The world really does need my daughter

My daughter, let's call her "Bear", is an absolute gem of a person. Yeah, yeah, I'm biased, I get it. But you'd be hard pressed to find anyone that knows her that would disagree. Teachers, peers, relatives, church members, bosses, and mentors will all give you the same assessment. As a result, I consider this an objective truth. Like gravity and cool ranch Doritos.

Dimensions of awesomeness

Bear is a good person, thoughtful and kind. She has friends from almost every group of people that she's spent more than a few weeks with. Her close friends struggle and she worries, they succeed and she celebrates and if she hasn't seen them in a while, she gets in touch. She blends effortlessly into groups of any age range; her generation, my generation, my parents, and 7 year olds. She can chat with famous scientists at dinner and play beer pong alone with 8 guys (they're good guys, no cause for alarm). She has been a comfortable, poised public speaker since junior high school.

Bear has been a phenomenal student. I believe there was a single non-A in 4 years in our Boston suburb high school college prep track including English, French, science, and advanced math all while participating in or leading the school news paper, mock trial, cross country, a modern dance group, and our church youth group. She graduated magna cum laude from UMass Amherst via the Honors College with a microbiology degree while also participating in the highly selective ICONS program. Oh, and she did undergraduate lab work that resulted in several publications including a first author paper. More on that below.

Bear worked all through high school and college and there is not a single job where she hasn't been given more responsibility than she started with. Everything from ice cream scooper to manager of the aforementioned modern dance group to Children's Hospital lab assistant. No employer has gone without praising her to her face and in almost every job she's gotten at least one unsolicited raise. And she babysits.

Her volunteer work for our Unitarian church deserves a special call out because I got to see it up close. Like most 6th and 7th graders, she and her brother initially resisted us dragging them to the religious education classes on Sunday mornings, but around the time the OWL program began she was all in. By the time Youth Group (about 40 kids that year, I think) started in high school she was a freshman representative on the Youth Group governing committee (If you don't know UU churches, this committee is the real deal. This is the group that plans their programming for the year and the adult advisors are generally as hands off as they can be.). She was elected to that governing committee every year until senior year when she co-chaired it. The UU youth do service trips every other year and she was on the planning committee both times.

An important calling

It's pretty clear that Bear would be successful in any career that she chose, but the one that she's chosen is unbelievably important and she is almost uniquely suited for it.

Aside from other humans, bacteria and viruses are one of the biggest threats to our survival. A bacterial population can double in as little as 4 minutes (though in non-lab environments it's generally slower) and they have many ways of changing their genetic makeup to build resistance to any treatment we can come up with. Viruses, especially mRNA ones, are even more mutagenic (HIV can generate drug resistance in a single day, hence the need for multi-drug treatment). Bacterial populations have emerged that are resistant to last resort antibiotics like vancomycin. We are already behind and we need more focused work to catch up, not less.

Pharmaceuticals don't much care for antibiotics. During my stint at a nearby pharmaceutical R&D location, the infectious disease operation had just been shut down after developing it's last antibiotic. Antibiotics are difficult to develop, the trials are expensive, and no one is willing to pay the exorbitant amount of money that pharma gets for things like chemotherapeutics. A few pharmaceuticals do infectious disease work on their own though it is mostly vaccines and anti-retroviral agents. There appears to be some collaborative efforts on antibiotics, but results are a long way off.

In addition, the not-so-secret secret of pharmaceutical R&D is that they rely heavily on published scientific literature. Pharma is as bad or worse than every other quarterly profit-, stock price-focused industry in the United States so they are culturally incapable of being able to fund long term research, especially with unclear outcomes. If they were to do any new antibiotic development it would absolutely be based on NIH-funded basic research.

She really needs to be a microbiologist

As you saw from the first few paragraphs, Bear will be very good at whatever she does. She's smart, hardworking, a multi-tasker, a collaborative team member, and a leader. Put her behind the cash register at CVS and she'll end up regional manager (or at least assistant regional manager).

But between her undergraduate lab work, her summer job with a Watertown diagnostics startup, and her current research assistant job at Children's Hospital, she's become an excellent young scientist. Check her out on Google Scholar. She has not even started graduate school and has a half-dozen publications including a first author paper in a very strong journal.

Try reading that publication. Bear didn't write all of it, but wrote a good chunk and did a substantial amount of the work. She understands that paper and chances are you don't. I have a (long disused) neurobiology PhD and I have trouble following it.

Having been a science graduate student myself, I am absolutely stunned by how strong her knowledge and skill are at this stage of her career. She talks about a wide array of lab processes and techniques and types of experiments right now with an understanding that I don't think I ever got to except in a very limited scope. At her current job, several other lab members rely on her heavily for help. Some credit for her comfort level goes to her Ph.D. parents; we can reasonably carry on conversations about lab dynamics, publication struggles, whether it's better just to buy the pipette tips already racked instead of in the bag. But she has done the work and she knows what she's doing.

In a normal world, Bear is on track to have a rich publication record and eventually a tenured position at a top tier University. She would be a great mentor to students, an excellent collaborator, and almost certainly department chair for a few years because she is the person everyone else will trust to do it.

I can't emphasize enough how rare this combination is. Smart, hard-working, exemplary person that is locked in early to a highly specialized, but highly important career path. She could make more money running a dozen Popeye's restaurants, but then her main impact on the world would be taking a slice of people's chain restaurant budget from some other chain restaurants and employing people that would otherwise be employed at the other chain restaurants.

She'd be a great school teacher and as a result would affect the lives of hundreds over her career, a contribution that is so unbelievably important to a healthy society. But the number of great people that can be school teachers absolutely dwarfs the number that can be great microbiologists. And humanity really needs great microbiologists.

Most countries don't have strong academic research because it's hard to do

The United States does a lot of great things, that, because of her wealth, she can do almost effortlessly. Remember that the federal budget ($6.9 trillion) is almost entirely Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Department of Defense, and interest on the debt. We have the greatest national park system in the world and the cost is a rounding error (0.05%). PEPFAR, the program to provide HIV, TB, and malaria treatments has saved roughly 23 million lives in 55 countries at an annual cost of $6 billion (less than 0.1%). The EPA transformed the U.S. from smoggy cities and burning rivers to the livable environment we have now.

Our scientific research community is the best in the world and it's not close. Even the conservative American Enterprise Institute mentions our leadership in research as one of the keys to our economic success . It's not close because, like other complex industries like chip fabrication, consumer electronics, fighter jet manufacturing, or even consumer toilet paper, there is an entire network of entities that needs to be operating to maintain production of quality output.

Good basic research requires a stable work environment that lasts for decades; you can't "rebalance your portfolio" every 12-18 months or work through mergers and acquisitions. Scientists can spend 20 years on a single protein. Good quality papers attack a single question with multiple techniques and approaches that can take a few weeks or many years to properly execute. Collaborations help, but more often than not add even more calendar time to the project.

You need specialized equipment that has a small market and suppliers for that specialized equipment. In some cases there are only a handful of big universities that can afford the instruments and any change in that number can destroy a company. Many scientific instruments originated in labs that created the initial iterations of the instrument under academic research grants. As noted above, our quarterly profit-oriented industry cannot justify to it's shareholders the years it can take to develop tools that will be used by a couple dozen customers.

Scientific training requires 4 years of college, 6-8 years of post graduate work and then 4-6 years of postdoctoral effort before you are ready for an insecure assistant professorship that may or may not lead to a tenured position. The current environment is difficult enough; right now we generate 100s of Ph.D.s for every open academic job in the country and even if you have a job, standard R01 grants are funded at about a 20% rate. Dropping a quarter or half of those positions will evaporate the training pipeline.

There is a continuous influx of foreign-born students and professors into our system. These are generally high caliber scientists from their home countries. In the case of students, they provide high quality input to our existing labs and a percentage will stay in the US, continuing to contribute as academic researchers or by joining / starting companies. Foreign born professors add to the international reputation and quality of US universities. Very much the best and brightest.

Small men are breaking great things

Donald Trump and Elon Musk are small men. These billionaires cheat at golf and video games, stiff their contractors and landlords, cheat on each of their many wives, have cosmetic surgery to make them feel better, and attack weaker people all because they have an endless need for external affirmation of their strength and power. Their slogan will never be "the buck stops here"; they will never build a team of rivals; they will never defend a vulnerable person knowing they will probably lose; they will never defend people even when they abandon them; they will never have the genuine humility and resilience required to endure year after year in the face of an overwhelming foe; they will never step aside for the greater good.

Elon Musk recently found a line item, after illegally breaching Treasury systems, that described $50 million for condoms in Gaza. Trump repeated this as $100 million for condoms for Hamas. This is just plain nonsense. More likely than not, the line item refers to AIDS prevention efforts in an area of Mozambique that is also called Gaza.

This level of logic is going to be applied to every item in the massive US budget. These people know little of what they're talking about, nothing of the consequences of what they are doing, and they don't care. We know Donald Trump is aggressively uninformed, but Musk is really no better. Musk fancies himself a software wizard, but even in that subject that he has passing familiarity with, the depth of his understanding is shockingly shallow.

We've seen Donald Trump advise Americans to inject disinfectant or UV radiation and eschew masks during a pandemic transmitted by spittle. There is a fairly good case that he confuses asylum seekers with mental institution patients. And of course "nobody knew that health care was so complicated."

This stupidity is leading to potentially catastrophic damage to our academic research community. The NIH has communicated that overhead charges will be limited to 15%. No grant includes line items for power, water, sewage, building maintenance, parking, property taxes, grant administration, security, or common services like autoclaves, animal care and use committees, shared instrument facilities, and lab safety monitors. This is what overhead is for. These things cost money and they are more expensive in Boston, New York, and San Francisco then they are in Kansas and Indiana. The rates that exist are negotiated between the institutions and the federal government and are regularly audited.

Cutting rates doesn't address inefficiencies. This is not separating the wheat from the chaff. This is cutting bone and muscle.

Shallow thinking, self-absorbed narcissists with empty souls are wrecking things that took a generation to establish and would take a decade to reconstitute, if we're lucky. The richest man in the world, a man with a $400 billion fortune that he couldn't spend in a dozen lifetimes, is trashing all of this so that his rockets can launch without hold ups and his cars can pretend to drive themselves without pushback from the families of people that die.

The world needs Bear to be a microbiologist and for the United States to continue it's post-Sputnik investment in science and technology. No other country can do this and humanity needs it even if it means that Elon Musk's fortune is only a couple of hundred billion dollars instead of a trillion.