Anjali Bhattacharya is wiry and deliberate, with the careful economy of movement that comes from decades of working with materials that cannot be replaced if dropped. Their Edo-Hungarian-Guinean heritage shows in their high cheekbones and the particular warm-dark tone of their skin, which they take careful care of in ways they don't advertise. They have cat ears — deep brown, slightly oversized, geneware — that they got at forty-five after a lifetime of thinking they weren't the sort of person who got geneware, and they are still quietly delighted by them. Their hair is silver and kept very short. They dress well, in old-fashioned tailored things that cost money and last decades, which is their idea of sustainability.

They are the conscience of any room they enter, not through force but through the quiet accumulation of inconvenient questions asked in calm voices. They have managed the gene-sequence heritage archive for twenty-two years and have, in that time, blocked sixteen attempts by corponations to access, purchase, or reclassify its contents. They are not adversarial by nature — they believe in dialogue and due process — but they are absolutely implacable once they have decided where a line is. Students find them intimidating at first and then deeply reassuring: here is someone who has thought carefully about what they owe the future.