Please remember, as you decide how to act in the coming days and weeks: We are not re-opening because we beat the virus. There is not adequate testing. There is no vaccine. There is no demonstrated treatment or cure. From a medical perspective, we are…
I’ll be honest, I don’t want to go back to the “normal” we had in February. I was killing myself with business travel. It was a slow sort of killing … but killing nonetheless. I was on a train most weeks and a plane most…
The thing that really frustrates me about the crises I’ve seen in my life is that, by and large, the financial devastation is 100% avoidable. Absolutely, 100% avoidable. Covid-19 has killed hundreds of thousands of people. That’s real and it’s not up for debate. I…
Getting serious for a moment: It’s time to stop pretending that, if we can only hold out long enough, everything is going to go back to exactly how it was before this pandemic. It is not. Please ignore what our so-called leaders are saying about…
The epidemic has really put a dent in my blogging. I’m amazed at the people who have been able to maintain their usual steady, productive output. For my part, I feel like I’m running on about half my usual emotional / mental capacity. I make…
Once a year, bioinformatics.org gives the “Benjamin Franklin” award to a person whose practice has “advanced open access in data and methods for life sciences.” There’s no cash prize, and the recipient doesn’t even get to give a talk. It usually gets presented in the…
People sometimes ask what motivates me to speak out publicly as an advocate and an ally to women and other underrepresented groups. Sometimes these questions are sincere. Mostly they are not. As I have found my voice on this topic, I have become aware of…
This post summarizes gender representation in the founding, leadership, board, and scientific advisory teams of 162 biotech companies – observed between October and December of 2019. Out of 162 companies listed on the “portfolio” pages of the big three Boston biotech venture firms (Third Rock…
On a whim the other day, I scraped the “portfolio” page on the websites of three of the large venture capital firms in Kendall Square (Atlas Venture, Flagship Pioneering, and Third Rock Ventures) to generate a list of 162 biotech companies. The first thing I…
This is the second in a series of three or four posts. The first one, diverse teams perform better, explored some of the research on the measurable performance advantages that diverse teams have over monocultures. This and future posts will share real world examples about…