The looming superbug crisis: Politics, profit, and Big Pharma
Here's how we stop a health crisis before it wreaks havoc on us.
MATT MCCARTHY: Yeah, the discovery of antibiotics is one of the most remarkable stories in medicine. There was this young military physician named Alexander Fleming who was taking care of injured soldiers in 1914 at a makeshift military hospital in France. And he noticed that many of the soldiers had infections that were not getting better with the tools that he had to treat them, which was largely his surgical scalpel and also antiseptic fluid. And he was just 34 years old at the time, but Fleming recognized that there had to be a better way. And after the war was over, he went back to his laboratory at St. Mary's Hospital and started tinkering around. And it wasn't until nearly 15 years later that he stumbled upon this fungus that was producing a chemical that was so extraordinary that it could kill almost every bacteria in its path. And the chemical that that fungus was producing is what we now know is penicillin.
What's interesting about that story is that the discovery did not lead to a commercially available drug right away. In fact, Alexander Fleming didn't realize that he was on the cusp of some incredible discovery. It took another World War, and teaming up with the burgeoning pharmaceutical industry and a number of other researchers at Oxford University, before everyone fully recognized what he had stumbled upon in his laboratory in the late 1920s. And that discovery of penicillin ushered in what we now know of as the golden era of antibiotic development. The 1950s was a period when there was a new drug being discovered seemingly every few months. And the life expectancy of humans shot up because of all of these fantastic discoveries. But then there was a problem, which is that we were so successful finding new antibiotics, that a number of prominent physicians and scientists came out and said, we got this infectious disease issue kicked. It's time to look for more pressing issues like heart disease and cancer.
And so we started focusing our attention on treating those diseases just as the bacteria were being exposed to our precious arsenal of antibiotics. And that set up a very difficult situation, which is that the bacteria were mutating when we took our eye off the ball. And we didn't recognize the scope of the problem until the 1990s. And that's when we first recognized that there were all of these drug resistant bacteria around us, which we now think of as superbugs. Yeah, so when we talk about bacteria evolving into superbugs, what we mean is that they are mutating to develop machinery and enzymes that can evade even our most powerful antibiotics. My favorite one is something called an efflux pump. And it's a microscopic vacuum cleaner that bacteria have developed that can suck up an antibiotic and spit it out. One of the other things I really like are these enzymes that they have created that chew up antibiotics. And they scavenge for metals, like zinc. And they can chop up even the most complex or nuanced medication that we throw at them.
And so bacteria are constantly doing this whether we recognize it or not. And so what's been fascinating to see is how quickly they can evolve. This is a remarkable insight that we can now discover this. But it also sets up a very perilous situation for the companies that want to create new antibiotics. They know that, if they make a new drug, the bacteria will eventually figure out a way to outfox them and become resistant to it. And that's a problem. We count on the pharmaceutical industry to help us make new drugs. And increasingly, they're saying it's simply not worth it. It's too risky. And the reason for that is, if you compare an antibiotic to, say, a blood pressure medication, a blood pressure medication is prescribed by a doctor like me. And I say, "Take this every day." And you may take it the rest of your life. That's a great business model. Now compare that to an antibiotic where doctors are stingy about doling them out. We only prescribe them in short courses. And eventually, even that best new antibiotic is going to wear out its welcome when the bacteria become resistant.
So this has created a crisis really, which is that at a time when we desperately need new antibiotics, the companies that make them are saying no thanks. Well, some antibiotics are economically viable. If you happen to hit on a broad spectrum antibiotic that has minimal side effects, you're going to make your money back. But the problem is most antibiotics, to go from discovery in a laboratory to a hospital somewhere, costs roughly $1 billion and takes at least 10 years of trials to show that it's safe and effective. The problem with that is that not all drugs succeed. And we have found that many of the companies are saying, it's simply not worth it for us to take this risk. And they point to a company called a Achaogen. Achaogen spent years and millions of dollars developing a new antibiotic called plazomicin, which was finally approved by the FDA in June of 2018. And it was approved to much fanfare. And in April of 2019, the company filed for bankruptcy. And that's because people like me weren't using the drug. And people like me weren't using the drug because it wasn't available in hospitals. Because the company got approval for urinary tract infections, but we don't really need a new drug for urinary tract infections. We need a new drug for ventilator acquired pneumonia or for bloodstream infections. And the company didn't receive that approval. And that was a disaster for them and for the whole enterprise.
And so when we talk about small companies developing new antibiotics, they're very nervous about doing so. And they point to Achaogen and say, we want to do something else with our time and our money and our resources because the risk is just so great. And this to me is the most important political issue that no one is talking about. There are a number of new incentives and financial enticements that are on the table that we're going to be hearing about in the coming months and years that are going to be brought up before Congress that we all should be informed on before we go and vote on them. And the two most common types of incentives are called push incentives and pull incentives. Now a push incentive is when you go to a company let's suppose, Merck, a large multinational pharmaceutical company and we say, hypothetically, your corporate tax rate is 20 percent. What if we cut that to 15% provided you promise to take a portion of the excess profits and invest in new antibiotics? So this is a surefire way to pump more money into the antibiotic pipeline.
The problem is that you're suddenly giving a tax break to a multibillion dollar pharmaceutical company. And when people look into the finances of how pharmaceutical companies are doing, they may not be enthusiastic to do that. My stomach turns when I look at some of the comments from pharmaceutical CEOs who jack up the prices of their drugs. One notably increased the price of an antibiotic for urinary tract infections by 5,000 percent. And he justified it by saying he had an ethical mandate to charge as much money as possible for antibiotics because he's ultimately accountable to shareholders and not patients. So the idea of giving a tax cut to a company like that is tough to stomach. On the other hand, it would give us more investment in something we desperately need. So those are called push incentives because it would push the company to do it. By contrast, there's something called a pull incentive. That is to say to a company, if you take on the risk of developing a new drug and it succeeds, rather than giving you five to seven years of market exclusivity, we'll give you 25 years, which means that generics can't challenge you.
That's a way that the company could charge more money for a longer time for their drug. Pull incentives are more popular among a lot of academics because it forces the companies to take the risk head first. And if they're successful, then they get to make money on the back end. Whether companies will go for this is unclear. But these push and pull incentives are the type of topics that we need to be talking to our politicians about. And then adding yet another layer to the complexity here is that, when an antibiotic is approved by the FDA, there's no guarantee that a hospital is going to use it. And in fact, I found that many top hospitals are not using the latest antibiotics that are approved. The reason for that is that the drugs take so long to get approved and are so expensive to produce that the companies are charging thousands of dollars per dose. And the hospitals are saying, no. We're not going to pay the ransom for these drugs. That leaves patients in the lurch. I've been in front of patients for whom there was no treatment option, knowing that there were antibiotics out there that would probably work. But they were not widely available because of dollars and cents, that the hospitals could not afford these drugs. And what make gives me pause is that we don't always see that with cardiovascular drugs or with chemotherapeutic drugs. We routinely give patients with cancer a chemotherapeutic drug that will cost tens of thousands of dollars that will extend their life by just a few weeks or months.
But we aren't taking that same kind of financial risk with infectious diseases, and that's got to change. So I've talked to people from across the political spectrum about this. People on the right who typically would be hesitant to have the government more involved in health care and making these financial deals are also open to tax cuts for corporations because they believe in the innovation of these companies. And they want to have antibiotics when they come to the hospital. And if a tax cut will get them there, that's fine with them. I've also talked to people on the left who are enthusiastic about coming up with these tax breaks as well because they recognize this is a problem. But on the left, there is also more interest for socializing the production of antibiotics. Now in England and in other parts of Europe, they've said, we recognize the antibiotic market is broken. Let's disentangle profits from the entire process. These are public goods, like electricity or water. We shouldn't think about them in terms of dollars and cents and that the key here is that we should all invest in these drugs, meaning countries should pool together their resources. And when the drugs are approved, we should all use them, and we shouldn't be looking at profit margins. We should be thinking about patients' lives.
Anyone who's looked at this issue knows the market will not solve it strictly because we're producing a product that doctors try not to prescribe. So the traditional laws of supply and demand don't work here. And something has to be done. This is called a market failure. And with market failures, you need government intervention. The controversial part is how the government should intervene. Many people are fearful of nationalizing the production because they think it will stifle innovation that, if you have the government involved in investing, then the top people will not go into this will not go into drug discovery. Drug discovery is the most exciting part of this entire process that people aren't really talking about either, that many of the best new antibiotics that we're discovering are in the soil beneath our feet. And that's something that has been lost on the lay press. It turns out that there are bacteria in the soil all around us. And those bacteria, just like Fleming's fungus, are producing chemicals to kill the other organisms in the environment, the other microbes. And it turns out that those chemicals that are being produced everyday beneath our feet can be harnessed and turned into antibiotics.
The challenge is finding where those are. And not far from where I work in Prospect Park, they recently found that the soil under the park had antibiotics and other potential medications. And what we're doing now, the next frontier, is using big data and artificial intelligence to sift through the proverbial needle in the haystack to find the next life saving drugs. The challenge is, once we identify that molecule in the soil, it costs $1 billion and 10 years of research to make sure it is safe and effective for humans. And we have to find someone, whether it's the government or whether it's a private company, that's willing to take on the risk because often those trials fail. When you find something in the soil, you've got to test it in a test tube and in animals, in healthy human volunteers, and then in patients who are sick. And that's a high wire act that people don't recognize how challenging it can be. But the pharmaceutical industry recognizes that it is a very perilous business model to rely on, that lengthy process to turn a profit. Our current antibiotics are waning in efficacy.
And we have an opportunity to invest in the future and to invest in the next generation of lifesaving antibiotics. But we cannot expect that this will take care of itself. And in fact, many people compare this to something like global warming, where there are things that people can do on a small scale, individuals, and there are things that countries and that corporations can do on a large scale. And even comparing that is fraught with controversy. But on a small scale, what we can do is that doctors like me cannot overprescribe antibiotics. And in fact, we found that dentists too are overprescribing antibiotics. Up to 80 percent of the antibiotics prescribed by dentists are inappropriate. So we can be better about prescribing. We can also be better as patients where, if a doctor says take seven days of antibiotics, you don't take two days and stop after you feel better. That gives the bacteria a whiff of the drug and gives them just enough of it to figure out how to evolve to escape it the next time around. So those are small things that we can do.
And then on a larger scale, we can make sure that we're not using antibiotics inappropriately in commercial agriculture and farming. For example, we're using some of our best tuberculosis and syphilis drugs in orange groves. We're using powerful antifungal drugs in tulip gardens. We're pumping meat producing animals full of antibiotics. We've gotten better about curbing that. But these are things that we have misused antibiotics for a generation. And that has allowed the bacteria to evolve in a way where they are now these superbugs.
- Alexander Fleming discovered a fungus that produced a chemical that could stop nearly every bacteria in its path.
- The 1950s are known as the Golden Era of Antibiotic Development. However, today, there is a looming superbug crisis because bacteria has mutated whilst we've focused on treating other diseases, such as cancer and heart disease.
- Many companies in the pharmaceutical industry don't want to take on the expensive risk of finding another antibiotic drug. However, a potential superbug crisis may compel us to use tax-break and patent policies to incentivize them to do so.
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‘Designer baby’ book trilogy explores the moral dilemmas humans may soon create
How would the ability to genetically customize children change society? Sci-fi author Eugene Clark explores the future on our horizon in Volume I of the "Genetic Pressure" series.
- A new sci-fi book series called "Genetic Pressure" explores the scientific and moral implications of a world with a burgeoning designer baby industry.
- It's currently illegal to implant genetically edited human embryos in most nations, but designer babies may someday become widespread.
- While gene-editing technology could help humans eliminate genetic diseases, some in the scientific community fear it may also usher in a new era of eugenics.
Tribalism and discrimination
<p>One question the "Genetic Pressure" series explores: What would tribalism and discrimination look like in a world with designer babies? As designer babies grow up, they could be noticeably different from other people, potentially being smarter, more attractive and healthier. This could breed resentment between the groups—as it does in the series.</p><p>"[Designer babies] slowly find that 'everyone else,' and even their own parents, becomes less and less tolerable," author Eugene Clark told Big Think. "Meanwhile, everyone else slowly feels threatened by the designer babies."</p><p>For example, one character in the series who was born a designer baby faces discrimination and harassment from "normal people"—they call her "soulless" and say she was "made in a factory," a "consumer product." </p><p>Would such divisions emerge in the real world? The answer may depend on who's able to afford designer baby services. If it's only the ultra-wealthy, then it's easy to imagine how being a designer baby could be seen by society as a kind of hyper-privilege, which designer babies would have to reckon with. </p><p>Even if people from all socioeconomic backgrounds can someday afford designer babies, people born designer babies may struggle with tough existential questions: Can they ever take full credit for things they achieve, or were they born with an unfair advantage? To what extent should they spend their lives helping the less fortunate? </p>Sexuality dilemmas
<p>Sexuality presents another set of thorny questions. If a designer baby industry someday allows people to optimize humans for attractiveness, designer babies could grow up to find themselves surrounded by ultra-attractive people. That may not sound like a big problem.</p><p>But consider that, if designer babies someday become the standard way to have children, there'd necessarily be a years-long gap in which only some people are having designer babies. Meanwhile, the rest of society would be having children the old-fashioned way. So, in terms of attractiveness, society could see increasingly apparent disparities in physical appearances between the two groups. "Normal people" could begin to seem increasingly ugly.</p><p>But ultra-attractive people who were born designer babies could face problems, too. One could be the loss of body image. </p><p>When designer babies grow up in the "Genetic Pressure" series, men look like all the other men, and women look like all the other women. This homogeneity of physical appearance occurs because parents of designer babies start following trends, all choosing similar traits for their children: tall, athletic build, olive skin, etc. </p><p>Sure, facial traits remain relatively unique, but everyone's more or less equally attractive. And this causes strange changes to sexual preferences.</p><p>"In a society of sexual equals, they start looking for other differentiators," he said, noting that violet-colored eyes become a rare trait that genetically engineered humans find especially attractive in the series.</p><p>But what about sexual relationships between genetically engineered humans and "normal" people? In the "Genetic Pressure" series, many "normal" people want to have kids with (or at least have sex with) genetically engineered humans. But a minority of engineered humans oppose breeding with "normal" people, and this leads to an ideology that considers engineered humans to be racially supreme. </p>Regulating designer babies
<p>On a policy level, there are many open questions about how governments might legislate a world with designer babies. But it's not totally new territory, considering the West's dark history of eugenics experiments.</p><p>In the 20th century, the U.S. conducted multiple eugenics programs, including immigration restrictions based on genetic inferiority and forced sterilizations. In 1927, for example, the Supreme Court ruled that forcibly sterilizing the mentally handicapped didn't violate the Constitution. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes wrote, "… three generations of imbeciles are enough." </p><p>After the Holocaust, eugenics programs became increasingly taboo and regulated in the U.S. (though some states continued forced sterilizations <a href="https://www.uvm.edu/~lkaelber/eugenics/" target="_blank">into the 1970s</a>). In recent years, some policymakers and scientists have expressed concerns about how gene-editing technologies could reanimate the eugenics nightmares of the 20th century. </p><p>Currently, the U.S. doesn't explicitly ban human germline genetic editing on the federal level, but a combination of laws effectively render it <a href="https://academic.oup.com/jlb/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jlb/lsaa006/5841599#204481018" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">illegal to implant a genetically modified embryo</a>. Part of the reason is that scientists still aren't sure of the unintended consequences of new gene-editing technologies. </p><p>But there are also concerns that these technologies could usher in a new era of eugenics. After all, the function of a designer baby industry, like the one in the "Genetic Pressure" series, wouldn't necessarily be limited to eliminating genetic diseases; it could also work to increase the occurrence of "desirable" traits. </p><p>If the industry did that, it'd effectively signal that the <em>opposites of those traits are undesirable. </em>As the International Bioethics Committee <a href="https://academic.oup.com/jlb/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jlb/lsaa006/5841599#204481018" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">wrote</a>, this would "jeopardize the inherent and therefore equal dignity of all human beings and renew eugenics, disguised as the fulfillment of the wish for a better, improved life."</p><p><em>"Genetic Pressure Volume I: Baby Steps"</em><em> by Eugene Clark is <a href="http://bigth.ink/38VhJn3" target="_blank">available now.</a></em></p>4 lessons the US learned from the COVID-19 pandemic
The long-term lessons America learns from the coronavirus pandemic will spell life or death.
- As the US commences its early stages of COVID-19 vaccinations, Michael Dowling, president and CEO of Northwell Health, argues that now is not the time to relax. "There are lessons to be learned by systems like ours based upon our experience," says Dowling, adding that "we know what these lessons are, and we're working on them."
- The four major takeaways that Dowling has identified are that the United States was unprepared and slow to react, that we need a domestic supply chain so that we aren't relying on other countries, that there needs to be more domestic and international cooperation, and that leadership roles in public health must be filled by public health experts.
- If and when another pandemic hits (in the hopefully distant future), the country—and by extension the world—will be in a much better place to deal with it.
Archaeologists identify contents of ancient Mayan drug containers
Scientists use new methods to discover what's inside drug containers used by ancient Mayan people.
- Archaeologists used new methods to identify contents of Mayan drug containers.
- They were able to discover a non-tobacco plant that was mixed in by the smoking Mayans.
- The approach promises to open up new frontiers in the knowledge of substances ancient people consumed.
PARME staff archaeologists excavating a burial site at the Tamanache site, Mérida, Yucatan.
Credit: WSU
Designer uses AI to bring 54 Roman emperors to life
It's hard to stop looking back and forth between these faces and the busts they came from.
- A quarantine project gone wild produces the possibly realistic faces of ancient Roman rulers.
- A designer worked with a machine learning app to produce the images.
- It's impossible to know if they're accurate, but they sure look plausible.
How the Roman emperors got faced
<a href="https://payload.cargocollective.com/1/6/201108/14127595/2K-ENGLISH-24x36-Educational_v8_WATERMARKED_2000.jpg" ><img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNDQ2NDk2MS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYyOTUzMzIxMX0.OwHMrgKu4pzu0eCsmOUjybdkTcSlJpL_uWDCF2djRfc/img.jpg?width=980" id="775ca" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="436000b6976931b8320313478c624c82" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" alt="lineup of emperor faces" data-width="1440" data-height="963" /></a>Credit: Daniel Voshart
<p>Voshart's imaginings began with an AI/neural-net program called <a href="https://www.artbreeder.com" target="_blank">Artbreeder</a>. The freemium online app intelligently generates new images from existing ones and can combine multiple images into…well, who knows. It's addictive — people have so far used it to generate nearly 72.7 million images, says the site — and it's easy to see how Voshart fell down the rabbit hole.</p><p>The Roman emperor project began with Voshart feeding Artbreeder images of 800 busts. Obviously, not all busts have weathered the centuries equally. Voshart told <a href="https://www.livescience.com/ai-roman-emperor-portraits.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Live Science</a>, "There is a rule of thumb in computer programming called 'garbage in garbage out,' and it applies to Artbreeder. A well-lit, well-sculpted bust with little damage and standard face features is going to be quite easy to get a result." Fortunately, there were multiple busts for some of the emperors, and different angles of busts captured in different photographs.</p><p>For the renderings Artbreeder produced, each face required some 15-16 hours of additional input from Voshart, who was left to deduce/guess such details as hair and skin coloring, though in many cases, an individual's features suggested likely pigmentations. Voshart was also aided by written descriptions of some of the rulers.</p><p>There's no way to know for sure how frequently Voshart's guesses hit their marks. It is obviously the case, though, that his interpretations look incredibly plausible when you compare one of his emperors to the sculpture(s) from which it was derived.</p><p>For an in-depth description of Voshart's process, check out his posts on <a href="https://medium.com/@voshart/photoreal-roman-emperor-project-236be7f06c8f" target="_blank">Medium</a> or on his <a href="https://voshart.com/ROMAN-EMPEROR-PROJECT" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">website</a>.</p><p>It's fascinating to feel like you're face-to-face with these ancient and sometimes notorious figures. Here are two examples, along with some of what we think we know about the men behind the faces.</p>Caligula
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNDQ2NDk4Mi9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY3MzQ1NTE5NX0.LiTmhPQlygl9Fa9lxay8PFPCSqShv4ELxbBRFkOW_qM/img.jpg?width=980" id="7bae0" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="ce795c554490fe0a36a8714b86f55b16" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" data-width="992" data-height="558" />One of numerous sculptures of Caligula, left
Credit: Rogers Fund, 1914/Wikimedia Commons/Daniel Voshart
<p><span style="background-color: initial;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caligula" target="_blank">Caligula</a></span> was the third Roman Emperor, ruling the city-state from AD 37 to 41. His name was actually Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus — Caligula is a nickname meaning "Little Boot."</p><p>One of the reputed great madmen of history, he was said to have made a horse his consul, had conversations with the moon, and to have ravaged his way through his kingdom, including his three sisters. Caligula is known for extreme cruelty, terrorizing his subjects, and accounts suggest he would deliberately distort his face to surprise and frighten people he wished to intimidate.</p><p>It's <a href="https://www.history.com/news/7-things-you-may-not-know-about-caligula" target="_blank">not totally clear</a> if Caligula was as over-the-top as history paints him, but that hasn't stopped Hollywood from churning out some <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080491/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">howlers</a> in his name.</p><p>A 1928 journal, <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/4172009" target="_blank">Studies in Philology</a>, noted that contemporary descriptions of Caligula depicted him as having a "head misshapen, eyes and temples sunken," and "eyes staring and with a glare savage enough to torture." In some sculptures not shown above, his head <em>is</em> a bit acorn-shaped. </p>Nero
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNDQ2NTAwMC9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY1NTQ2ODU0NX0.AgYuQZzRQCanqehSI5UeakpxU8fwLagMc_POH7xB3-M/img.jpg?width=980" id="a8825" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="9e0593d79c591c97af4bd70f3423885e" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" data-width="992" data-height="558" />One of numerous sculptures of Nero, left
Credit: Bibi_Saint-Pol/Wikimedia Commons/Daniel Voshart
<p>There's a good German word for the face of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nero" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Nero</a>, that guy famous for fiddling as Rome burned. It's "<a href="https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Backpfeifengesicht" target="_blank">backpfeifengesicht</a>." Properly named Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, he was Rome's fifth emperor. He ruled from AD 54 until his suicide in AD 68.</p><p>Another Germanicus-family gem, Nero's said to have murdered his own mother, Agrippa, as well as (maybe) his second wife. As for the fiddling, he <em>was</em> a lover of music and the arts, and there are stories of his charitability. And, oh yeah, he may have set the fire as an excuse to rebuild the city center, making it his own.</p><p>While it may not be the most historically sound means of assessing an historical personage, Voshart's imagining of Nero does suggest an over-indulged, entitled young man. Backpfeifengesicht.</p>Biden nominates Dr. Eric Lander as cabinet-level science adviser, in U.S. first
Dr. Eric Lander is a pioneer in genomics. What role will he play in the new administration?
- Dr. Lander is a mathematician and geneticist who's best known for his leading role in the Human Genome Project.
- Biden nominated Dr. Lander to head the Office of Science and Technology Policy and also serve as a cabinet-level science adviser, marking the first time the position has been part of the presidential cabinet.
- In an open letter, Biden said it's essential for the U.S. to "refresh and reinvigorate our national science and technology strategy to set us on a strong course for the next 75 years."
Who is Dr. Eric Lander?
<p>Born in Brooklyn, New York, Dr. Lander started his academic career as a mathematician, often arriving at high school an hour early to do math. He won multiple awards in mathematics in his teens, including the Mathematical Olympiad in 1974.<br></p><p>Finding mathematics "too monastic" to pursue as a career, he began teaching managerial economics at Harvard Business School. Then, at the <a href="https://www.worldsciencefestival.com/videos/eric-lander-the-genesis-of-genius/" target="_blank">encouragement of his brother</a>, a neurobiologist, Dr. Lander became interested in studying neurobiology and microbiology. This pushed him to his main lifelong pursuit: unraveling the mysteries of the human genome.</p><p>Dr. Lander spent more than a decade as a leader within the Human Genome Project, which provided the world a complete map of all human genes in 2003. In 2004, he founded the Broad Institute, a biomedical and genomic nonprofit research center that partners with M.I.T. and Harvard University.</p>Credit: Pixabay
<p>Broad's <a href="https://www.broadinstitute.org/news-multimedia/basic-q-about-broad-institute" target="_blank">mission</a> is to "fulfill the promise of genomics by creating comprehensive tools for biology and medicine, making them broadly available to the world and applying them to the understanding of human biology and the diagnosis, treatment, and cure of human diseases." The institute aims to diminish diseases by better understanding cellular mechanisms, rather than simply treating symptoms.</p><p>Despite some <a href="https://www.statnews.com/2016/01/25/why-eric-lander-morphed/" target="_blank">minor controversies and patent disputes</a>, Dr. Lander remains a monumental figure in American science, and also previously served as co-chairman of former President Barack Obama's science advisory council.</p>What will Dr. Lander do in the Biden administration?
<p>If confirmed by the Senate, it's not exactly clear what Dr. Lander will do in his role as cabinet science adviser and head of the OSTP. But his primary focus likely won't be COVID-19, considering Biden has already established a task force dedicated to shaping policy and recommendations related to the pandemic.<br></p><p>But Biden revealed some of his expectation in an <a href="https://buildbackbetter.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/OSTP-Appointment.pdf" target="_blank">open letter</a> that posed five questions for the Office of Science and Technology Policy to explore:</p><ol><li>What can we learn from the pandemic about what is possible—or what ought to be possible— to address the widest range of needs related to our public health?</li><li>How can breakthroughs in science and technology create powerful new solutions to address climate change—propelling market-driven change, jump-starting economic growth, improving health, and growing jobs, especially in communities that have been left behind?</li><li>How can the United States ensure that it is the world leader in the technologies and industries of the future that will be critical to our economic prosperity and national security, especially in competition with China?</li><li>How can we guarantee that the fruits of science and technology are fully shared across America and among all Americans?</li><li>How can we ensure the long-term health of science and technology in our nation?</li></ol><p>The president-elect wrote that it's essential to "refresh and reinvigorate our national science and technology strategy to set us on a strong course for the next 75 years," concluding:</p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"I believe that the answers to these questions will be instrumental in helping our nation embark on a new path in the years ahead—a path of dignity and respect, of prosperity and security, of progress and common purpose. They are big questions, to be sure, but not as big as America's capacity to address them. I look forward to receiving your recommendations—and to working with you, your team, and the broader scientific community to turn them into solutions that ease everyday burdens for the American people, spark new jobs and opportunities, and restore American leadership on the world stage."</p>