No one is more heroic than the healthcare workers and those on the frontlines treating the sick. But there’s also a role for others, particularly those in positions of privilege, to play in this crisis. As I’ve worked to make my own contributions, I’ve crossed paths with many different people and organizations offering their skills, expertise, and resources to get aid to essential workers and the sick. I created this podcast to share these inspiring stories in real-time, but also as a call to action. If you think you can help, do. If you want to help but don’t know how, the people in these episodes will guide you towards ways to get started. They’re helping to lead us through and eventually out of the crisis and offering tools for joining the effort.
No one is more heroic than the healthcare workers and those on the frontlines treating the sick. But there’s also a role for others, particularly those in positions of privilege, to play in this crisis. As I’ve worked to make my own contributions, I’ve crossed paths with many different people and organizations offering their skills, expertise, and resources to get aid to essential workers and the sick. I created this podcast to share these inspiring stories in real-time, but also as a call to action. If you think you can help, do. If you want to help but don’t know how, the people in these episodes will guide you towards ways to get started. They’re helping to lead us through and eventually out of the crisis and offering tools for joining the effort.
Robert Rhinehart is most known for Soylent, a company and product he founded in the search for nutrition supported by science. But, Robert has always been interested in technical underpinnings of biology.
So, after reading a paper about the effect of COVID on the brainstem, Robert jumped into action. He launched the Corona Initiative, a public benefit corporation dedicated to building the tools for research. These tools, such as a psuedovirus, are required for researchers to run experiments and test treatments. In this conversation Robert and I discussed why basic research is underfunded, what we need to accelerate COVID research and the implications this pandemic could have on biotechnology companies going forward.
Some of the resources we discussed are:
https://cdn.elifesciences.org/articles/57309/elife-57309-v3.pdf