Hi Emmannaemeka,
Thanks for writing this, and sorry to hear that has been your experience so far. I don’t work in anything related to biology so I don’t think I can offer any solutions, unfortunately. The only thing that comes to mind, other than bio security, is that fermentation is one area that could be useful to produce alternative proteins. Perhaps the Good Food Institute could be a good place to look into.
In any case, I think the EA community should be welcoming to everyone, even if there are no good ways to contribute to most typical EA causes. Again, thanks for writing this.
Thank you for your thoughtful response. I agree that pivoting can be useful, but I also believe that what we’re building at the Center for Phage Biology and Therapeutics has a unique and powerful kind of impact.
I often imagine the scenario of a patient who has run out of antibiotic options and is at the brink of death. In that moment, the clinician, or even the patient’s family, reaches out to us, sends us the bacterial isolate, and within days we are able to identify a matching phage, purify it, and return it for therapeutic use. That is not theoretical impact, it is direct, life-saving intervention.
Beyond that, we are currently working on evaluating our phage-based vaccines. If we succeed, we will have built the capacity to rapidly design vaccines against a wide range of infections. This could mean moving from treating individual patients to preventing outbreaks entirely. To me, that is another dimension of impact that one can achieve within a career.
So while I understand the argument that funding availability can influence career trajectories, I think the deeper question is: should external funding constraints dictate what problems we dedicate our lives to solving? For me, the vision of saving lives through phage therapy and building a platform for rapid vaccine development is too important to abandon, even if it doesn’t fit neatly into current funding prioritie
Hi Emmannaemeka, Thanks for writing this, and sorry to hear that has been your experience so far. I don’t work in anything related to biology so I don’t think I can offer any solutions, unfortunately. The only thing that comes to mind, other than bio security, is that fermentation is one area that could be useful to produce alternative proteins. Perhaps the Good Food Institute could be a good place to look into. In any case, I think the EA community should be welcoming to everyone, even if there are no good ways to contribute to most typical EA causes. Again, thanks for writing this.
Thank you for your thoughtful response. I agree that pivoting can be useful, but I also believe that what we’re building at the Center for Phage Biology and Therapeutics has a unique and powerful kind of impact.
I often imagine the scenario of a patient who has run out of antibiotic options and is at the brink of death. In that moment, the clinician, or even the patient’s family, reaches out to us, sends us the bacterial isolate, and within days we are able to identify a matching phage, purify it, and return it for therapeutic use. That is not theoretical impact, it is direct, life-saving intervention.
Beyond that, we are currently working on evaluating our phage-based vaccines. If we succeed, we will have built the capacity to rapidly design vaccines against a wide range of infections. This could mean moving from treating individual patients to preventing outbreaks entirely. To me, that is another dimension of impact that one can achieve within a career.
So while I understand the argument that funding availability can influence career trajectories, I think the deeper question is: should external funding constraints dictate what problems we dedicate our lives to solving? For me, the vision of saving lives through phage therapy and building a platform for rapid vaccine development is too important to abandon, even if it doesn’t fit neatly into current funding prioritie
This seems awesome. I’m grateful you are working on this.