It’s a terrible time for humanity but a wonderful time for science and intellectual curiosity. Yesterday, I attended a live talk entitled “CRISPR: Rewriting DNA and the Future of Humanity” with Professor and Nobel Prize winner Dr Jennifer Doudna. She discussed research into the family of CRISPR-associated proteins: where they came from, how they work, and how CRISPR-based technologies can be used to revolutionize research, biomedicine and agriculture. It’s amazing to be given access to such an expert and it left me a little starstruck. I’m currently reading “Variants! The Shape-Shifting Challenge of COVID-19.” by William A. Haseltine, PhD. former Harvard Medical School professor and founder of the university’s cancer and HIV/AIDS research departments. He’s not only a respected expert in his field, he’s one of the better writers on the subject. His article “How Will The Coronavirus Evolve?” was an eye-opener for me. It’s rare to find a scientific mind with the chops of a novel writer but Haseltine is the whole package. On the political side, science writer and EU affairs journalist Leigh Phillips this week wrote an interesting article for Jacobin. In his article “We Need a Movement Against Vaccine Apartheid” he addressed the very real repercussions of a vaccine-divided world and suggests that vaccine apartheid has “built a giant variant factory that threatens us all”. These are just a few recent examples of the resources which inform my opinions. It’s wrong to assume that someone weird and wordy, who opposes a blind “vaccines n’ high fives!” government strategy, is necessarily “uninformed”. Some of us don’t wait for “experts” to tell us how to think, we read and we think for ourselves.
