Happy New Year

Happy new year, everyone.

I’d like to leave you with a thought, something very simple: we owe a great deal to those who have an idea, something new, different, often against the grain and ideally with some evidence to back it up, and who hold on to their idea despite people dragging them down, calling them names or ignoring them. One very clear example is the work of a team at the University of Texas, which has been working on creating vaccines via mRNA, specifically, finding ways to have human cells create spike proteins that the immune system finds and learns to fight against.

The team started their work in 2015, long before the current Coronavirus outbreak, and at a time when there was much less interest in this genre of disease. My point is this: we owe our safety, comfort and freedom to those that do things, fight for things, and work on things that we (the rest of us) don’t have the the foresight to understand. Usually we ignore them, sometimes we call them geeks, cranks, or just weird. Ultimately, the difference between having an idea and changing the course of history is the ability to stick to your guns while others are trying to drag you down, and we as a society are very much indebted to people with this quality.

Be well, enjoy 2021, and illegitimi non carborundum.