Mondays with Mike: A non-binary world

A few years back I posted about how we often anoint wunderkinds as “creators” of a new technology. The point was that scientific and technological advance reflects collaboration, not wunderkinds. That every advancement is sort of a collective milestone in the eternal scientific drive to learn more and do things better.

Right now the commercials we see from the companies that are producing the covid vaccines that are essentially self-anointments. What these companies accomplished is remarkable. But it’s only part of the story.

A NY Times piece (Halting Progress and Happy Accidents: How mRNA Vaccines Were Made) a few days ago illustrated yet another example of how science is a collective effort—the development of the Covid vaccines specifically, and, more broadly, mRNA vaccines. These vaccines hold great promise beyond our current predicament.

And it all started with AIDS, AIDS research and the efforts to develop an AIDS vaccine. From the article:

In December 1996, President Bill Clinton invited Dr. Anthony S. Fauci to the Oval Office to brief him on that era’s grave pandemic, AIDS, which by then had killed more than 350,000 people in the United States and six million more globally.

Dr. Fauci, the top government scientist investigating the virus, was feeling oddly hopeful. For the first time since the virus emerged, annual AIDS deaths in the country had fallen, thanks to several new drugs that were tested and approved after years of intense public pressure by patient activists.

But the most valuable tool remained missing from their arsenal: a vaccine. And the president was impatient.

As the men walked out to the Rose Garden, Dr. Fauci recalled, the president turned to him and said: “You’ve known about AIDS as a disease since 1981. How come you guys don’t have a vaccine yet?”

Dr. Fauci, taken aback, told the president that research efforts thus far had been largely uncoordinated. Then he made a bold pitch: a research facility where scientists from different disciplines could talk to one another and collaborate, with the goal of putting vaccines into arms rather than proving that their own discipline had the answers.

Mr. Clinton turned to his chief of staff, Leon Panetta. “You think we can do that?” he asked.

“You’re the president of the United States,” Mr. Panetta recalled saying. “You can do whatever the hell you want.”

To date, the HIV vaccine effort has failed. But it spawned breakthroughs that enabled the mRNA vaccines. And the government’s role in all that has been critical.

mRNA vaccines also required the muscle and ingenuity of private sector medical companies.

Arguing incessantly about government vs. the private sector leaves us stranded in today’s binary world. It’s not either, it’s both. Arguments about the balance are legitimate, but to address big problems, we need both.