have said they're now at least open to the possibility of U.S. airstrikes in Syria. Images of dead children, neatly stacked in rows, have a way of changing minds.

"It's horrible, it's stupid," the intelligence official said about the East Ghouta attack by the Syrian military. "Whatever happens in the next few days -- they get what they deserve."

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How A Small Music Agency Is Helping Indie Artists Sell Out

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It used to be that fans would cringe if they heard a band’s song in a commercial. Selling out, or compromising one’s precious art for crass commercialism, was incredibly un-rock and roll. (Spinal Tap’s Rock’n'Rolls comes to mind.) 

And then the music industry died, basically, and bands have a much harder time making a living on album sales and touring. Licensing songs to commercials has become standard since 2008. Pop singer Santigold led the way, penning tracks for brands like Ford, Converse, and Bud Light Lime, and agreeing to have her music played in Target. Here’s a quote from a New York Magazine profile:

Everybody wants you to sell a lot of records, but it’s not considered a failure if you don’t. The record labels know that most of the money nowadays is made in licensing. On MTV, their whole approach is to put your songs in their programming now. … So where before it might have been, ‘Oh, you’re gonna sell out?’ now it’s how we make our money.

Beyond that, a good licensing deal can translate into a hit. As Planet Money pointed out in July, the radio hit “I Love It” by Icona Pop hit No. 2 in America’s Top 40 this summer, over a year after it was released. The song only became a summer anthem after it was prominently featured in an iconic scene in the HBO show “Girls.”

So now up-and-coming bands are eager to sell out. It’s just a matter of getting the chance to do it.

Marmoset Music is a Portland-based boutique music agency helping them live their sell-out dreams. ”We joked that we should have a tagline on the site that says ‘helping artists sell out,’” says co-founder Ryan Wines. That’s the state of the music industry today: Jokes about selling out are barely offensive, even to pretentious of music snobs.

Marmoset got its start a few years back as a composition house, providing custom scores for ad agencies and film studios. But Wines, who has an ad agency background, noticed that his clients were increasingly asking to be connected with indie artists.

“We’re finding self-recorded music that’s done on a budget is what consumers and people are relating to. It has heart, basically, and people are relating to it more than the traditional music model â€" rather than jingles that feel slick and contrived,” he says. It just so happens that the bands making this kind of music are eager for the opportunity to be featured in TV shows and commercials.

After testing a bare-bones, cobbled-together WordPress site as a platform to connect agencies and brands, Marmoset hired digital agency Flavor to help it build a slick-looking self-serve platform. The company is in the midst of a transition from a boutique into a marketplace driven by technology.

The new site allows companies to find music and purchase licenses directly from artists. Marmoset’s site has around 7,000 songs, 28,000 guest accounts, 311 of which have converted to customers. The WordPress version of the site generated around $30,000 a month in gross sales; with the new site Marmoset predicts around $2 million in revenue this year. Marmoset doesn’t disclose the breakdown of revenue sharing between it and artists or their labels.

The deals are fairly inexpensive (in $1,000 range and lower) and include limited rights. For bigger deals, Marmoset acts as a broker between artists and agencies and film-makers. Already Marmoset’s site has facilitated some career-changing deals with little-known artists. A $20,000 or $40,000 check can mean the difference between starving artist and working musician; a feature on a national commercial could lead to wider recognition. A band called Fever Fever landed a large contract with a Southern California health care company, a band called Kye Kye was featured in some Samsung promotions, and a band called Purse Candy sold a big license with Toshiba.

Certainly there are other companies offering a licensing platform for indie artists. Jingle Punks, started in 2008, had paid 1000 artists $1 million as of a year ago. Pump Audio and Taxi offer similar services through painfully cheesy interfaces. Even Getty offers stock music and Vimeo and YouTube have their own music stores. (My own band signed a deal with a service like this â€" can’t remember which â€" years ago, which led to features Vampire Diaries and Suburgatory. It did not, however, translate to untold riches.) “What we’ve found with the big stock music places is it’s not good quality,” Wine says.

Wine believes Marmoset has an advantage because of its personal connections with indie bands  its and focus on filmmakers. Aside from it’s history as a composition house, the company has indie artists (members of the Fruitbats and The Shins) and filmmakers as advisors and employees. Beyond that, still has the ability to commission custom scores. That makes up around 25 percent of Marmoset’s business. Now, when composers come up with five or so options for a score and the client chooses one, the leftovers can be listed on Marmoset’s platform for others to license.

For every startup that sees an industry in transition and sets out to “disrupt” or “revolutionize” it, there’s a humbler effort like Marmoset being built by industry insiders under the radar. The company’s lack of Silicon Valley roots may end up being its biggest advantage. It’s as Chris Dixon said â€" if you want to disrupt an industry, you better know it well.

[Image via Stereogum]

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Friday, August 30, 2013

What Happens When You Mash Up 3D Printing And Amazon's Same-Day Delivery?

They say waiting to get something is often more enjoyable than actually getting it.

That’s not how Jeff Bezos sees it. In the last few years, the Amazon.com founder has been in relentless pursuit of a lag-less future, one where you barely have enough time to utter the word “shipping” before your package arrives. In this utopia, deliveries take place in a matter of hours, not days. To make it a reality, Bezos is bringing the full power of Amazon’s supply-chain resources to bear. The company has plowed nearly $13.9 billion since 2010 into new warehouses near its customers. It’s an undertaking only a massive multinational would dare attempt.

But a handful of smaller companies are convinced there’s a way to get products to consumers just as quickly, with greater satisfaction and at a fraction of the overall cost. The future, these companies argue, is in on-demand 3D printing.

These two ways of delivering goods couldn’t be more different. One relies on scaling and infrastructure to reduce transportation time. The other eliminates as much infrastructure as possible and instead sinks money into materials and on-site manufacturing. Yet both share a common dream: achieving a just-in-timeness never before seen in the history of commerce.

It won’t be long before these technologies start overlapping and interacting â€" and that’s a good thing. The resulting combinations will iron out a lot of the inefficiencies of using either method alone. But however it happens, it probably won’t be hailed as a “3D printing revolution” or as a “shipping revolution.” It might simply be known as the just-in-time revolution.

The race to ‘instant’

Amazon is merely one of a growing number of businesses all jockeying to see who can shave the most delay off of their shipping options. Recently, eBay and WalMart both began testing same-day delivery in parts of the country. The competition to eliminate just a few extra shipping hours is intense; to get deliveries to customers in under an hour, eBay dispatches college students by foot, bike and taxi to pick up products at local big-box stores and bring them to people’s doorsteps.

Faster shipping is costly. As a share of Amazon’s total sales, the amount of money that went to shipping came to nearly 5 percent in 2011, up from just 3.2 percent in 2009. Shipping is increasingly eating into Amazon’s profits, and the move to same-day delivery promises to exacerbate that trend.

Amazon is moving ahead anyway. By bundling same-day delivery with Amazon Prime â€" whose members spend up to twice as much as non-members, according to some estimates â€" the company is likely to make up for any shipping-related shortfalls. It’s hard to see a mom-and-pop store pulling off a feat like this; only a company as large and coordinated as Amazon has the means to use same-day shipping as a loss-leader.

But same-day shipping doesn’t solve everything. It raises the pressure on Amazon to have an even more reliable inventory than it does now, lest an order come in and can’t be fulfilled within 24 hours.

(Rick Wilking/Reuters)

(Rick Wilking/Reuters)

The business case for 3D printing

Faster shipping has also played an important role behind the scenes, allowing companies to produce a wider variety of products with less unsold inventory. When air shipping first began to displace ocean freight in the mid-20th century, it cut weeks off of transportation times, enabling perishable goods to survive much longer trips. That trend has only accelerated as aircraft technology has improved, according to David Hummels, a Purdue University economist.

“If there is uncertainty in demand plus lags between production and final sales,” Hummels wrote, “firms may face a mismatch between what consumers want and what the firm has available to sell.”

So the less time goods spend in transit during the production and distribution process, the more efficient companies can be at supplying consumers’ desires. But what if companies could dispense with shipping altogether by “manufacturing” goods near their final destination?

That’s where 3D printing comes in. By producing goods in exactly the ordered configuration precisely when they’re needed, 3D printing is ideal for filling gaps in the supply chain (which reduces uncertainty), keeping inventory low more generally (which saves companies money on shelving) and reducing waste (which occurs when the goods aren’t sold).

Advocates for 3D printing argue that even on its own, the manufacturing technique could upend the retail sector. A small or non-existent inventory gives a business much more freedom to test new products. Suppose you sold a lineup of coffee cups that were only manufactured as people ordered them, said Hod Lipson, director of Cornell University’s Creative Machines Lab. You could post a handful of options on your website at little to no cost to you, then delete the low-performing cups without having to make them all first.

“That would be very costly to do if you actually had to fill up a whole supply chain, a whole production line, for each of those items,” said Lipson. “But when you’re printing them or fabricating them on demand, you can much more easily evolve and adapt your production to what output people actually want.”

The limits of 3D printing

The dream of thousands if not millions of American entrepreneurs doing business this way is enticing. But this is where the promise of 3D printing bumps up against reality. There are concrete limits to just-in-time manufacturing that make universal adoption unlikely.

One major hurdle is that while printing with most materials singly is a cinch, printing with more than one material at once is much harder. A typical room might contain objects with 50 different materials in various combinations. To print an object in said room, not only would you need to have all the necessary materials on hand in a printable form â€" you’d also have to have a printer with multiple or interchangeable nozzles. As if that weren’t difficult enough, each new material might need to be printed under different conditions.

DJ Butenschoen works for an Illinois-based company called GPI Prototype and Manufacturing Services, Inc. The company 3D-prints metal parts by laying down a powder and then tracing a design with a heated laser before applying more powder and repeating the same process, over and over again. (All 3D printing operates on the same idea in one form or another.)

“We have seven different metals we build out of,” Butenschoen said. Each one of them prints at a different rate. “Sometimes it’s how focused the laser is, is it quick, is it slow â€" so having the ability to put multiple metals in there, you’d have to have multiple lasers and multiple everything. And then you’re putting three or four machines together just to make one part.”

As labor-intensive as the production sequence sounds, it’s the finishing process that often demands the most attention. After all, even the simplest bobbleheads and figurines generally need to be decorated before being sold. And that can take time and money, too.

GPI accepts orders from practically anyone, ranging from hobbyists to large manufacturing firms that need complex moving parts. But â€" tellingly â€" GPI won’t 3D-print something if it can be machined using traditional methods.

The kind of business that GPI does, moreover, isn’t the kind of activity that ordinary consumers can safely perform in their own homes. Squirting molten plastic from a tube might be fine, but steel or aluminum, with their higher melting points, are a different story altogether.

The coming future of ‘just-in-time’

Nobody, in other words, will be replicating whole cell phones and televisions from their living rooms anytime soon. Traditional manufacturing and standalone factories will â€" duh â€" remain a key part of the American retail universe for some time. But in the 21st Century, we’ll see more factories that incorporate 3D printing into the production process, allowing more flexible manufacturing and shorter turnaround times.

In fact, there’s some evidence that’s already happening. We think of factories as being large buildings filled with robots and people in hard hats that consumers never visit, but the factory of the coming decade might wind up being a much smaller, community-oriented destination. Another way to put it is that 3D printing is fast adopting the Kinko’s model. UPS â€" yes, the company with “parcel” in its name â€" recently announced plans to set up 3D printing shops in San Diego that will let startups and small businesses print their own prototypes. Washington D.C.’s public library system has its own 3D printer that anyone can walk in and use. And New York-based Shapeways already accepts your 3D designs and prints them for you.

The last of those represents an early mix of traditional shipping and 3D printing.

“Shapeways is taking the Amazon model,” said Chris Dixon, the Andreesen Horowitz investor who sent Shapeways $30 million in venture capital earlier this year. After printing a customer’s product from a 3D design file, he said, it then gets UPS to deliver it.

Shipping to U.S. locations currently takes 2-3 weeks. But when UPS opens its new 3D printing centers nationwide, Shapeways could conceivably slice that delay down to the time it takes a customer to visit a printing center, feed a copy-protected version of the design file into the machine, and print the product themselves.

Amazon’s giant fulfillment centers could be another place where just-in-time manufacturing and delivery come together. Today, the company might be focused on getting things from its facilities to customers quickly. But that inventory has to be restocked for the next customer from someplace. To the extent that 3D printers can help replenish inventory locally, that could add up to a great deal of savings.

Adding 3D printers to Amazon’s business wouldn’t just be good for Jeff Bezos. It’d be a boon for 3D printing advocates looking to spread the technology far and wide. Even if home-based 3D printing remains a niche activity, MakerBot CEO Bre Pettis expects that within 18 months, most people will have held a 3D-printed object in their hands.

“The next big threshold is when everyone knows someone who has access to a 3D printer,” said Pettis. “You’ll be the person friends come to and say, ‘Take me to your leader.’”

With these new hybrid ways of getting products to consumers, that point could arrive even sooner than we think.

Brian Fung covers technology for The Washington Post, focusing on electronic privacy, national security, digital politics and the Internet that binds it all together. He was previously the technology correspondent for National Journal and an associate editor at the Atlantic. His writing has also appeared in Foreign Policy, Talking Points Memo, the American Prospect and Nonprofit Quarterly.
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Cancer’s Primeval Power And Murderous Purpose

It was 2010 and I was driving through the badlands of northwest Colorado, far from the cool, green Rocky Mountains. This was the land where the oldest known example of cancer had been found: inside of a bone of a Jurassic Age dinosaur.

About 150 million years ago, the malignant growth had eaten away at the beast. It died and was buried under the layered debris of the ages. But a fragment of its petrified skeleton chanced to survive. It was discovered by an unknown rock hunter, cut and polished in a rock shop, and purchased by a man on vacation -- a doctor who knew bone cancer when he saw it.

We think of cancer as a modern scourge, but it was here long before people walked the Earth. Only very recently, in geological time, have creatures like us evolved who think there might be something they can do about it.

That evening, I thought about Nancy, the woman I had been married to. It had been almost seven years to the day since she was diagnosed with a metastatic cancer. I remembered the frantic search -- for the best doctor, the best treatment, the best hospital. The surgery, the chemotherapy, the radiation -- that was all behind us now, but the enigmatic nature of the disease still preyed on my mind.

The science, I knew, was deep and complex -- and I set out to learn everything I could. My goal, after two years of reading, studying and talking to scientists, was to reach a point where I, as an outsider, could hold the full sweep of the field in my head. I would never learn or understand every fine detail -- that would be impossible even for an expert. What I aimed for was a bird’s-eye view of the scientific terrain -- of what science does and does not know about cancer. I was in for a lot of surprises.

Occupying Force

“Disease” began to seem too weak a word for this condition. It is a fundamental biological phenomenon. A single cell “decides” (for lack of a better word) to strike off on its own. Mutation by mutation, it evolves -- like a monster in the ecosystem of your body. Cancer is an occupying force with a will of its own.

For Nancy, the first sign was subtle at first: a swollen lymph node in her right inguinal area -- a symptom that can have many causes, often benign. (Cat scratch fever was our hopeful hypothesis.) The lump was biopsied, the cells were examined by a pathologist, and the diagnosis was made. I can still hear the doctor’s measured words: “I think we are looking at a carcinoma.”

Most cancers, by far, are carcinomas, which occur in the epithelial tissue that lines the exterior and the interior of the body. These cells are constantly being sloughed off and replaced, and every time new cells are born, they inevitably acquire mutations. That is the nature of life in an imperfect universe.

Mutations usually happen for no obvious reason -- the only identifiable cause is entropy, the natural tendency of all things complex to gradually succumb to the universe’s inherent randomness. Epithelial cells, forming the skin and lining the alimentary canal and digestive track, are vulnerable in another way. They are frequently exposed to substances in food and in the air that can damage DNA. Whatever the cause, the right combination of mutations can convert a normal cell into one that is cancerous.

In Nancy’s case, the lymph node was only a way station on what, unchecked, would be a mass migration through her body. The source, the doctors told us, could be the colon, the stomach, the ovaries, the uterus. The cancer could have come from almost anywhere.

Genome Mutation

“Metastatic carcinoma with an unknown primary.” A diagnosis doesn’t get much scarier than that. Somewhere in the recesses of her body, a cell had divided into two daughter cells, leaving one of them with a microscopic birth defect -- a mutation to its genome that caused it to divide a little faster than its neighbors.

Normally, that wouldn’t be a problem. The body is equipped with a phalanx of defenses. But as the aberrant cell divides, more mutations accumulate -- and some of these might be the very ones that disable the safeguards or enact mechanisms to work around them.

Freed from these constraints, the cell divides even faster. As one generation gives rise to another and another, more mutations occur, and the chances increase that a family of cells will develop the biochemical intelligence to outwit the rest of the body and grow into a malignant tumor.

What is happening is a sped-up version of Darwinian evolution, with the tumor becoming fitter and fitter, better equipped to dominate and thrive.

That was for me a jarring realization: What from the body’s point of view are dangerous mutations are, for the tumor, advantageous adaptations. As it fights off attacks from the immune system, it develops the ability to eat into the surrounding tissues and to nourish itself by growing its own blood vessels. It can learn to insinuate its way into the lymphatic system. Nancy’s cancer had reached that point, and it was only after weeks of tests that a positron emission tomography (PET) scan finally revealed the source of the trouble: the lining of her uterus, called the endometrium.

By the time the surgery was scheduled, the cancer had traveled across her body from the lymph node in her right leg to another in her left leg. Every day, it was getting smarter and more dangerous. You are not supposed to personify biological processes. But with cancer, even many scientists find it impossible to resist.

Nancy’s operation was successful. But after the cancerous tissues and lymph nodes were removed and examined, the diagnosis only got worse. This was not the most common type of endometrial cancer -- one that can have a very high survival rate. It was a rare, extraordinarily aggressive kind called uterine papillary serous carcinoma, or UPSC. According to a paper published around that time, the five-year chance of survival for Stage 4 UPSC -- this is what the doctors said she had -- was as low as 5 percent.

Mustard Gas

For so aggressive a cancer in someone so young (she was in her early 40s), the only tools at the oncologist’s disposal were a triple cocktail of corrosive chemotherapy drugs followed by an intense course of radiation. The therapy had to be as brutal as the cancer. I didn’t know this then: The first chemotherapy drugs were derived from mustard gas. And they are still in use. A drug called mustargen, or nitrogen mustard, which is used to treat some cancers, is banned under the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention -- unless the enemy consists of cancer cells.

We had briefly hoped that Nancy could be treated with one of the gentler “targeted therapies” -- the so-called magic bullets reputed to zero in only on the cancerous cells while avoiding the healthy ones. But none of them had the power to attack this kind of cancer. The only remedy was an old-fashioned blunderbuss assault with chemical toxins -- cisplatin, doxorubicin, paclitaxel -- and finishing up with X-rays.

All of these poisons kill healthy cells along with the cancerous ones. Since the cancer cells are dividing at a faster rate and are often less able to repair themselves, they are killed in greater numbers. That is the idea, anyway. But while the treatment is in progress, the errant cells continue to evolve. They can become immune to the poisons or more resistant to radiation.

It has been almost 10 years since those brutal months. But the treatment would hardly be different for someone diagnosed with the cancer today -- or for almost any metastatic cancer, particularly those in advanced stages. The news is filled with reports of the latest targeted therapies such as “super Herceptin,” described as “a heat-seeking missile” that delivers the poison directly to the errant cancer cells. Or the newest immunotherapies, in which a patient’s own immune cells are removed and reprogrammed to destroy the cancer. But none of these turn out to be as effective as they sound. For an advanced metastatic cancer, the best that can usually be offered is a few extra months of misery.

Successful Treatment

Nancy was lucky. The treatment worked, and she is healthier than ever. But such a close brush with death changes a person in other ways. Though we survived her cancer, our marriage did not.

As our life together was unwinding, I kept up the chase, learning everything I could about what scientists are learning about this attack from within.

It is eerie enough to think of a cancer evolving like a quasi-creature in the ecosystem of your body -- acquiring through random mutation and selection the powers to thrive. But the malignant cells don’t have to develop all of their tools from scratch. They can take advantage of mechanisms already built into the cell -- including those a fertilized egg uses as it divides and develops in the womb. These genes, which are switched off after a baby has been fully formed, can be switched back on by the cancer cell. Susan Sontag called cancer “a demonic pregnancy,” “a fetus with its own will.” That is more than an arresting metaphor.

Just as remarkable is the way an aggressive tumor is capable not only of destroying healthy cells -- but also of recruiting them to aid in the attack. The tumor not only learns to evade the immune system, but it also turns it into an ally. That is one of the paradoxes of cancer. The various devices normally used to heal a wound -- destroying diseased tissue and replacing it with healthy new growth -- are used to promote the development of the cancer.

The complexity of this all -- the biological brilliance -- is enthralling. And appalling. As I explored this new world, I found myself torn between seeing cancer as it was for Nancy -- a terrifying, debilitating illness -- and cancer as an intellectual puzzle. When I felt myself straying too high into the stratosphere of abstraction, I had her story to pull me back to the ground.

Then, just as I was almost done writing, came the next, bigger blow. Joe, my youngest brother, was diagnosed with what the oncologists called squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck -- usually a very survivable cancer. He had none of the recognized risk factors. The only thing that could be called a cause was a deadly series of random, microscopic blows.

As he went through the gamut -- surgery, radiation, chemo, and then chemo again -- I tried to encourage him with what I had learned about the science of cancer. I think I even tried to put things in perspective with that story about the dinosaur. For all science has discovered about the intricacies of the cancer cell, there was nothing to help him. Less than a year after the diagnosis, he had died.

(George Johnson is a science journalist and author. This article was adapted from his latest book, “The Cancer Chronicles: Unlocking Medicine’s Deepest Mystery,” published by Alfred A. Knopf.)

To contact the writer of this article: George Johnson at georgejohnson@talaya.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this article: Max Berley at mberley@bloomberg.net.

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Thursday, August 29, 2013

The Billionaire Who Controls Your Beer, Your Condiments And Your Whopper

After they sold H.J. Heinz to Warren Buffett and a bunch of Brazilians in June, the ketchup manufacturer’s outgoing board of directors met for dinner at Pittsburgh’s Duquesne Club to congratulate themselves on a job well done. Twenty-three billion dollars had just changed hands. The takeover price, at $72.50 a share, was almost 20 percent higher than the company’s recent all-time high. “We said we’re all going to miss each other, but we felt we had done right by the shareholders,” says Dean O’Hare, who’d sat on the board since 2000. Heinz is an institution in Pittsburghâ€"the Steelers play at Heinz Field, locals of means like to get married at Heinz Memorial Chapelâ€"and Buffett’s presence allayed fears that the 144-year-old company would be dismantled. “Seeing the name on the letter was very important to us,” O’Hare says.

The only really un-Buffettlike aspect of the deal, other than the high price, was the Brazilians. Not because of their nationality, but because they were the principals at 3G Capital, an investment firm best known for the leveraged buyout of Burger King in 2010. Had the Oracle of Omaha changed his mind on private equity, which he once compared to a porn shop? At Berkshire Hathaway’s (BRK/A) annual shareholders’ meeting in May, Buffett explained why he seemed to be breaking his own rules: his confidence in 3G’s 74-year-old chief investor and strategist, Jorge Paulo Lemann. He called Lemann “classy.” As a sign of Buffett’s esteem, 3G and Berkshire have equal stakes in Heinz despite Berkshire putting up three times as much cash. Heinz, Buffett said, would be Lemann’s show.

In the U.S., Lemann is virtually unknown, even though he and his two longtime partners, Marcel Herrmann Telles and Carlos Alberto Sicupira, now control three icons of U.S. consumer culture: Heinz ketchup, Burger King, and, after the $52 billion takeover of Anheuser-Busch in 2008, Budweiser beer. The combined market value of the companies they run is $187 billionâ€"larger than that of Citigroup (C).

In Brazil, Lemann is a business-class hero. He’s the wiry, white-haired conglomerateur who’s part Buffett, part Sam Walton, part Roger Federer. (In his younger days he was a five-time Brazilian national tennis champion.) “Lemann” is shorthand for pitiless efficiency. Last year he became the richest man in Brazil, taking the title from oil and mining tycoon Eike Batista, whose empire has since collapsed. Worth some $20 billion, Lemann is No. 32 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, seven slots behind George Soros and three ahead of Carl Icahn. Arminio Fraga, who worked under Lemann in the 1980s, later served as central bank chief, and now runs one of the country’s largest asset-management firms, is one of a generation of Brazilian entrepreneurs who look up to Lemann. “He carried out a revolution in the way people think about business,” Fraga says.

Lemann and his partners founded 3G in New York in 2004 to buy U.S. companies with the cash they’d earned from more than two decades of takeovers and turnarounds in Brazil. The name is a reference to the number of principals in the firm (the Brazilian press often calls Lemann, Telles, and Sicupira the three musketeers) and to Banco Garantia, the investment bank where they developed their management philosophy. Starting in the 1970s, Lemann built Garantia into Brazil’s premier financial firm. Since selling the bank to Credit Suisse (CS) in 1998, he and his partners have focused on acquisitions outside the financial industry, such as Heinz.

Lemann declined to be interviewed for this article. When contacted by Bloomberg Businessweek, some of his friends and business associates said they’d been asked by Lemann not to speak with journalists about him. Heinz likewise declined to make its executives available for comment, though a handful of press releases since June 7, when the company’s shares ceased trading and Heinz officially went private, hint at the sort of shake-ups that Lemann and his partners specialize in.

Their first move was to replace Heinz’s long-serving chief executive officer, William Johnson, with Bernardo Hees, a former Brazilian railroad executive who had most recently run Burger King (BKW). In August, Hees fired 600 members of Heinz’s office staff in the U.S. and Canada, or 9 percent of its North American workforce. About 350 of those jobs were in Pittsburgh. Then he started knocking down the walls between offices to create an open-air plan and promote communication. He also axed 11 senior executives and replaced them with top performers from inside the company. Much of this resembles the changes Lemann’s people made at Burger King, where it’s forbidden to make color copies without permission, and Anheuser, where employees no longer have access to free beer. According to a book published in Brazil this year, Sonho Grande (Big Dream), Lemann’s partner Sicupira has a favorite phrase: “Costs are like fingernails: You have to cut them constantly.”

The formula has done wonders for the profitability of Anheuser-Busch InBev (BUD), the company created by Anheuser’s 2008 merger with InBev; its stock price has increased about 150 percent in the past five years. Burger King is already valued at more than twice the $3.3 billion the three musketeers bought it for in 2010.

Burger King had languished for eight years under the ownership of the private equity firms Goldman Sachs Capital Partners, TPG Capital, and Bain Capital. In two years under Hees the company more than doubled its margins, as measured by Ebitda (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization), Wall Street’s preferred gauge of cash flow. He did this in part by recasting Burger King as an owner of franchises rather than an operator of restaurants and sold off locations owned by the company. This allowed Hees to shove about 28,000 employees off Burger King’s balance sheet. It also meant the company didn’t need to spend as much to refurbish aging restaurants; instead, it offered incentives and lined up loans for franchisees to revamp their locations, replacing dull old plastic countertops with shiny metallic surfaces and futuristic stripes of neon. Seeking to draw in a wider crowd, Hees scrapped an advertising strategy that catered to young males and got rid of that creepy bearded mascot, the King. And he expanded abroad, forming joint ventures in emerging markets including Brazil, where local partners put up most if not all of the cash.

Hees didn’t know anything about fast food before becoming CEO of Burger King. He started his career as a logistics analyst at a Brazilian railroad Lemann and his partners took over in the 1990s, rising to CEO after just seven years. Putting a railroad guy in charge of a fast-food chain makes no sense at first blush, but this, too, is a typical Lemann move. “What’s important is not knowing hamburgers, it’s knowing how to lead a company,” says Paulo Veras, an Internet entrepreneur who for several years led one of the trio’s foundations. “It’s the kind of intelligence that transcends any specific business segment.”

Lemann was born and raised in Rio de Janeiro. The surname is Swissâ€"his father, a dairy entrepreneur, was born in Switzerland, as were his maternal grandparents. Lemann went to the American School of Rio de Janeiro, where he was voted most likely to succeed, even though he spent much of his time surfing and playing tennis. He played at Wimbledon and competed in the Davis Cup twiceâ€"once for Brazil and once for Switzerland (he has dual citizenship). In 1958 he was accepted by Harvard University at a time when few Brazilians went; as he explained in a 2011 speech to a group of high school students in São Paulo, he probably got in because of his tennis game.

In the speech, Lemann said he didn’t like Harvard. He hated the cold and missed the waves of Leblon beach in Rio. So he designed a system to get his bachelor’s degree in just three years: Before signing up for a class he gathered information on the syllabus by interviewing the professor and students who’d already taken it. He also discovered that the final exams from previous years were archived at the library and noted that they varied little from year to year, allowing for easy cramming. Harvard was mainly worthwhile, he said, because it forced him to get creative so he could finish early.

One day, when he was in Rio on summer vacation from Harvard, a powerful storm had created waves more than 30 feet tall that broke perilously late, right on the beach. Used to 10-foot waves, he decided to go for it anyway. “I took the wave and felt the blood go to my feet. It was a lot faster than I was used to, and a lot taller, but I went for it, and I managed to get out before it crashed. My adrenaline was at the maximum,” he told the Brazilian high school students, a broad smile across his wrinkled face. At key moments in his career, “I thought back to that wave I surfed in Copacabana far more than I thought about the things I learned in college. It gave me a certain self-confidence when it came to taking risks.”

After graduating in 1961, Lemann juggled a tennis career with a series of jobs in Brazil’s fledgling financial industry. In 1971 he joined with a few other traders to take over an inconsequential brokerage known as Garantia. Luiz Cezar Fernandes, one of those original traders, says Lemann instituted the partnership model of Goldman Sachs (GS), with a twist. Instead of simply awarding shares once a year for a job well done the way Goldman did, Lemann offered the best performers the chance to use their bonus to buy shares. Because they offered lower salaries than the competition, this meant that becoming a partner was a risk. “You had to give up buying a house, a car,” says Fernandes. As Garantia grew, it also meant that becoming a partner would make you very rich on paper. Seniority didn’t matter: To reward top-performing newcomers, the bank would shrink the bonus pool for laggards.

Lemann always made a point of personally hiring employees, whom he considered potential partners. In the past, Brazil’s best jobs were in the local offices of multinational corporations, but by the 1980s, Garantia had become one of the most sought-after employers for smart young men. (There are few women in Lemann’s world, even today.) Résumés didn’t matter much. Candidates had to go through a gauntlet of interviews with 8 or 10 partners who had an acronym for the profile they were looking for: PSD, for poor, smart, deep desire to get rich. Sometimes the partners posed odd or even offensive questions just to throw interviewees off balance and see how they reacted. Paulo Lerner, who worked at Garantia in the early ’90s, remembers being asked whether he had sex with his girlfriend. He wasn’t too fazed, and he made it through, one of a handful among the hundreds who applied each year.

Garantia was a place where the words fanático and obsessivo were considered compliments. The first person to go home for the day often received ironic applause. “No one came and handed anything to you on a platter,” says Lerner. “A lot of people couldn’t handle it.”

The Garantia style was personified by Sicupira, who joined in 1973. At 17 he had emancipated himself from his parents and founded a brokerage, selling it the following year. He first met Lemann because they are both avid spearfishermenâ€"Sicupira once caught a 301.2-kilo (664-pound) blue marlin, which set a world record. In 1982, Sicupira led Garantia’s first major foray outside finance, the acquisition of an ailing retail chain known as Lojas Americanas, or American Stores. It was the first hostile takeover in Brazil, where stratospheric interest rates and the general chumminess of business had long kept such moves in check.

Sicupira knew little about retail. He was, however, well aware of a Lemann maxim, one of 20 laid out in a document distributed to Garantia executives: “Innovations that create value are useful, but copying what works well is more practical.” So Sicupira wrote letters to the CEOs of the world’s largest retailers, asking if he could pay them a visit to learn about their business. One responded personally: Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart Stores (WMT).

Lemann and Sicupira visited Walton in Arkansas and saw firsthand how the American billionaire squeezed suppliers, controlled inventories, and paid obsessive attention to cost. They also saw how he leveled with employees and customers. Walton’s philosophy worked for Wal-Mart, so Sicupira copied it. Much as Walton promised his executives he would dance the hula on Wall Street if Wal-Mart reached a certain mark of profitabilityâ€"and followed throughâ€"Sicupira, upon achieving a 6 percent Ebitda margin at Lojas Americanas, did the samba in carnaval dress in downtown Rio.

Sicupira also incorporated some of the Garantia culture, lowering executives’ base salaries, cutting perks, and implementing big, target-based stock incentives. Lojas Americanas’ top management mutinied, calling for the return of the cushy old system. After the executives made their demandsâ€"and went out for lunchâ€"Sicupira fired them and locked them out of the building. Sicupira, Telles, and Lemann still own Lojas Americanas. Its share price has increased tenfold in the past decade.

Lemann once told Brazil’s HSM Management magazine how he’d visited Konosuke Matsushita, the founder of Panasonic, a few years before his death in 1989. “Suddenly he starts telling me about his plans for the next 500 years of his company, as if that were normal,” Lemann said. This was at a time when hyperinflation kept most Brazilians from planning for the future at all. Lemann also considered General Electric’s (GE) annual reports a kind of bible and adopted Jack Welch’s 20-70-10 ruleâ€"promote the top 20 percent of your employees, maintain the middle 70, and fire the rest. Claudio Galeazzi, a management consultant who led Lojas Americanas in the late 1990s, compares Lemann and his partners to sponges. “They weren’t ashamed to copy the best examples of management,” he says. “Then they made it better, applying their own ink.”

The seed for what would become AB InBev was Brahma, a Brazilian beer manufacturer that Lemann acquired in 1989, putting Telles in charge. They hired a management consultant named Vicente Falconi, who put in place a system where, instead of basing budgets on the previous year’s, managers started at zero every 12 months and had to make a case for why they should get more. Hees used the same system at Burger King. “People say the customer comes first and all that,” says Falconi, who still advises Lemann’s companies, “but actually it’s cash.”

Through it all, Lemann kept up his tennis. Even while overseeing Garantia, Lojas Americanas, Brahma, and, starting in 1993, a buyout firm called GP Investimentos, Lemann played almost every morning at 6:30 a.m. The adrenaline eventually took its toll. Although obsessed with fitness and healthy eating, he suffered a heart attack in 1994, at 54. For perhaps the first time in his life, he was forced to slow down.

At the time, Garantia was at its peak. Margaret Thatcher had recently paid a visit, signaling its clout. It was a pioneer in Brazil for making risky bets of the sort favored by U.S. investment banks, and in 1994, according to Sonho Grande, it cleared $1 billion in profit. Its traders got cocky. Without properly hedging itself, Garantia sold huge amounts of insurance on Brazilian government bonds, and when the Asian financial crisis exploded in 1997, sending interest rates soaring in emerging markets around the world, the bank lost hundreds of millions of dollars in a single year. It was the bank’s first loss in two decades, and its aura of invincibility was ruined. The next year, Lemann and his partners sold it to Credit Suisse for $675 million, a fraction of the price they might have gotten before the losses.

Then life got worse for Lemann. In 1999 criminals attempted to kidnap his three young children. A driver was taking them to school when two cars blocked the street. The would-be kidnappers opened fire. Although the driver was wounded, he managed to get the children to safety. Lemann would soon move his family to Switzerland, but on the day of the shooting his children did not miss school. Nor did Lemann himself miss any meetings, according to Sonho Grande and a former associate who asked not to be named. To his business partners, the only sign something was amiss was that he arrived late.

The sale of Garantia was a blow to Lemann, but it left him with cash to invest, so he started buying shares in Gillette (PG), the razor manufacturer, and won a seat on the board. This is where he met Buffett, who had invested $600 million in the company in 1989. They had similar boardroom styles, says James Kilts, Gillette’s chairman and CEO from 2001 to 2005. He praises Lemann’s intellectual curiosity and nimbleness in an industry where he had no expertise. Once, in a debate over the wisdom of buying the largest battery manufacturer in China, Lemann prevailed on his fellow board members by saying the strategic value of the acquisition outweighed concerns over price. Kilts says the bet ultimately paid off. “He had this ability to step back from a situation and capture the essence,” Kilts says. “He’s a great listener, not a big talker.”

At his own companies, Lemann’s single-minded focus on cash flow explains how, after the takeover of Anheuser-Busch in 2008, AB InBev had little trouble paying down its massive debt amid the global financial crisis. It could also explain why consumers in the U.S. have lately taken to suing the company for allegedly watering down its Budweiser. People who know Lemann say he personally avoids the products he now peddles; he’s a teetotaler who prefers a bottle of water and a salad. According to Sonho Grande, he ate his first Burger King hamburger only after acquiring the company and commented that he found it too big. What he liked about Burger King was how it generated cash.

Veras, the Web entrepreneur, says Lemann and Sicupira have a saying: “Any organization, to be successful, must grow.” Once they’ve streamlined away a company’s inefficiencies and there’s nothing left to improve, however, the only way to keep growing is through acquisitions. “It’s essential to keep this immense machine operating and renewing itself,” says Thomaz Wood Jr., a management professor at São Paulo’s Fundação Getúlio Vargas business school. It’s a heady but vicious work environment; Wood says he wouldn’t recommend his students take jobs at Lemann’s companies.

AB InBev is the world’s largest brewer. It sells almost one in every five beers consumed on earth. Those huge economies of scale allow it to return more value to shareholders, but Wood suggests the benefits have mostly accrued to Lemann, Telles, and Sicupira’s bank accounts. This is more than an abstract discussion. In 2009 the three men paid 15 million reais ($6.4 million) to Brazil’s securities regulator to settle allegations that they had abused their control of AmBev, the product of their merger of Brahma with another Brazilian beer company. The regulator, known as CVM, said they had used stock options to boost their holdings in AmBev’s voting shares before selling it to Belgium’s Interbrew in 2004, to the detriment of minority investors. None of the three admitted wrongdoing as part of the settlement.

Heinz is different from Lemann’s past acquisitions in that there’s less fat to trim. This has a lot to do with billionaire investor Nelson Peltz. His firm, Trian Fund Management, bought a 5 percent stake in 2006 and helped usher in aggressive cost savings and asset sales, allowing for more marketing spending as well as higher dividends and share buybacks. Analysts credit him for the rally in the share price in the years before Lemann and Buffett acquired the company. How, then, to wring more value from Heinz? Peter Rossman, a spokesman for the IUF, an international association of unions in the food industry, says Heinz workers are nervous, though its factory jobs have so far gone untouched.

If AB InBev is any indication, Lemann didn’t buy Heinz just to downsize it. O’Hare, the longtime Heinz board member, says 3G relayed the message that it plans to use the company as a platform for acquisitions. Fernandes, the onetime partner at Garantia, says he’d bet money that Lemann will try to take over PepsiCo (PEP). (A spokesperson from PepsiCo declined to comment.)

Lemann once told a Brazilian tennis magazine he decided to pursue business only after he realized he was unlikely to be one of the world’s 10 best tennis players. He said, “I saw that I would never be an astro”â€"a star. People who know him say he hates seeing his name on rich lists, but it seems more an aversion to publicity than an aversion to riches. He’s an empire builder. “People in the U.S. are moved by the American dream,” says Fernandes. “Jorge Paulo, as soon as he fulfills one dream, he’s on to the next.”

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How A Near-Death Experience In The Jungle Inspired A Blockbuster Zombie Game

Photo: Antonin Kratochvil/VII

Dean Hall was close to death in the jungles of Brunei. It was December 2010 and the officer cadet in the New Zealand army was alone on a survival-training mission. Given only two days’ worth of food for 20 days, he supplemented his diet with raw fish and ferns. He slept on a bed of sticks, and by the end of the mission he’d lost 44 pounds from his already lean frame. There were other trainees out there, and he started to plot raids on their food supplies. He thought of himself as an honorable person, but he was too hungry for honor. As he approached one man’s camp, the guy spotted him and tossed him some rancid ramen. Hall boiled the noodles and wolfed them down.

That night, as water pooled around his bed and ramen roiled his stomach, he imagined himself inside his favorite videogame, a military simulation for PCs called Arma 2. He had been playing it since its release in 2009 and often spent three to four hours a day on the game. Now, lying on the jungle floor, his feverish imagination turned Arma 2 into something different. He visualized a new kind of game, one in which there were no missions, no objectives, and no ability to simply be respawn when killed. You had one life, and if you lost it, you lost everything.

Physically, Hall was a mess when he emerged from the jungle â€" he underwent emergency surgery for an intestinal blockage. But intellectually, he was energized by his visions and inspired to build a new Arma 2 modification. Amateur game mods have been popular since the 1990s, when players adapted first-person shooters like Wolfenstein 3D and Quake to create entirely new games. Mods can’t run on their own â€" they operate in conjunction with the underlying game â€" and are usually given away online by the xFCberfans who code them. The high-water mark came in 1999, when two gamers turned the science fiction world of Half-Life into a terrorist-versus-soldier battle zone called Counter-Strike. It was so popular, gamemaker Valve bought it in 2000 and released it as a stand-alone title, eventually selling more than 25 million units.

A savvy programmer, Hall had created lots of Arma 2 mods, adding new weapons and vehicles to the game, and even new missions. But what he had in mind now was fundamentally different. Typically, games try not to frustrate players; if your character is killed, you aren’t forced to start over from the beginning. But Hall thought this stripped gaming of emotion and drama. He wanted to reproduce what he had experienced in the jungle, something filled with agony, frustration, and fear. “I wanted it to be brutal,” he says.

In a hotel room in Singapore, Hall began coding. In his new game, players would begin with almost nothing, stranded in the middle of a barren land, forced to hunt for supplies. If they were killed, they’d lose everything and have to start over. The only mission: Survive.

“Hall wanted to reproduce what he had experienced in the jungle: agony, frustration, and fear.”

Eventually he hit on the idea to replace Arma‘s terrorists with zombies, but the undead would actually be the least of a player’s concerns. Hall was designing the game as a social experiment: Every time a player logged in, they’d be pitted against other players also hunting for supplies. Players would compete for limited food, water, and weaponry, and their anxiety would make them more deadly than the brain-eaters. The gameplay re-created his feeling of isolation in the jungle, surrounded by dozens of starving strangers, any of whom might be plotting to steal his meager supplies just as he was plotting to steal theirs. Hall wanted the possibility of dying and losing everything to drive players to kill other survivors in order to steal their rations. He would call the game Day Z, a twist on D-Day.

Bohemia Interactive, the Czech company behind Arma 2, actively encourages fans to mess with its game, so there were already hundreds of Arma 2 offshoots. When Hall was building a mod, he would frequently contact a Bohemia developer named Ivan Buchta, usually with an esoteric code question. But after returning from the jungle, Hall had become bored, and this time, while working to finish Day Z in his spare time, he wrote to ask whether Bohemia was hiring. “I was impressed with the mods he’d made in the past,” Buchta says. “We needed help on Arma 3, so we agreed to bring him on.”

It wasn’t a great deal for Hall. He’d have to buy his own ticket to the Czech Republic, take a leave of absence from the New Zealand army (which allows two-year absences), and be paid less than he had been making as a lowly second lieutenant. But he took the job; he was thrilled at the prospect of being in the birthplace of his favorite game. It was like a die-hard Star Wars fan getting hired by Lucasfilm.

Still, when he arrived at Bohemia, he decided not to tell Buchta or anyone else about what he was working on. “I knew they’d think zombies were stupid,” he says. “They’re all hardcore realism military junkies, so I kind of felt embarrassed that I was making a zombie mod.” He decided just to put Day Z online. He figured a few hundred people would play and no one else would notice.

Within weeks, though, players flocked to the game. By the end of its first month, Day Z had attracted 10,000 users, and Hall decided he’d better mention it to Buchta. Sure enough, Buchta was dismissive. The company was gunning to finish its latest Arma release. He didn’t have time for zombies.

But days later Buchta loaded Day Z to check it out. The game placed him near an old warehouse. He had a baseball cap and not much else. He quickly found an old handgun with no bullets. There were zombies in the distance and the threat of other players killing him for his gun. The scenery was just like Arma 2, but everything seemed different. “I felt really naked,” he says. Most first-person shooters equip newbies with guns and enough ammo to survive a sustained firefight. Now Buchta was scrounging for bullets and counting them carefully. “I’m a professional game developer, but I was immediately scared and tense,” he says. “Games don’t usually work like that on me.”

In Day Z, players traverse a bleak landscape, dodging zombies and one another. The only mission: Survive.

Buchta messaged Marek Spanel, who co-owned Bohemia with his brother Ondrej, and told them to try the game. The brothers had formed the company in 1999 and spent most of their lives playing videogames together. Now they spawned into the game simultaneously and discovered that they’d been placed miles apart. They began to move toward each other, dodging zombies and other players. It took more than an hour of nail-biting evasion to rendezvous. “Walking for half an hour in a game would usually be boring. But just doing that, I felt stronger emotions than I’d ever felt in Arma,” Marek Spanel says.

To play Hall’s game, users had to buy Arma 2 for about $20. At that point, Arma 2 had been out for three years and was nearing the end of its life cycle. Arma 3 was supposed to jump-start the company’s sales, but suddenly purchases of Arma 2 started ticking up. By June, around 20,000 players were using Arma 2 to play Day Z. By early July, there were 405,000 users, and it didn’t stop there. In August more than 1 million people were playing Day Z. Arma 2 was suddenly a top-selling PC game. In the three years before Hall put Day Z online, Arma 2 had sold 1 million copies. Now it sold a million more in just a few months.

The guy who’d arrived at the company as a junior designer five months before now seemed to hold the keys to its future. Bohemia, meanwhile, had raked in millions from the boom in Arma 2 sales, and Spanel wanted to build on that success. So when Hall said he wanted to turn Day Z into a stand-alone game, Spanel offered him a promotion from junior designer to project lead, the top spot.

Hall was ecstatic. He now had a large team of people implementing his every idea. He requested a discharge from the military and started refining the Day Z world. Originally supplies appeared in the open, lying on the ground. Now those necessities were harder to find, hidden in cupboards or under beds. He also populated the game with hundreds of public domain books like War of the Worlds and Moby-Dick. Maybe players would find a quiet place to read away from the zombie apocalypse.

He had been in the Czech Republic for only a few months â€" he was still living out of a suitcase â€" but his signing bonus gave him enough money to buy a house. The problem was, he wasn’t sure where he might settle. His military discharge was pending â€" he could go anywhere. Plus, he was powerfully interested in collecting experiences that might inform his gameplay. In 2006 he had climbed Mount Cook, New Zealand’s highest peak, and thought that it would be interesting to explore the idea of coding a mountain-climbing game. He also felt he was capable of much more than the lowly 12,316-foot peak, so he decided to pay $100,000 to climb Mount Everest. “Dean is part crazy,” Spanel says. “In the middle of the most successful project of his life, he leaves for two months to climb Everest.”

Using a Sabre portable satellite modem he brought to Nepal, Hall approved design changes and budgets and IM’d with the coders building the game. “So here I am, at Everest Base Camp,” he posted to the Day Z development Tumblr on April 15, 2013, and then, from 17,717 feet, offered a rundown of the new features his team was coding into the game: The world would look more battered, there’d be radios for communicating with other players, and the zombies’ movements would be more, um, realistic. Though he’d arranged the mountaineering trip in a burst of enthusiasm, he tried to convince everyone otherwise. “Although the timing is poor for my sabbatical, it is not something planned on a whim and involves nonrefundable costs of up to $100K.”

On May 16 he began his summit attempt. The weather was clear, and he made good time: By 12:01 am on the 21st, he was less than four hours from the peak. The Hillary Step, a 40-foot wall of rock and ice and the last obstacle before the summit, loomed ahead. He started to move toward it when he heard a distress call from his climbing partner up above. “There’s a guy dying here,” the voice crackled over the radio. “What do I do?”

Hall ascended to the dying man’s position; it was a Bangladeshi climber from another group who had been left for dead. He was clipped into the same rope they were ascending, and he wasn’t moving. Hall’s sherpa grabbed the man’s hand. It was limp; he couldn’t tell if the man was breathing. “His position and posture symbolized absolute desperation and sadness,” Hall wrote later in a blog entry.

They were only an hour from the summit, and they debated whether to abort their climb to try to save the man. Hall’s partner was distraught â€" he wanted to help even if that meant abandoning the climb. Hall had no such ambivalence. “I thought I would have reacted differently, but when I looked at him, I realized that there was just nothing we could do,” Hall says. “I felt really sad, but I figured he was dead or he was about to die.” Hall persuaded his partner to keep moving, and they scrambled past the dying man. “It was a Day Z moment,” Hall says grimly. The man died, and his body was left behind, encased in snow and ice.

An hour later, Hall reached the summit. “The sight was so breathtaking it was like being slapped in the face,” he recalled on the blog. “I immediately started crying … I’ve thought a lot about how to summarize that feeling, and the best I can do is to say that if there is a God, then it’s like looking upon his face.”

Four days later he was back in Prague, funneling the experience into the haunting, morally fraught environment of the new Day Z. The game, he hopes, will force others to confront their own humanity. It comes out this fall.

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