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If you had asked me in 2019 to predict 2025, I would have failed. Not utterly—a pandemic was inevitable—Asia a likely origin.

But what I would have failed to predict was the devastation of both healthcare and public health. Were there communication errors especially at the launch of the pandemic? Absolutely. (Also predictable. There is actual scientific evidence that messaging is hard at the start of such upheaval.)

Were doctors, nurses, and public health officials prepared for the world to turn on them so completely, to ‘shoot the messenger’ with a certain chilling gusto?

I am one of those messengers. When you are supposed to be the hero comes not just from my story, but the repetition of it hundreds of times, thousands of times, like a terrible bootstrap algorithm that just keeps resampling the horror against a global tapestry—none quite so frayed as the experience in the United States. This is the hero story inverted, reinvented as a B-grade spy flick turned dystopian misadventure.

Luckily for both of us, JR also enjoyed A Fine Mold, a delightful tail about toe fungi on an ogre. With some beautiful pathophysiology. I hope you enjoy my big kid science words as much as I do. (Because plenty of people don’t want to hear another science word for at least a decade, right?)

Please enjoy a couple of spec-science poems in the new issue of Star*Line.

(You at the back, I see you. Don’t you start too.)