A: I’ve always thought of myself as a pessimist.
At the very best, a short-term pessimist and
long-term optimist. It’s sort of the engineering
mindset. If you weren’t a short-term pessimist,
you wouldn’t be able to see all of the sub-optimal
things around you that need to be fixed. It’s also
hard to be an engineer if you’re not a long-term
optimist, because then you wouldn’t have the
necessary faith that all of the brokenness that you
see around you would be fixable at all. One of
the positive side effects of this is that I’m actually
in touch with my friends more than I was before,
doing virtual happy hours over video conference.
I often find myself bringing news about how it is I
see some hope over the horizon, like some of the
promising things happening on the therapeutics
front. And about how, when we come out of this,
maybe things will be different and in a better way.
Q: How would things be better?
A: We are all on this accelerated timeline
figuring out how to work from home. Not just
getting over technical hurdles. It’s learning the
culture and the rhythms of interacting with
your colleagues by videoconference and doing
your work remotely. That is getting so much
better so quickly that I don’t think I’m going to
be commuting nearly as frequently. It means I
will get to spend more time doing productive
work and more time with my family. Another
thing that is almost certainly going to happen
as a byproduct of this is we are going to have
a massive acceleration in investments and
innovation in the biological sciences. In the past
when we’ve had crises of this magnitude, think
World War II, the things we’ve done to react to it
have created this very long tailwind that pushes
progress forward.