Four For Friday | June 12, 2026
LF223 | Smart toilets and female health, cyborgs, super vaccines, defining social infrastructure + book of the week, Incorruptible.
Welcome to this week’s Four For Friday. Four topical stories on systems change, healthspan and AI for impact, and a bonus book of the week. Enjoy!
1. The smart toilet’s way in, female health?
Sébastien Lacroix of VC firm LangLeven is sceptical that smart toilets are ready. Most, he argues, manage little more than hydration readings or Bristol-scale scores, since dirty, diluted samples defeat the sensors. But he spots one credible wedge: female health.
Fertility, cycle tracking and perimenopause depend on hormones like estradiol and LH that are awkward to monitor any other way, and the bathroom is already a daily touchpoint. Here passive collection has real value and no frictionless rival exists. Lacroix's bet is that the category breaks in not as a universal clinic, but through an underserved need women feel daily.
The So What: Smart toilets win not by measuring everything, but by solving one female-health problem first.
2. The body tech that people could actually accept
On a related note, could your toilet be the kind of cyborg that people are looking for? Forget the brain chip - an ethnographer interviewed people living with bionics and augmentations, and found the sci-fi fantasy of human-machine fusion almost universally unwanted.
Surgery repels: Tajana’s deep brain stimulation brought a life-threatening infection. Control matters more than capability. Brian’s defibrillator monitors him constantly, yet he cannot see his own data.
So net, net - the tech that wins will bypass skin and skull rather than penetrate them, augmenting us without asking us to change. And it is about identity as much as function. The successful kind is invisible, passive and never makes you feel like a patient.
The So What: The next health breakthroughs will be ambient, not implanted. Whoever owns consent owns the category.
3. A vaccine for viruses that don’t exist yet
Cambridge University scientists and spin-out DIOSynVax have done something odd: built a jab against pandemics that haven’t happened.
Their AI-designed “super-antigen”, the first vaccine component conceived entirely in silico to reach human trials, cleared a Phase I safety study in 39 volunteers aged 18 to 50.
The vaccine provoked immune responses not just to SARS-CoV-2 and SARS, but to bat coronaviruses yet to spill over. Machine learning trawled the Sarbeco coronavirus family’s shared genetics to find what stays constant as viruses mutate. Lead researcher Jonathan Heeney calls it escaping the dog-chasing-its-tail cycle of reactive vaccinology.
The So What: Vaccinology stops chasing variants and starts pre-empting them. Pandemics may lose their head start.
4. Defining social infrastructure in five domains
Everyone now invokes social infrastructure, yet almost no one means the same thing by it. Anaya Joshi and Daniel Aldrich reviewed roughly 150 articles and found the term sprawling across five domains: education, healthcare, housing, transport and, increasingly, networking spaces. The drift is the point. Scholars are converging on the places, real and virtual, where people actually connect.
The authors pin it down: spaces of high stewardship and coproduction that cultivate trust, cooperation and social capital. It sounds academic, but the stakes are not. Aldrich’s own work shows these spaces help neighbourhoods survive disasters (his book, Black Wave on Japan’s tsunami is a powerful read, showing that social infrastructure can save lives).
The So What: Define social infrastructure precisely and it becomes something you can fund and build.
Book of the Week: Incorruptible
Eric Ries of the Lean Startup fame has pivoted, and his new book Incorruptible, takes aim at the win-at-all-costs, corporate huckster culture (that the Lean Startup arguably helped to foment). This book attacks shareholder capitalism, espousing a mission-driven approach, highlighting numerous emerging approaches for those looking to build sustainable businesses that deliver for customers, employees, shareholders and society.
The case studies really hit home, including Patagonia (it was a 5-year journey for them to figure out how to create a sustainable model), Whole Foods (dissection of a corporate sell out) and Novo Nordisk (their mission lock prevented them selling to Serono and instead netted shareholders half a trillion dollars of value).
That’s all for now, happy weekend, everyone.
- Stephen