COVID19 Vaccine: A Very Deep, Personal Meaning

-

A safe and effective vaccine has been developed to meet a public health threat, in months instead of a decade.  It is the amazing confluence of molecular biology, medicine, and and influx of money, all colliding to install community immunity to a highly transmissible and potentially harmful virus. 

I receive my first shot today, the Moderna mRNA vaccine. I'll get it today at 5:40 pm at the Publix grocery store on 91st Street.  

For most this event marks the end of a threat to health, the potential to maybe rejoin others and life returning to normal. 

But to me it means something more. It is another gorgeous application of a technology I have studied for almost a lifetime. 

I first learned of recombinant DNA technology in 1977.  I was 10.  The concept was always intriguing. It was amazing that we could potentially fix medical problems, correct genetic errors, enhance traits in plants.... simply my adjusting the basic instructions in the molecular blueprint.  


I get the shot in an hour and my sleeve has been rolled up all day. I have been waiting for this opportunity to protect my community, colleagues and family. 


For the next 44 years I'd study the molecular basis of life, and today teach these concepts to students in class and in the lab.  For six years I have hosted a popular weekly podcast on biotechnology.  I have taught these concepts in the public square, in front of angry protesting audiences, and in online forums, sometimes leading to responses of defamation, threats, and situations requiring police protection. 

If you don't believe I have paid a price for teaching science, just do a Google Images search of my name. 

Today I get to receive the gift of this amazing technology.  It is technology that I have fought and suffered for, and paid great prices personally and professionally to advance. 

My guess is that I'll drop a few tears when I get the jab, and not because it hurts, but because it heals. 

And I'll drop a few more when it can reach the most desperate and needy in the world in other forms, with medical care and food security.  We live in amazing times with beautiful technology, and maybe the silver lining of the pandemic is that new technology will gain acceptance into its proper place in improving the human condition. 


 

Popular posts from this blog

Film Review: The Need to Grow

-
Image
The recurring ads on Facebook pulled at me to watch The Need to Grow , a documentary film about food and farming.  As someone connected with these areas professionally and personally, I thought it would be worth a watch.  Here is a review. First the good things.  The film is nicely shot and well written.  The majority of the work builds on themes such as nutritious diets healthy soils, and efficient energy. Those are the central underlying values of the film, and ones that I wholly endorse.  However, where the film falls apart is in its approaches to achieve those end points.  Two of the "experts" recruited for the film are none other than Jeffrey Smith and Vandana Shiva, two people with little training in science or farming (and no, Vandana Shiva is not a physicist as the film claims).  The narrator is actress Rosario Dawson, who early in the film makes the proclamation, "Agriculture is the most destructive human activity on the planet." It is...
Read more

Food Babe Visits My University

-
Image
It was 6:30 pm in the lab and I was just thinking about the last things I'd need to get done before I could go home.  Typical night.  Usually I'm riding home about 7 pm, but an email popped up asking me if I was going to go watch the Food Babe.  A click on a link would take me to the note on a UF Dean for Students Good Food Revolution Events website.  Vani Hari would be spreading her corrupt message of bogus science and abject food terrorism here at the University of Florida. Oh joy. There's something that dies inside when you are a faculty member that works hard to teach about food, farming and science, and your own university brings in a crackpot to unravel all of the information you have brought to students. She might have started from honest roots.  Her story says she was duped by an organic yogurt stand (join the club) into buying taro toppings that were filled with artificial, non-organic colors.  She realized that she could use social m...
Read more

Shame on Pediatrics. Rejecting Scientist's Comments

-
 A lot has been said about the journal Pediatrics December 2023 Clinical Report on "Using GMOs on Children". The poor scholarship and citation bias are alarming, and the bias against safe technology is clear.  When I wrote to editor-in-chief Dr. Lewis First, he indicated that I was invited to submit a response to the article that would be posted below the article on its website. I submitted my response, and it was not published on the site. My guess is that it illuminated the bankruptcies of the article in a manner that ran counter to the authors', editor's and journal's narrative.  So I'll publish my comment here.  Dear Pediatrics Readership,  The article by Abrams et al. represents a stunning example of how misinformation spreads- even through a credible conduit. Pediatrics is a respected journal, so when a paper implies a technology is dangerous, physicians and the general public take note. That’s good. But if the message runs counter to the scientific con...
Read more