At mid-February of this year, I had a meeting with a couple of prominent researchers that I know at Intermountain Healthcare‘s Medical Center in Murray, Utah. For those of you who are not familiar with it, the Murray Medical Center is a 100-acre campus and the heart and soul of one of the nation’s top medical groups. For me, in many ways, it was like coming home. Let me explain.
The Human Impact of Good Augmented Intelligence
Utah has some of the nation’s lowest per capita healthcare costs and it was work done by Intermountain Healthcare and the University of Utah, under the leadership of Homer Warner, that laid the groundwork for this amazing fact. Of course, we’ve done great things since, like all that work on artificial hearts and the Huntsman Cancer Institute, but it was Medical Informatics that set the stage for all these advances. As I pulled into the parking lot at the Murray Medical Center, I thought back on one of my early mentors, Dr. Koler. He had a plan for my life, for me to get a joint Ph.D./M.D. and to work with him to change the world. That said, my grandfather, a prodigy who had received his first patent at 12, advised me to go a different route.
I didn’t take my grandfather’s advice lightly. He was not only a prodigy but also a war hero who had started his service as a Seabee conscripted to help raise the Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor. At the time of his conscription, he’d been working for the US Department of Agriculture moonlighting as a professor at Oregon State University in Corvallis, but most importantly he was one of the nation’s top hands-on experts on pumping technology. Like Dr. Warner and Dr. Koler, my grandfather’s work saved lives. It was so meaningful, that after the war he decided that he’d stay for the rest of his life, helping secure peace and prosperity for the world. He eventually ran the “Can-Do” group at the Navy’s Point Mugu, having over 500 engineers report to him. Early users of computers, his group actually helped shape the development of the entire industry.
The “Can-Do” Group and an Example to Live Up To
My grandfather’s group helped organizations like NASA solve problems that their own engineers and machine shops could not, with the rest of the time doing his day job like building the Pacific Missile Defense Shield, something accomplished under the aegis of what is now the Naval Air Warfare Center, Weapons Division. The whole time, he stayed involved with academia, keeping friends in the top universities in Southern California where he operated an extensive hands-on internship program. He had offices at Pentagon and a few other secure locations, worked with admirals, and consulted with Presidents. More importantly for me, he was the guy who got me started programming and he also got me out of Central Juvenile Hall. There was no one whose opinion I valued more. To this day, this panorama of newspaper articles, pictures, and his first patent (pictured below) is in my office inspiring me to live up to his example.
In the last conversation I had with my grandfather before he died, he suggested that I go to high school and have a more “normal life.” He said I should find my path more gently over time and that it would “emerge” as I followed my passions that would develop over time. I was closer to him than pretty much anyone in the world and he was dying so I took his advice very seriously. Within days I told Dr. Koler I was going to enroll in high school. This was one of the hardest decisions of my life. You see, my family had actually moved to Oregon for me and my mom to go to school in Portland. I was supposed to go to OHSU and my mom went to Lewis & Clark to get an environmental law degree (the top of its type in the nation) and we’d be roommates in Portland. I was slated to be the programmer on a big NIH-funded research project, introducing promising antigen agents past the Blood-brain barrier, so it was a hard decision, but Dr. Koler said he understood and to his credit, he still met with me as I navigated high school and my new direction that emerged in my life. I was thankful for those talks as my grandfather passed away days after I informed Dr. Koler of my decision.
The Road not Taken and COVID-19
Those conversations with Dr. Koler, and the idea of the road not taken, dominated my mind as I pulled into the Intermountain Medical Center in Murray. I was there because of the conversations I’d had with a friend of mine, Lee Hood, about a year ago. Lee is one of the fathers of computational genetics and he had me come out to Seattle and stay with him at his home and then speak to his Institute of Systems Biology about how technological advances in finance could be applied to integrated medicine. Lee’s idea was that we would form a new institute taking the advances we’d made in finance and apply them to healthcare. There were several reasons why Lee’s idea didn’t become a reality but suffice it to say that I wasn’t ready to retire yet and I think I can do more by continuing to push the bounds of domain-specific architectures in my primary field for now and then applying them to medicine later, not unlike what Columbia’s David Shaw is doing now. This said, a friend at Intermountain and I got into a conversation about their relationship with Amgen and computational genetics and I was invited to come and explain some of the same ideas I’d explained to Lee and his staff in Seattle.
As I was reminiscing about Dr. Koler, I walked into the lobby and it was immediately obvious that everything had changed in the world. The previous week, Utah’s Governor Herbert had made an announcement that many viewed as dramatic, with Utah curtailing meetings of over 100 people and all public schools to begin a transition to online work as soon as possible. There are other implications that we’re still trying to figure out, but one thing was obvious in the lobby of Intermountain’s main Medical Center – they were already taking it very seriously. I was met in the lobby by the departmental assistant who refused to shake my hand and used copious hand sanitizer. When we had the meeting I was immediately told that all resources of the group Center were being directed to the COVID-19 issues, which they viewed as an imminent threat. It was surprising and heartening to see it finally be taken seriously as I had in the last six weeks traveled to New York and California and had worn gloves, a mask, and used hand sanitizer and I had people in those places look at me like was Howie Mandel. In short, in my travels, no one was the least concerned.
Neal Stephenson, the Virus, and COVID-19
After the meeting with the researchers in which we agreed to meet up after the issues of COVID-19 had been resolved, I thought about things and reflected on one of my favorite authors, Neal Stephenson. All of my students know him well as I include copious quotes from his books in my lectures. One of the ones that came into my head as I left the Medical Center parking lot was:
“The franchise and the virus work on the same principle; what thrives in one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder – its DNA – xerox it, and embed it in the fertile lining of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a left turn lane…”
The quote is from Snow Crash, Stephenson’s first commercial success. The book is what got me hooked on him because it is about language, in many ways the Perfect Language, and the first computer virus that could be embedded directly into the human brain (kind of like a digital version of what Dr. Koler was trying to do, but in a bad way). I thought that this is what we have here with COVID-19. All those bodies of human beings are the cars, and the planes are the “well-traveled highway, with lots of left-turn lanes.”
At this difficult time, I actually couldn’t be happier to be in Utah, with one of the best medical establishments in the nation and also one of the most secure places, so secure that the NSA located their data analysis center, codenamed Bumblehive, here. That said, while all roads used to lead to Rome, all those highways in the air lead everywhere so I don’t know if any of us are secure from these effects for long, and as a result, we all have to work together. New York is really not that far away, only four hours, and as a virus travels China is not that much further. My step-father was a Sinologist (China expert), a close personal friend with Huang Hua, and he and my mom spent over a decade in Beijing helping found new law and business schools as China opened to the world. In short, one groups’ problem is another’s in this connected world. Neal Stephenson actually has a lot to say about China, or the “Han” as he calls them and I reflected on that and how prescient his ideas seem now.
Ideas from Stephenson about these Uncertain Times
As I reflected on Stephenson, I also reflected on the current state of the ULISSES Project and what could possibly be our future by the time I meet with the Intermountain Healthcare people again. Stephenson is not only possibly the best post-cyberpunk author but he is also regarded by many as one of the best futurists around, having worked with and inspired some of the world’s top tech entrepreneurs (both directly and indirectly). For my money, Stephenson is insightful and amazingly prescient, outpacing people like Kurzweil (who some in Silicon Valley almost revere as a prophet). In consideration of this, I’ve decided that I’m going to start a narrative set of blog entries during the COVID-19 Epidemic that layout the Epic of Modern Finance as it relates directly to the ULISSES Project.
The general format will take inspiration from Stephenson’s masterful Epic The Baroque Cycle, but rearranging it a bit. While the form is from The Baroque Cycle, the inspiration for content comes from Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age, and even some of other works and speeches., My first three entries will be under the rubric of The Silver Age, while the last two will be under The Diamond Age, with an interlude in between of The Golden Age. I can think of nothing better to organize my thoughts in a time that could be leading to a general disruption, something discussed in The Diamond Age.