PANDEMIC PANDEMONIUM… AND MORE TO COME!

Two of my best friends were in the biological sciences in my early years in California. One was a newly minted professor of chemistry at Berkeley, and the other, whom I was always in competition with during my elementary school in Ankara, was working as a post-doctoral research scientist at the University of California, San Francisco medical school. Their sole ambition those days was to write grants, obtain money for their research, and set up their bioscience’s labs. On Saturdays, it was always customary to fire up the grill in the backyard of my house, which I had just bought, make barbeque, open French wines, and shoot the breeze. Seldom had we talked about their grant applications and the outcomes because that was a touchy subject due to the veiled competition between them.

That was until we started hearing about the AIDS epidemic and the rush to find a cure (similar to today’s sense of urgency). All of a sudden, the veil lifted and the NIH (the National Institute of Health), which was the main dispenser of grant money to the pharmaceutical companies and the well-established universities of which my friends belonged, became a source of conversation in our weekly meet-ups with my friends. Sipping wine and munching on the left over from the barbecue, my friends started talking and discussing openly into the early morning hours the various methods, proteins and the biological techniques and mechanics on how the cure could be delivered.

Later in 1986 is when I experienced the first shock to my system and my surroundings. It was the space shuttle Challenger disaster, which was a fatal incident in the United States space program killing all the seven-crew members including a schoolteacher. A defective O-ring that was supposed to seal off the joint, which contained the pressurized burning gas to propel Challenger to the orbit, caused the failure. At the time, I was employed as the plasma etching and metallization section manager of a new startup company called Cypress Semiconductor in the Silicon Valley. I was in charge of both production as well as research and development to advance the semiconductor technology we had at the transistor length of 0.8 micron. Just to give you a reference point… On the average, one strand of your hair is about 40 microns. Today’s transistor length as being manufactured at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company is 30 nanometers…to give you a more shocking reference point, the size of an atom is about 4 nanometers…Moore’s law lives on…in the Far East.

Then it was in 1989 when the San Francisco earthquake took place. I was mourning the passing of my father while sitting in my living room sipping tea when I could see through the window that the lagoon in front of our beautiful house was all of a sudden developing waves out of nowhere, and the lid over my Jacuzzi was lifted with the slushing water in the tub. Within a few seconds, literally, sirens started yelling and the news on the TV switched to the abrupt event happening. By the end of the evening, we learned that the Bay Bridge connecting east bay to the city of San Francisco had collapsed and there were casualties. Cell phones were barely beginning and there was no trace of Twitter or Facebook and the ubiquitous social media per se to disseminate the news.

If you let me go on, because I have had a longer life than you have, there was the 911 debacle in 2001 and its aftermath, which was based on nothing but lies and more lies and still yet to reach, its intended noble objective to bring democracy to the Middle East.

It will not happen despite all the earnest attempts by feeble inept politicians in the west cheered by sycophantic entourage.

Not to veer off from the main theme. The 2008 financial crisis was to be expected in hindsight when the landscaper who cut the grass of my yard in Redwood City, California could actually live in a bigger house than mine some 60 miles away in Modesto, more like a suburb of Sacramento and not San Francisco. He obtained the mortgage on the house approved by an international bank by simply stating his first name only: Jose. Literally. Filling in the top three blanks in an application form for a loan: name, address, occupation…he was undocumented meaning he had no real regular income, he did not pay taxes and did not have a record of him. Period.

But this pandemic is something very different,  it is otherworldly… the depictions of the virus are not as scary as the alien salivating and hissing in the movies but the inner depictions of its damage to the lungs etc. and the suffering of the people are real, not to mention the death rates which we read, see, and hear all day.

Let me get to the real thrust of my thinking…

This is a life changing step function in your lives and things will not be the same as before as we distance ourselves from everything, from the door handle to the next guy who you hope and pray will move to the back seat when you are flying. As soon as we relax the shutdowns, as soon as we get back to the office where there is more people around, the first sign or the sound of a cough or a sneeze will alert us and we will hark back to these days we are experiencing now. Exponential growth will be on our minds as you lift your head and see the Damocles sword ready to descend as you move. Going outside to the restaurant is out of the question…going to the bathroom will be negotiable keeping your distance.

Avianca airlines, an airline I along with many other colleagues have used in the past, has just declared bankruptcy today…this is the oldest airline in the world.

Traveling will only be allowed for the brave hearted and intrepid deal finishers, not dealmakers, and business class will be full, but the economy will be empty with zombies wearing masks and munching on their own brought on-board peanuts.

All in all, I am pessimistic that we will be passing this pandemic as if nothing happened and things will go back to normal and life will not only be good but will prosper. That is what happened in all the previous disasters and why not now? The reason for that is what I said at the beginning, and that is if you have not embraced the high tech and utilize the IT which is enabled by the 20 atoms lined up next to each other forming the transistor, which forms the foundation of the web based communication link to figure out who went where to prevent the spread (as being done now in South Korea), then one can only hope that there will be a vaccine to proactively stop this pandemic.

However, may I remind you that the possibility of finding the vaccine in the short time and dispensing to the entire world population so that life can return to its former dispensation will be slow and expensive if at all. Why do I say that? Because after 40 years, there is still no vaccine for AIDS and close to 40 million people in the world are living with this disease. Life as we knew it will not be the same so get used to it and do not rush to get back to your old habits.