CNN has the lead here. I can’t say I’m surprised. Francis has done a great job leading the Agency, but he’s been there a very long time. It’s early in the handicapping for who President Biden will nominate to succeeed him, but it’s a good bet the Lander and Faucci will have a big say. What is important is that NIH figure out a distinct mission for its intramural program–I would suggest focusing on high risk, high payoff science. I also think that a new NIH director should do something to reform the creaky NIH peer-review culture (Study Sections).

I’m on the team that submitted this preprint to MedrXiv. I’d say the conclusions are quite compelling. We’re also finishing our project on the National Science Board and moving on to Space Law (as in the future Rules of Life for SpaceX). We’re also getting ready to submit a new proposal on cell traffiking of proteins in neurons and another major push in AI at the edge. So busy.

Just a progress report for folks who have been following my project to take a policy look at the National Science Board through the lens of NSF’s science mission. We’re in the process of finishing up a manuscript for submission. My undergraduate honors student has been spectacular in moving the project forward during the pandemic–he will be first author!

From this week’s New Yorker, here: featuring my colleague Tyler Cowen. Well written and quite entertaining.

Note: I consider the scientific method (which I subscribe to in my own thinking) as being somewhat distinct from Bayesian reasoning which is pushed in the piece. A scientist needs to be imaginative in addition to being rigorous in her thinking. The imaginative component is absent from the article.

Thirty years ago today there was an almost successful coup in the former USSR. But for those of us at the Marine Biological Laboratory, geopolitics was secondary. We were mostly huddled on second floor of the Swope Center at MBL as the storm surge took over the parking lot and then moved closer to the main front doors. Eel pond had completely blown out through the Ball Field into Buzzard’s Bay and the roof of the Brick Dorm was scattering shingles piece meal. Some of us wandered over to the Lillie Building wearing bike helmets as protection from the roof. That probably wasn’t wise.

After the storm, there was much swimming in the lake that had been School Street. The Shining Sea bike path was gone and the New York Times led the next day with pictures of the big sailboats washed up on Penzance Point. They had to send in the Sea King helicopters.

The power was out for the next several weeks. But we kept the -80 freezers alive and science kept on. If that isn’t resiliance, I don’t know what is.

The shortage was due to a porcine pandemic that preceeded COVID19. Leading to the use of replacement “wet market” meats, report from SCIENCE here. It’s an interesting hypothesis and yet another example of how the human touch to Earth’s biosphere has many potential unintended consequences.

• 

As the academic year gets underway here at George Mason University, I’m beginning my own sabbatical year. I’m on leave until May of 2022, although if you consider the summer break, it’s actually for a full year. I’ll mostly be around DC (where I’ve mostly been since March 2020 when the pandemic began), but there will hopefully be stints elsewhere including overseas if the vaccine deities permit.

The plan is to read as much as I can on a wide variety of subjects off my usual beaten path of science and history. Defintely a lot more fiction. I’d be interested in suggestions from readers. I’m also planning to put together a new proposal for NSF and continue my various scientific collaborations on AI at the edge.

For students and others who need recommendation letters from me, please get those requests in earlier than in the past (same contact information). I plan to visit my university office in Arlington occassionally both for meetings and because the microscope lives there. Mostly though, I’ll be available on Zoom or by email–just drop me a line.

And I’ll be posting to the blog of course….

• 

The Biosphere will soon expand out into the Solar System. In fact, thinking back to microbes on current and past Mars landers, it probably already has. So what new selection pressures will come into play? How will history and contigency play out over that much larger system?

I write these words, thinking in the context of the delta variant of SARS-CoV2 and its phenotype trajectory as a function of mRNA vaccine “attack landscapes”. The virus now responds to entirely new selection pressures correct? So too, microbes on Mars would be subject to entirely new selection pressures (e.g. extreme temperatures, low atmospheric density, radiation).

I thinking about virus evolution, it’s easy to see that there would be selection pressure towards greater infectivity. It’s harder to imagine selection pressure towards greater virulence, although that might be worth it if reproductive efficiency (of virions) was greatly enhanced.

In any case, the all to brief “freedom” is over. Back to masks and avoiding the obvious risky circumstances.

Well, actually I started coming back to my office in early April, but I thought today would be as good a time as any to write about the experience:

A vignette: I take the elevator down to the lobby and walk over the the bookstore to browse the nearly empty shelves. The proprietor (who I’ve been acquainted with for several years) is so glad to see a human customer, that he follows up his greeting with a long conversation about how strange it is to be opening up again. I purchase some pencils and a notebook and head back through the nearly empty building to edit a manuscript.

Washington DC is slowly coming back to life. Individuals (including myself) are tentative and the mask is always close at hand, a totem of our recent year+. As in some anthropomorphic form of pathetic fallacy, outside my office window, I get to watch as the old department store is demolished by machines the size of Godzilla. It’s impossible not to think that we are watching an old era end and something altogether new begin.

Oddly enough, the sound of the machines helps the focus on the manuscript–which is about the history of the relationship between the NSF and the National Science Board, created in the same act of Congress in 1950. Stay tuned.