I went and saw Bohemian Rhapsody, and left the movie thinking about risk-taking and risk mitigation, because I am a giant nerd.

The movie also took me back to the time before we had any effective HIV treatments. The AIDS epidemic was at its peak in my teenage and early adult years. I am not a member of any of the groups who were most affected by the epidemic. It was the back drop of my growing up, but I didn't really understand the full horror of what was happening until later. I was in graduate school when HIV protease inhibitors became available, and death rates started to really fall. I still consider the discovery of HIV protease inhibitors one of the greatest drug discovery success stories of my lifetime. I think the difficulty of that achievement isn't fully appreciated outside of drug discovery circles. I am not at all the right person to tell that story, and I wish I could find a history written by someone who was involved in the work.

The pharmaceutical industry gets a fair amount of grief these days, some of it I think is deserved, some maybe less so. But effective treatments for AIDS and the huge increase in survival rates for most pediatric cancers are two genuine successes of the industry in my lifetime. I know that there are many, many dedicated scientists in pharma and biotech working to make more success stories, too.

I have nothing new to link to this month.... Except to say that I had two children's books come out! That is a very different type of writing than what I usually share here, but if you're interested:

If you are a woman navigating how to be an effective leader, this HBR article has some good information. 

This HBR career planning article has some good ideas, too.

Derek Lowe has a good write up about the scientific reaction to the news of the babies born after having CRISPR performed in embryo.

And this is just a fun use of data crunching: The repetitiveness of hit songs.

That's all I have this month! See you in January.