It’s been a few weeks since we’ve discussed the COVID-19 pandemic, so it seems like we should touch base there. Having disrupted the exponential growth of cases (at least for now), thoughts are turning towards how to move forward. The burden of staying at home is substantial and not equally distributed, so wanting to get out again is understandable. At the same time, with most of the population still unexposed and thus susceptible and a vaccine still along ways off, the mitigation of spread is still highly contingent on measures like social distancing, sheltering in place, and voluntary self-quarantine. Any contemplation of resuming interrupted activities requires careful consideration of how reduce the risk of transmission. For research institutions and scientists like many of you, that includes figuring out how to make laboratories safer.
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laboratory science
If that’s where you want to end up, I wouldn’t start here
The poets talk about life as a journey. But that just makes me wonder – in what space are we traveling? What metric can we use to assess distances? What sort of path-finding algorithm should we use? Will there be a giant ball of metaphorical twine along the way?
When I was asked to write a bit about my journey, I figured it would be easy; I’m the world’s leading expert after all. However, after several attempts, I could never get it to fit into any sort of particularly compelling narrative. It felt like a just-so tale; there was a chronology of events, and plenty of the usual milestones, but nothing that made for an interesting story.
But then I took a look around at where I was, and where I had come from, and I thought “Hang on. Just how exactly did I get here from there?” And so I started to wonder if maybe what was remarkable was that the changes had seemed so unremarkable as they happened. Because when I looked along particular dimensions, I realized I had gone pretty far.
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