4 ms·

COVID is an accelerator, not an innovator Travel is the big unraveling. Tourism has ballooned since 2000 but it was no longer tourism: how many tourists even t

COVID is an accelerator, not an innovator Travel is the big unraveling. Tourism has ballooned since 2000 but it was no longer tourism: how many tourists even talk to locals anymore? Look at Youtube travelogues - how often do you see locals? Tourism degenerated to fodder for the social media/instagram economy and every holiday is the same packaged experience , just different background. That makes it easy to virtualize. It's also fueled by high density urbanization, tiny living spaces in insufferable cities (urbanites travel more). There are entire countries and world regions that rely on tourism, and for them this is going to be the most consequential long-lasting change (also for environmental reasons). In person entertainment, privacy, work from home, remote schooling, all these have been slowly eating the world. There s another one: Biotech. We are now testing things like mRNA drugs and antibody therapies at an unprecedented pace. If one of them proves safe, biomedicine will be next to eat the world. This is not happening at the national level, it's happening at the individual / company level and people are noticing. The overfunded US and China army can't do nothing for the pandemic or the climate, and govt agencies across the world have proven unreliable. The pandemic has been a shitshow for politics / governments and a boon for private initiative, and people are noticing.

rado 6y ago
Yes, Biotech will rule this century.
CalRobert 6y ago
", tiny living spaces in insufferable cities (urbanites travel more). " Whether urban living is preferable is subjective, but urbanites also tend to be richer and have easier access to airports (and trains and buses).
DrAwdeOccarim 6y ago
Completely agree. Imagine if an mRNA vaccine hits? Every government in the world will be clambering to start their own vaccine defence arm for national security. The technology is so attainable for so cheap, it's going to flip the infections disease paradigm. No longer will we be lamenting so much about the end of antibiotics, we will be lamenting about computational screens for neutralizing targets of surface antigens coming up short. Do you want to put your tech abilities toward this problem? Learn about genomics, structural biochemistry, and genetic alignments. So you have a positive clinical hit for an antigen against some organism? What other organism has a homologous gene? Do you need to try and fold the new one to see if the antigen you hit is still solvent exposed? Join-up with David Baker, or any computational structure prediction group. D.E. Shaw will be a big funder of this stuff. Gates foundation. The golden age of biotech is coming, learn the tools today. Just look at the biotech IPO market this year alone.
- ignoramous 6y ago
  Thanks. Any books, blogs, Twitter accounts you'd recommend?
  - DrAwdeOccarim 6y ago
    Thanks for the reply, it made me think about the book idea. The topic is still too new for a book, but it's a good idea; maybe more of a treatise needs to be written on the subject right now. Regardless, the parents of modern mRNA vaccinology are Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman. If you want to go down the rabbit hole, follow his publications. Here are a couple good reviews to get you started (https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd.2017.243 https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd.2017.243 and https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.3812 https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.3812). I say modern, because the idea of using modified chemistry is likely going to be key to a successful mRNA vaccine. Without it, the immunogenicty leads to safety concerns and a reduction in transcript expression--it's just too hot. CureVac founder and arguably the first person to really drive the idea of an mRNA vaccine into the clinic is Ingmar Hoerr, but his company started before the idea of modified chemistry. He is a fantastic scientist, but ultimately CureVac came too soon and has triple-downed on canonical uridine. Another issue is they likely can't get FTO so they don't really have a choice. As for blogs/twitter accounts, none of the mRNA people are active on social media likely because the stakes are just too high right now. If you're interested in mRNA beyond vaccines, check out Sek Kathiresan on twitter. He's active. He's the CEO of Verve. Worst kept secret of the gene editing (e.g., CRISPR) world is that everyone is pivoting to using mRNA for expression of the editing enzymes (e.g., CAS9, ADAR, APOBECs).
iagooar 6y ago
> There are entire countries and world regions that rely on tourism, and for them this is going to be the most consequential long-lasting change (also for environmental reasons). I don't see how people stop traveling once Covid is gone (or at least reduced to a regular flu level of danger). Why would people ever prefer not to travel? I agree that some paranoid people won't travel until 5 years after the pandemic, but the vast majority of people will do.
- buboard 6y ago
  tourism is one part of traveling. people from highly urbanized areas tend to travel long distances more (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aac9d2 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aac9d2) . If this density drops (due to convenient remote work) tourish would drop as well
  - gspr 6y ago
    > If this density drops (due to convenient remote work) tourish would drop as well I've never understood this one. Do people really think that work is the only big reason people flock to cities?
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  Some people would definitely prefer not to travel if their potential destination still had major restrictions on foreigners entering. Forcing arriving travelers to quarantine themselves for two weeks in a hotel would automatically cut out most tourists, because relatively few people have that much holiday and would want to budget for two weeks of accommodation where they can’t go anywhere. Even softer measures like forcing travelers to install the local government’s app like in China might be a turnoff.
gspr 6y ago
> tiny living spaces in insufferable cities Where is this coming from? It may be just anecdotal, but "availability of relevant work" is only one of many reasons the people I know choose to live in cities.

rado 6y ago

Yes, Biotech will rule this century.

CalRobert 6y ago

", tiny living spaces in insufferable cities (urbanites travel more). " Whether urban living is preferable is subjective, but urbanites also tend to be richer and have easier access to airports (and trains and buses).

DrAwdeOccarim 6y ago

Completely agree. Imagine if an mRNA vaccine hits? Every government in the world will be clambering to start their own vaccine defence arm for national security. The technology is so attainable for so cheap, it's going to flip the infections disease paradigm. No longer will we be lamenting so much about the end of antibiotics, we will be lamenting about computational screens for neutralizing targets of surface antigens coming up short. Do you want to put your tech abilities toward this problem? Learn about genomics, structural biochemistry, and genetic alignments. So you have a positive clinical hit for an antigen against some organism? What other organism has a homologous gene? Do you need to try and fold the new one to see if the antigen you hit is still solvent exposed? Join-up with David Baker, or any computational structure prediction group. D.E. Shaw will be a big funder of this stuff. Gates foundation. The golden age of biotech is coming, learn the tools today. Just look at the biotech IPO market this year alone.

ignoramous 6y ago
Thanks. Any books, blogs, Twitter accounts you'd recommend?
- DrAwdeOccarim 6y ago
  Thanks for the reply, it made me think about the book idea. The topic is still too new for a book, but it's a good idea; maybe more of a treatise needs to be written on the subject right now. Regardless, the parents of modern mRNA vaccinology are Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman. If you want to go down the rabbit hole, follow his publications. Here are a couple good reviews to get you started (https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd.2017.243 https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd.2017.243 and https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.3812 https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.3812). I say modern, because the idea of using modified chemistry is likely going to be key to a successful mRNA vaccine. Without it, the immunogenicty leads to safety concerns and a reduction in transcript expression--it's just too hot. CureVac founder and arguably the first person to really drive the idea of an mRNA vaccine into the clinic is Ingmar Hoerr, but his company started before the idea of modified chemistry. He is a fantastic scientist, but ultimately CureVac came too soon and has triple-downed on canonical uridine. Another issue is they likely can't get FTO so they don't really have a choice. As for blogs/twitter accounts, none of the mRNA people are active on social media likely because the stakes are just too high right now. If you're interested in mRNA beyond vaccines, check out Sek Kathiresan on twitter. He's active. He's the CEO of Verve. Worst kept secret of the gene editing (e.g., CRISPR) world is that everyone is pivoting to using mRNA for expression of the editing enzymes (e.g., CAS9, ADAR, APOBECs).

iagooar 6y ago

> There are entire countries and world regions that rely on tourism, and for them this is going to be the most consequential long-lasting change (also for environmental reasons). I don't see how people stop traveling once Covid is gone (or at least reduced to a regular flu level of danger). Why would people ever prefer not to travel? I agree that some paranoid people won't travel until 5 years after the pandemic, but the vast majority of people will do.

buboard 6y ago
tourism is one part of traveling. people from highly urbanized areas tend to travel long distances more (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aac9d2 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aac9d2) . If this density drops (due to convenient remote work) tourish would drop as well
- gspr 6y ago
  > If this density drops (due to convenient remote work) tourish would drop as well I've never understood this one. Do people really think that work is the only big reason people flock to cities?
Mediterraneo10 6y ago
Some people would definitely prefer not to travel if their potential destination still had major restrictions on foreigners entering. Forcing arriving travelers to quarantine themselves for two weeks in a hotel would automatically cut out most tourists, because relatively few people have that much holiday and would want to budget for two weeks of accommodation where they can’t go anywhere. Even softer measures like forcing travelers to install the local government’s app like in China might be a turnoff.

gspr 6y ago

> tiny living spaces in insufferable cities Where is this coming from? It may be just anecdotal, but "availability of relevant work" is only one of many reasons the people I know choose to live in cities.