In part an examination of the speculative arena of genomics, particularly through the historical context of US nuclear detonations in the Pacific in the mid-twentieth century, this essay traces a rhetorical shift in scientific interest in “mutation” to “regeneration.” This shift marks how the financialization of scientific research brokers a profitable conversion of the devastations of the atomic age to the promissory therapies of the Human Genome Project. Against this backcloth, I turn to Larissa Lai's speculative fiction Salt Fish Girl, which resurrects these specters of the Pacific to haunt the HGP's projections and tether transpacific futurity to an irradiated past.