I'll start with some news of the day:
The FDA approved its first Alzheimer's drug to delay dementia.- Aducanumab by Biogen, to be sold as Aduhelm.
- However, it comes with an annual cost of $56,000, plus an additional major diagnostic test expense.
- Of course Biogen stock value shot up.
- More than 6 million Americans have Alzheimer's, with more than a doubling expected by 2050.
- All this after somewhat inconclusive tests about the effectiveness of this drug.
- What this means is that the FDA has effectively concluded that targeting that sticky brain compound, beta-amyloid, is a worthy solution.
- But the cost and lack of convincing data will mean that medical plans and doctors will show huge reluctance to proceed.
My reading of the politics of the Senate and Biden Administration is that the White House has pretty much given up passing liberal and filibuster-killing legislation because of Senator Joe Manchin, who, while a Democrat, barely got elected the last time in West Virginia, a state still controlled by Donald Trump. Democrats will continue to fail with their priorities, but only to make Republicans look bad to the voting public in 2022. What Democrats are satisfied about are a couple of money bills that will sneak through by reconciliation. What is that? Read my posting of 6April2021.
Next month Jeff Bezos will be in the crew on the flight of the New Shepard, a space ship made by his company, Blue Origin.- This will be first time humans will be on board this spacecraft, which will "only" near the edge of space on an 11-minute flight to an elevation of 60 miles.
- There will be room for six.
- With him will be younger brother Mark.
- The other seats will be through bidding, which is now up to $3.2 million.
Just in case the worse happens, get to know people like Andy Jassy (center), who will head Amazon when Bezos resigns on July 5, and, maybe Jeff Wilke (right), who at the age of 53 just resigned from the company.
Every so often I nostalgically reminisce on how I became what I am today. In a dinner discussion this past week, this subject came up on how we ended up at 15 Craigside. It occurred to me that I had not planned my life. I'm living life my way now, but to get here, everything was influenced by circumstances and events that steered me in certain directions.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how I was early in my 14th-year of this daily blog, and how this translates to the real world, for the time from kindergarten to starting college fell in this period. My first big decision was what to do after graduation from high school. Growing up, my gang pretty much all felt that they would be joining the military, and most of them did.
I bypassed that path for two reasons. First, during my sophomore year of high school my family and our neighbors were booted out of Kakaako (that blue portion is where I lived) to begin the process of making what is the Ward Complex is today.
Second, my older brother was exceptional in many ways. First, he was into music, played the ukulele and when he and his wife moved to Southern California, they started their own hula halau. Somehow he had escaped the traditional path, and when I was starting McKinley High School he was a graduate student in Civil Engineering at the University of Michigan. So I applied to that school, intending to stay with him. However, he moved to California when I was a junior in high school, so I added CalTech and Stanford to my list. I did move in with them my first summer after leaving Honolulu when they lived in Oxnard.
The story of how an average student got into CalTech and Stanford has been told throughout the 14 years of this blog, but I never did write about why I ended up at Stanford. Why those two schools was that the closest university to Oxnard is UCLA, but for reasons that seems foolish today, I didn't think it was good enough academically, and the best was the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Stanford also looked pretty good. How in the world I thought I could get accepted, then afford either one, had to be a grand personal delusion. But maybe it was my brother, Stan, who served as the inspiration, and I wanted to do better than him, for he was planning on continuing on to a higher degree at UCLA.
Incidentally, as I worked three summers at the Naval Civil Engineering Laboratory (NCEL) at Port Hueneme, I know what he did, which was measure the creep in marine concrete structures. He also now and then came back home during the 70's to climb two antenna in Lualualei, both around 1500 feet high. How those had to do with structures alludes me, but I think he was on some secret messaging projects of the Navy. In any case, I thought in the 60's he had the most boring job in the world, so I went into chemical engineering. Later in life I was at dinner with five eminent Japanese engineering professors in Tokyo when someone asked me about my brother Stan. One of them, who was a dean at Tokai University, remarked that Stan was the foremost marine structural engineer in the world. I was stunned that you could get famous in such a prosaic way. I began to appreciate my brother a lot more after that meal.
Back to my story, I chose Stanford because CalTech only provided a pittance of a scholarship, while Stanford waived tuition, paid for room and board, and even gave me a 10-hour/week part-time job working M-F from 7-9PM in the Rare Book Room of the library. Only later did I realize the wisdom of this gift, for no one comes into that room at night, and I could study for two hours.
A friend of mine at NCEL was going on to CalTech. He was much smarter than I was, but when we compared notes the second summer, he said he studied really hard and could only get C's and D's. I would have done worse if I went there. At Stanford, they wanted you to expand your mind, so encouraged things like my taking more art courses than those in my major field. I don't know anyone who flunked out.
When I was approaching graduation, I seriously gave thought to going to art school at Sophia University in Tokyo. However, here is how another external influence shaped me. President John F. Kennedy in my junior year announced his intention to create a Peace Corps. At least six of my closest classmates chose to get paid $90/month to compete for some two-year assignment in places like Africa and the Philippines. Well, my conscience was such that I couldn't comfortably find a $1000/month engineering position on the mainland, so I instead sacrificed by returning to Hawaii to work for C. Brewer at Naalehu for $500/month so that I could save the sugar industry. I felt compelled to serve some humanitarian purpose. I did meet someone who became my wife, a nurse in the neighboring town of Pahala. I also had a job in biomass engineering, which was a good start to my later research focus on renewable energy at the University of Hawaii.
When one gets really old, mobility becomes an issue, and Japan seems to be recognizing this need:
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