Month: December 2020

US climate innovation

To reduce duplication, focus the government’s efforts, and get the most innovation out of every $ of funding, we should create a new organization, the National Institutes of Energy Innovation. This the most important thing the US can do to lead the world in innovations that will solve climate change. Creating these institutes wouldn’t be an exercise in simply moving boxes around an organizational chart and hoping for a better outcome. We actually have a model for setting things up in a better way, and evidence that it produces results. That model is the National Institutes of Health. The NIH is the largest single funder of biomedical research in the world, and its impact is simply mind-blowing. Scientists supported by the NIH have mapped the human genome, resulting in tests or treatments for 10s of genetic diseases. They have helped cut deaths from heart disease by 66% in the past 50 years. Since 1980, NIH-supported research has contributed to the discovery of more than 150 new drugs, vaccines, and novel uses for existing drugs. The Gates Foundation’s work in global health simply would not be possible without the countless advances made by the NIH.

Why is the NIH so successful? It has a clear and specific mission. It has apolitical leaders who let independent researchers follow the science, rather than political staff who change priorities every few years. It’s organized in a way that empowers each of its separate institutes and research centers. And it has strong bipartisan support from policymakers and the public.

False Side Effects

if you reach a large enough population, you are literally going to have cases where someone gets the vaccine and drops dead the next day (just as they would have if they didn’t get the vaccine). It could prove difficult to convince that person’s friends and relatives of that lack of connection, though. Post hoc ergo propter hoc is one of the most powerful fallacies of human logic, and we’re not going to get rid of it any time soon.

Warp Speed is Normal

one big reason we got vaccines so quickly was that work had already gone into coronaviruses:

That was a really good—well, not “guess,” I suppose, but a good hypothesis, right? That a coronavirus was going to be a problem?

We were hedging our bets. No one knew what the next outbreak would be. It could have been a variant of influenza; it could have been one of a number of pathogens. But yeah, the short answer is, if you look at a list of outbreaks over the last 20 years, if 2 of the viruses on the list are in the coronavirus family, then you shouldn’t be shocked that it comes up again. SARS was 2002. MERS was 2012. In pandemic history, that’s a pretty short timeframe.

So we did some work with Moderna on designing MERS vaccines—all early, preclinical—so we were able to test how our mRNA worked, and we could test some designs on what the RNA should teach the body to make an immune response against. We had a lot of groundwork already laid when we found out the new virus was a coronavirus.

to prepare for the next pandemic:

It took nearly 20 years to understand coronaviruses well enough to work on. But what if the next one’s not a coronavirus?

There’s a reasonable possibility that a virus could emerge from a different virus family, and we would not be as prepared. We know that there are ~20 major virus families in the world that infect humans, and almost every outbreak we’ve seen in the past 50 years or more has come from one of those 20 virus families. What if we made a concerted effort to study every family in detail, to make vaccines to every family, and do what we did for coronavirus? Make some prototypes. So that if a cousin in that family emerges, a virus we’ve never seen before, we at least have laid some groundwork for vaccine design. One could, for $20m per virus family, make a prototype vaccine and test in the clinic. You’re talking a few billion $ over 5 years for that kind of project. That used to seem like it wouldn’t be tenable. But now it’s like, well, if I could be prepared for the next pandemic, that’s probably a really good investment.

Ancient steam engines

The invention of the steam engine is usually ascribed to British engineers of the 17th and 18th centuries. James Watt is best known for inventing an especially efficient type of the engine in 1786, which was applied first to trains and then in the early 19th century to ships. It is much less known that the engine was invented in the 1st century AD by Greek engineers of Alexandria, more than 1.5 ka before Watt. The British Library holds a remarkable collection of Greek manuscripts that describe and illustrate these early steam engines in great detail.

Easy WiFi roaming

Orion Wifi this looks superior to boingo etc because it’s transparent for users. hopefully this scales fast, this would have been technically possible for nearly 20 years, though to be fair the backbone was far less mature. i remember fon in 2003, among others. it’s disappointing how long “obvious” ideas take sometimes.