NEWSSCIENCE science.org
Donald Trump had touted as a coronavirus
remedy—as useless.
The suit and his congressional testimony
that soon followed catapulted Bright into
the public e ye. A 60 Minutes story described
him as “the highest ranking government
scientist to charge the federal government’s
response to the coronavirus pandemic has
been slow and chaotic.” Trump took to Twit-
ter to assail him, but many of Bright’s peers
in public health cheered him. “He was one
of the very early people to tell the Ameri-
can people what was going on,” says Nicole
Lurie, who during former President Barack
Obama’s administration oversaw BARDA
as assistant secretary for preparedness
and response (ASPR) at the Department
of Health and Human Services (HHS). “He
had a lot of guts.”
Bright’s abrupt, tumultuous exit from
BARDA, where he had for 4 years overseen
a $1 billion–plus research budget aimed at
protecting the country from pandemics and
bioweapons, marked but one more dramatic
chapter in a rough-and-tumble life. Now, in
a bold gamble on his ability to make some-
thing from nothing, the Rockefeller Foun-
dation has hired Bright to head a new bid
to protect the world from future pandemics.
Rockefeller will give the Pandemic Pre-
vention Institute (PPI) $150 million in seed
money over the next 3 years to tap and
quickly share pathogen surveillance data
gathered by myriad sources. “We’re setting
out to build an environment for sharing
data around the world at all levels—not just
governments—that will allow us to make
smarter decisions,” Bright says.
“I’m wildly supportive that the Rocke-
feller’s doing this,” says Eric Lander, direc-
tor of the White House’s Office of Science
and Technology Policy, which recently is-
sued its own ambitious, multibillion-dollar
prescription to better address pandemics.
Rajiv Shah, Rockefeller’s president, is cer-
tain Bright can turn PPI into a powerful
force. “Rick is absolutely the best person
on the planet to lead it,” Shah says. Bruce
Gellin, an epidemiologist who for 15 years
led HHS’s National Vaccine Program Office
and is one of PPI’s first 16 employees, says,
“Rick is a 50-year-vision person. That’s
what he does.”
But even some admirers wonder how
Bright’s new venture will stand out among
efforts by governments, academia, indus-
try, and the World Health Organization
(WHO) that share PPI’s elusive aspiration,
including several new ones with similarly
large backing. And his detractors charge
that Bright can be arrogant. “His ego is big-
ger than his managerial skills,” says physi-
cian Robert Kadlec, Lurie’s successor as
ASPR under Trump and the main target of
Bright’s blistering whistleblower complaint.
Lurie sees it differently. Bright, she says,
has no fear of speaking what he perceives as
truth to power. “Even when it was unpopular,
it was something he did, whether it was
about programmatic stuff or individuals,”
she says. “If Rick didn’t respect somebody,
it was difficult for him to play along without
saying something.”BRIGHT’S HARDSCRABBLE ROOTS help ex-
plain his willingness to speak out, Lurie
says. “When you overcome a huge amount
of adversity, it builds a new kind of self-confidence and resilience.” But little else
foreshadowed that Bright would become
a leader in vaccine development and pan-
demic preparedness. Nearly 40 years ago,
his high school in Hutchinson, Kansas, told
him he could not attend his senior year
because he had not received the vaccine
against measles, mumps, and rubella. Turns
out, he says, “my mother never vaccinated
us for anything.”
Bright, who bounced between eight
foster homes after his family fell apart
because of an abusive stepfather, stresses
that his mother wasn’t antivaccine. “We
were a low-income family in a small town,”
says Bright, who has six siblings. “It was an
educational thing.”
He got vaccinated and finished high
school—a notable feat given his back-
ground. “My choice in life growing up
was to drop out of school early and take
over the auto salvage business or work on
the farm,” he says. College, he adds, never
would have occurred to him, but while in
high school he worked 40 hours a week at
a restaurant owned by a family that val-
ued education and encouraged him to keep
studying. He enrolled at the University of
Kansas as an accounting major, his ticket
out of Hutchinson. But he soon dropped
out and moved to Kansas City, Missouri,
with no concrete plans.
A help wanted ad in the paper led to a job
at a dance studio, cold calling potential cli-
ents. During a coffee break, one of the stu-
dio’s teachers—a “glamorous woman with
a glamorous life”—asked him whether hehad any interest in becoming an instructor.
After 1 month of dance lessons, he had his
first career. A wealthy student—an elderly
woman who had lost a son his age the year
before—took a shine to him and challenged
him to restart his college education. She of-
fered him $10,000 to quit his job, and he ac-
cepted. “I went back for a year and dropped
out again, still lost.”
Bright became seriously interested in sci-
ence when a lab that did diagnostic testing
hired him to write educational material.
He decided to try college again, moving to
Alabama with the dream of going to medi-
cal school. To be eligible for in-state tu-
ition, he needed to live there for 1 year, so
he took a job at Blockbuster Video, which
helped him pay off $25,000 in credit card
debt. He eventually enrolled at Auburn
University, paying his way through school
by washing glassware in a lab. Bright was
30 years old in 1997 when he graduated,
magna cum laude, with a double major in
biology and chemistry.
For his Ph.D., Bright attended Emory
University, where he told his adviser, HIV
vaccine researcher Harriet Robinson, he
wanted to do something unique. He was
thrilled when she let him focus on develop-
ing a vaccine against H5N1, a highly lethal
bird flu strain that had jumped to humans.
“I want to save lives, and I want to protect
people,” Bright says. He got his first taste of
research with dangerous pathogens, run-
ning experiments in high-biosecurity labs at
the nearby Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC).
Bright returned to CDC after getting
his Ph.D., studying the limitations of an
entire class of influenza drugs and pub-
lishing first-author papers in The Lancet
and JAMA. He soon turned to influenza
vaccines again, first at an up-and-coming
company called Novavax (which recently
developed a COVID-19 vaccine) and then
at PATH, a nonprofit that focuses on global
health. There he helped a government-
owned manufacturer in Vietnam produce
shots for seasonal and potentially pan-
demic influenza viruses.
The PATH project received funding from
BARDA, which lured Bright in 2010 to
oversee its international projects, and he
soon moved into the influenza and emerg-
ing diseases division. Ted Ross, a postdoc
in Robinson’s lab while Bright was doing
his Ph.D. who now develops influenza vac-
cines at the University of Georgia, Athens,
soon found himself seeking money from
his old friend and collaborator—who some-
times turned him down. “He could listen to
100 proposals and not really flinch,” Ross
says. “He knew when people were kind of
BS-ing him versus what was real.”Rick Bright has a lot of desks to fill at his
new Pandemic Prevention Institute.
“If Rick didn’t respect somebody,
it was difficult for him to play
along without saying something.”
Nicole Lurie, Coalition for
Epidemic Preparedness Innovations7 JANUARY 2022 • VOL 375 ISSUE 6576 17