Why JansBrief exists
Jan Stenbeck was the smartest person I ever met. Not smart in the way academics are smart. Smart in the way that changes the world. He saw what nobody else saw. He understood that mobile telephony would revolutionise countries that hadn't even laid copper wire yet. He broke state socialist monopolies when everyone said it was impossible. He built empires out of ideas.
Every day Jan received a binder. Two people read all the world's important newspapers and magazines for him and pulled out what mattered. The things others missed. The faint signals that foreshadow great change.
I worked with Jan. I learned from him. And I have never forgotten that binder. JansBrief is my tribute to him, a modern version: global, AI-driven, available to everyone with ambition.
In memory of Jan Stenbeck
1942 — 2002
Jan Stenbeck
Tele2, Millicom, MTG, Metro
In today's edition · 14 May 2026
The antibiotic pipeline has been dying for decades — not because the science is impossible, but because the economics are perverse. A new antibiotic that works brilliantly earns less than a mediocre cancer drug, because doctors are told to use it sparingly. The result: big pharma walked away. Between 2000 and 2020, the number of major companies with active antibiotic research programmes dropped from eighteen to roughly five. Meanwhile, antimicrobial resistance now kills more than 1.2 million people a year, a figure projected to rise steeply as last-resort drugs fail one by one.
What makes this moment different is the unlikely coalition forming outside pharma's gated compounds. Nature this week profiles a new generation of antibiotic hunters who are deliberately abandoning the old playbook — screening synthetic chemical libraries in sterile labs — and going feral instead. They are looking at folk medicine traditions, soil bacteria from under-sampled ecosystems, deep-sea organisms, and AI-driven molecular prediction to find compounds that established drug development never considered.
One strand of this work harnesses machine learning to scan vast databases of microbial genomes for gene clusters that might produce antimicrobial molecules, even when the organisms themselves are difficult or impossible to culture in a lab. Another involves ethnobotanists working with indigenous communities whose traditional plant remedies have never been subjected to modern pharmacological analysis. A third thread focuses on bacteriophages — viruses that infect bacteria — which were explored in Soviet-era Georgia but largely ignored in the West for seventy years.
What is striking is the economic structure emerging around these efforts. Because big pharma's incentive problem remains unsolved, much of the new work is being funded by governments, foundations, and small biotechs operating on shoestring budgets. The UK's GARDP (Global Antibiotic Research and Development Partnership) and the US government's BARDA have become major funders, but so have organisations like the Wellcome Trust and Médecins Sans Frontières. The researchers profiled are often in Nairobi, Bangkok, or Tbilisi — not Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The AI element deserves attention. Several teams are now using large language models and generative chemistry tools to predict which molecular structures might penetrate bacterial cell walls that have evolved resistance to existing drugs. This is not the glamorous AI of chatbots and image generators. It is computational grunt work applied to one of humanity's most urgent and least profitable problems.
The weak signal here is not that resistance is growing — everyone knows that. It is that the institutional response is shifting from centralised pharma R&D to a distributed, almost insurgent model. Small labs, unconventional funding, non-Western knowledge systems, and AI tools are converging to create something that looks less like traditional drug discovery and more like open-source software development. If it works, it will not just produce new antibiotics. It will rewrite how we develop medicines for diseases that cannot generate shareholder returns.
Source: Nature · 13 May 2026
Short term (now–12 months): The immediate pressure comes from hospital wards. Resistance to carbapenems — the antibiotics of last resort — is rising in ICUs across South and Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Every month without a new pipeline candidate reaching Phase III trials means more untreatable infections. The AI-accelerated screening projects now reaching proof-of-concept stage could shave years off the identification phase, potentially moving candidates into preclinical testing within the next year.
Medium term (1–3 years): The distributed funding model matters for geopolitics. If the next generation of antibiotics emerges from labs in Nairobi or Tbilisi rather than New Jersey, it will challenge the intellectual property frameworks that have governed pharmaceutical development for half a century. Countries contributing traditional knowledge and biological samples will demand different licensing arrangements. GARDP's model — developing drugs and then negotiating affordable access in advance — could become a template, disrupting the patent-maximisation approach that has kept drug prices high and access low.
Long term (3–10 years): If AI-driven molecular discovery proves its worth in antibiotics — a field that pharma abandoned precisely because profits are thin — it will serve as the definitive proof case for applying AI to neglected diseases more broadly. Tuberculosis, fungal infections, and neglected tropical diseases could all benefit from the same approach. The deeper implication: we may be watching the emergence of a parallel pharmaceutical economy, one driven by public goods logic rather than shareholder returns, and powered by computational tools that make small teams as productive as corporate labs once were. Source: Nature · 13 May 2026 ---
Japanese 30-year bond yields have surged beyond 2.6 percent, their highest level in years, as persistent inflation forces a reckoning with the Bank of Japan's long era of ultra-loose policy. The move signals that markets are pricing in sustained rate increases — a seismic shift for an economy that has spent three decades fighting deflation. The knock-on effects are global: Japan's institutional investors hold enormous foreign bond portfolios, and rising domestic yields could trigger repatriation flows that rattle US and European debt markets. Source: Nikkei Asia · 13 May 2026
A peer-reviewed study finds that Malawi's rapid solar electrification push is systematically excluding the country's poorest households. Wealth inequality — not geography or grid access — is the binding constraint: the poorest quintile simply cannot afford even the most basic solar home systems. The finding challenges the narrative that off-grid solar automatically reaches the last mile and raises hard questions about subsidy design in one of the world's least electrified nations. Source: Mail & Guardian · 13 May 2026
The US Senate has confirmed Kevin Warsh as the 17th chair of the Federal Reserve in a 54-45 vote, handing Donald Trump's pick control of monetary policy at a moment of acute price pressure. Warsh, a former Fed governor during the 2008 crisis, inherits an economy where inflation has climbed to a three-year high amid the Hormuz disruption and elevated energy costs. His appointment ends the Powell era and opens a new chapter in the Fed's relationship with the White House. Source: Mercopress · 13 May 2026
An NRC Handelsblad investigation reveals that private London-based intelligence firms conducted months of covert operations against International Criminal Court staff in The Hague. Operatives gathered passwords, passport data, information about children, and religious backgrounds — with explicit instructions to search for ties to Israel and Jewish ancestry. The operation targeted employees connected to ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan, who faces separate sexual abuse allegations. The revelations raise alarming questions about who commissioned the surveillance and why. Source: NRC Handelsblad · 13 May 2026
A new study of soils across Arctic and boreal regions has found that intensifying wildfires are burning deep enough to release carbon that has been locked underground for thousands of years. The discovery upends existing emissions models, which assumed these ancient carbon stores were effectively inert. If the pattern accelerates — and warming temperatures suggest it will — the Arctic could shift from a net carbon sink to a net source, creating a feedback loop that no policy lever currently addresses. The finding means that global carbon budgets may be even tighter than the most pessimistic projections suggest. Source: New Scientist · 13 May 2026
The Association of Industrial Pharmacists of Nigeria has called on the federal government to declare a national emergency on pharmaceutical manufacturing. Nigeria imports roughly 70 percent of its medicines, leaving the country acutely vulnerable to supply chain shocks — a vulnerability exposed by the Hormuz closure and rising shipping costs. The pharmacists argue that domestic production capacity has deteriorated to a point where only emergency-level intervention can prevent a public health crisis. Source: Business Day Nigeria · 13 May 2026
A little-known chapter of Patagonian history — the fate of Welsh settlers and indigenous communities in southern Argentina — will be staged at London's Royal Albert Hall in June. The project began when Welsh composer Robat Arwyn visited Patagonia and met local historian Jeremy Wood in Esquel. The resulting choral work blends Welsh and Patagonian voices in what amounts to a musical excavation of colonial memory, diaspora, and survival at the bottom of the world. Source: Mercopress · 13 May 2026
A South Carolina court has overturned Alex Murdaugh's convictions for the June 2021 murders of his wife Maggie and son Paul, ordering a new trial. The disgraced attorney, a scion of one of the state's most powerful legal dynasties, was sentenced to life in prison in 2023 after a trial that captivated the country. The appeal court found procedural errors serious enough to vacate the verdict, sending the case back for retrial and reopening one of the most high-profile criminal cases in recent American history. The decision raises uncomfortable questions about whether the original prosecution prioritised spectacle over process. Source: BBC World · 13 May 2026 ---
A Neanderthal tooth, analysed in a new study, shows unmistakable signs of deliberate intervention to treat a bacterial cavity — a tiny hole drilled into the enamel, almost certainly with a stone tool, at least 59,000 years ago. It is the oldest known act of dentistry, pushing the origin of medical intervention back by tens of thousands of years.
What makes this discovery electric is not the clinical technique — it is what it implies about who gets to be called innovative. For decades, the dominant narrative positioned Neanderthals as our dimmer cousins, capable of brute survival but not of the cognitive leap required for diagnosis, tool selection, and intervention. That narrative was always partly ideological: it flattered Homo sapiens and, by extension, the particular civilisational lineage that produced the scientists telling the story.
This tooth demolishes that. Someone in a small group, without language as we understand it, without institutions, without funding or peer review, looked at a companion's pain and thought: I can fix this. They found a tool. They applied it. The patient survived long enough for the tooth to show healing.
It is the purest form of problem-solving — no committee, no approval process, no incumbent telling them it could not be done. Just a person, an idea, and the nerve to drill into someone's mouth with a rock.
The researchers, publishing in New Scientist, note that the find joins a growing body of evidence for Neanderthal medical knowledge, including the use of plant-based pain remedies and rudimentary wound care. But this is the first clear case of invasive intervention — surgery, in effect. It suggests that the impulse to fix, to refuse to accept the given condition, is not a product of civilisation. It predates civilisation by an almost incomprehensible margin.
There is something bracing about that. The builder, the fixer, the person who sees a problem and reaches for a tool — that person was not invented by modernity. They were there at the beginning.
Source: New Scientist · 13 May 2026
The new Brusk exhibition hall in Bruges, designed by Robbrecht en Daem and Olivier Salens architecten, opens as the latest addition to the city's Museum Quarter. Rather than competing with Bruges' medieval fabric, the building defers to it — low-slung, materially honest, flooding galleries with diffused northern light. Wallpaper describes it as "everything an exhibition hall should be and more," a rare case of civic architecture that serves art without shouting about itself. Source: Wallpaper · 13 May 2026
Performa, the New York biennial that has spent two decades arguing performance art belongs alongside painting and sculpture, is staging a variety show on Broadway. Hosted by Casey Jost, the evening features Barbara Kruger, Julio Torres, Anne Imhof, and Marcel Dzama. It is a calculated provocation: the most commercial venue in American theatre occupied by artists who typically refuse commercial framing. Whether it works or merely flatters both sides remains to be seen, but the ambition is genuine. Source: Artnet News · 13 May 2026
A new Condé Nast Traveler film called *Erupcja*, starring Charli XCX and Jeremy O. Harris, functions as an insider guide to bohemian Warsaw — word-of-mouth raves, very late nights, and the kind of cultural energy that emerges when a city is still cheap enough for artists to stay. Warsaw's moment has been building for years, but this is the first high-profile attempt to document it while the door is still open. Source: Condé Nast Traveler · 13 May 2026
Eater documents a curious wave of aggressively blue restaurants sweeping Brooklyn and beyond — blue exteriors, blue interiors, blue tableware. The trend is partly reactive: after years of beige minimalism and exposed brick, operators are reaching for visual differentiation in an oversaturated market. But it also reflects a broader shift in restaurant design toward bold, almost confrontational colour as a branding tool. Whether the food matches the ambition is, as always, another question. Source: Eater · 13 May 2026
Wallpaper's Neil Ridley reports from Tokyo and Kyoto on how Japanese hospitality in food and drink continues to redefine the global standard. The piece moves beyond the usual sushi-and-sake clichés to explore how younger Japanese bartenders and chefs are fusing rigorous traditional technique with global influences — resulting in experiences that feel simultaneously ancient and entirely contemporary. The lesson: hospitality as craft, not performance. Source: Wallpaper · 13 May 2026
The New Yorker profiles Hungary's new Prime Minister Péter Magyar and the daunting task of institutional reconstruction after years of democratic erosion under Viktor Orbán. Magyar faces questions about whether Hungary's courts, media, and civil service can be rebuilt without replicating the centralisation that damaged them. It is a rare case study in post-authoritarian governance within the EU — and a test of whether democratic habits, once broken, can be relearned. Source: The New Yorker · 13 May 2026 ---
MIT Technology Review reports that AI chatbots — including Google's — are surfacing real people's personal phone numbers in response to user queries, with no easy mechanism for individuals to prevent it. One Reddit user described being inundated with calls from strangers after a chatbot listed his number as belonging to a lawyer. The problem exposes a fundamental gap in AI data governance: models trained on web-scraped data inevitably absorb personal information, but the frameworks for removing it — or preventing its regurgitation — barely exist. GDPR theoretically gives Europeans the right to demand deletion, but enforcement against AI outputs remains untested. For Americans, there is essentially no legal recourse. This is not a hypothetical privacy concern — it is happening now, to real people, and the companies responsible have no fix. Source: MIT Technology Review · 13 May 2026
Varda Space Industries, a startup that manufactures pharmaceutical compounds in microgravity, has signed its first commercial partnership with United Therapeutics. The deal marks a shift from proof-of-concept to actual production: Varda's orbital capsules will be used to crystallise drug compounds that form more uniformly in zero gravity than on Earth, potentially improving bioavailability. The economics remain challenging — launch costs must fall further — but the United Therapeutics deal signals that at least one major pharma company believes in-orbit manufacturing is no longer science fiction. If the model scales, it could open an entirely new frontier in pharmaceutical production, one where the factory is a re-entry capsule. Source: MIT Technology Review · 13 May 2026
Ecologists working with 3.8 million camera-trap photos teamed up with Google to test whether AI could replace the brutal manual labour of identifying species in field images. The answer: yes, with accuracy comparable to trained human reviewers, and at a fraction of the time. The system, detailed by Anthropocene Magazine, could transform conservation monitoring by making it feasible to process the data deluge that modern sensor networks produce. The real significance is not the AI — it is what becomes possible when scientists stop spending months clicking through photos and start actually analysing what the animals are doing. Source: Anthropocene Magazine · 13 May 2026 ---
59,000
59,000
That is the minimum age, in years, of the oldest known dental intervention — a drilled Neanderthal tooth described in a new study. The finding pushes the origin of invasive medicine back by tens of thousands of years, well before the emergence of agriculture, writing, or anything we would recognise as organised society.
The number matters because it reframes innovation itself. We tend to think of medical breakthroughs as products of institutions — universities, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies. But 59,000 years ago, someone with a stone tool and an idea looked at a problem and decided to act. No ethics board. No funding application. No incumbent telling them it was impossible.
It also puts our current antibiotics crisis in uncomfortable perspective. We have exponentially more knowledge, tools, and resources than a Neanderthal dentist — yet we struggle to develop new antimicrobial drugs because the economic incentives are misaligned. The Neanderthal had no incentives beyond compassion and curiosity. Perhaps the lesson is that when the institutional machinery fails, it falls to individuals with nerve and a sharp instrument to do what needs doing.
Source: New Scientist · 13 May 2026
In perspective
That is the minimum age, in years, of the oldest known dental intervention — a drilled Neanderthal tooth described in a new study. The finding pushes the origin of invasive medicine back by tens of thousands of years, well before the emergence of agriculture,...
8 — Today's Wisdom
A Neanderthal 59,000 years ago looked at another Neanderthal's infected tooth, selected a stone tool, and drilled. No one had taught them it was possible. No one had given permission. The patient survived, the tooth healed, and we know this because researchers have just published the evidence.
It's the purest form of entrepreneurship I can think of. Not a word about market analysis or risk assessment, just a person who refused to accept a problem and acted with whatever was at hand.
Compare that to our own time. We have AI that can screen millions of molecules, we have sequenced genetics, we have more medical knowledge than all previous generations combined. And yet 1.2 million people die every year from antibiotic resistance, not because the science is missing but because the business model doesn't deliver sufficient returns for shareholders. Big pharma has left the field. The one who drilled a tooth with a stone had no incentive beyond compassion and curiosity, and that was enough.
What gives me hope right now is that a new generation of researchers in Nairobi, Tbilisi, and Bangkok are building an antibiotic pipeline outside the old system, using AI, traditional knowledge, and public funding. They're doing exactly what the Neanderthal did. They see the problem, pick up whatever tool is available, and refuse to wait for someone else to solve it.
That's how breakthroughs have always worked. Not by asking for permission, but by starting to drill.
Johan Staël von Holstein
Serial entrepreneur · wakopa.ai