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Three Fascinating Things About Vaccines
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Three Fascinating Things About Vaccines

The most life-saving invention in medical history

We’re on the cusp of a Covid-19 vaccine rolling out to the public, even if in limited supply at first. As we reflect on how essential this accomplishment will be for the world and how many lives will be saved, consider also the following fascinating and inspiring facts about vaccines.

1. Women and immigrants have played a critical role in the development of vaccines

In a Bloomberg column this week, economist Tyler Cowen drew attention to the critical work done by Dr. Katalin Karikó, who was born in Hungary before she moved to the United States. Her tireless work on mRNA-based vaccination made possible the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine that will be among the very first available. This innovation is partly responsible for the speed at which the researchers moved from design to testing.

Karikó isn’t the only woman or immigrant involved, as Cowen notes. Nor is this pattern uncommon for vaccines in history. Women and immigrants have repeatedly been pivotal to vaccine development. The polio vaccine, for example, would likely have been delayed for years if not for the work of Dr. Isabel Morgan. She led the team that showed how a killed virus, not only a weakened one, could produce an immune response. In fact, historians have argued that Dr. Morgan could have arrived at a vaccine before Jonas Salk had she not left her research to care for her disabled stepson.

2. A malaria vaccine will be historic, and it’s just around the corner.

Malaria currently kills over 400,000 people per year, the majority of them children under 5. Inventing a vaccine requires almost completely new science because the disease is caused by a parasite. Unlike with a virus, getting sick with a parasite often doesn’t grant immunity in the future. This means the basic process of a vaccine needs to work differently. In fact, no parasite vaccine is commercially available today.

The same team at Oxford testing a Covid-19 vaccine is also now entering final human trials for a malaria vaccine. Should they prove successful, it could be ready for full-scale production by 2024. Vaccines for other rampant parasites—like hookworm and schistosomiasis—are also on the horizon.

3. We can’t measure how many lives vaccines have saved, but it’s surely many millions per year.

There is no way to reliably calculate how many lives vaccines have saved, but there is every reason to think that vaccines are the most live-saving invention in medicine, if not in all history. Perhaps only modern sanitation and clean drinking water could take credit for saving more lives.

The smallpox vaccine alone probably prevented a current death rate of five million people per year. We owe a great deal to all who have made vaccines possible and available throughout the world.

Seeing Good at Work

Malaria isn’t defeated yet, but one of the best groups working to prevent it is the Against Malaria Foundation. They provide long-lasting, treated bed nets, which randomized control trials have shown to reduce malaria infections in children.

GiveWell, a sophisticated rater of charity effectiveness, recommends them as a top charity. Just $5 provides a net to a family.

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I hope these weekly messages have been interesting and uplifting. Please consider sharing Good at Work with others.

How Gratitude Helps
Newsletter Past Issues of Good at Work

How Gratitude Helps

Practicing gratitude boosts care for others

Over the last three decades, research into gratitude has established two important insights:

  1. Gratitude is something we can do deliberately; it’s a practice not just a feeling that comes and goes.
  2. The practice of gratitude has clear and direct benefits for a person’s wellbeing. Practicing gratitude directly leads to increased happiness, resilience, and all kinds of other positive outcomes.

Despite all of this, we might be tempted to look cynically at practiced gratitude, especially when we live in a world with too much suffering and injustice. Gratitude can feel like a naive distraction from the difficult work of solving real problems. It also can feel like little more than an expression of privilege that many people do not enjoy.

But more recent research is showing that gratitude makes things better for others, not just for the grateful people.

Gratitude enhances our empathy and compassion

A 2018 study in the Journal of Positive Psychology and Wellbeing evaluated patterns of gratitude, empathy, and compassion in over 200 respondents. The authors found that “those who are more grateful tend to have greater empathy and compassion toward others.” These results reaffirmed previous research showing that gratitude predicts prosocial behavior, forgiveness, a sense of meaning, and empathy.

Expressing gratitude increases helping behavior in others

Adam Grant and Francesca Gino revealed in their 2010 paper that showing gratitude to others—in this case with a thank-you note—increased the likelihood that the recipients would offer help to the person who wrote the note. But even more interesting, it also increased the chances that the recipient would help others as well. These results held up outside of the lab in two different field experiments. People who are thanked are more likely to feel social validation and want to help others in return.

Two practices that help

So how do we make this happen in ourselves and others? Here are two simple, research-backed practices that consistently produce gratitude and its benefits:

  1. Every day, recite three good things you are grateful for. This can be in a moment of meditation or prayer, in a journal, or in conversation with someone else. (I do this as part of a daily journal practice and it works for me.) Even just a few weeks of this practice has repeatedly shown significant results.
  2. Write more thank-you notes. Research has shown that we consistently underestimate the positive benefits that come from expressing gratitude and we overestimate the awkwardness of doing so. And thank-you notes have a measurable benefit to the sender, too, not just the recipient.

So the next time you feel an urge to dismiss gratitude as naive or privileged, remember that it helps you better help others. If you don’t want to practice gratitude for yourself, do it to help someone else.

Seeing Good at Work

This week instead of highlighting an organization, I simply want to draw attention to the good work in the sacrifices so many are making during the Covid-19 pandemic. We owe a deep debt of gratitude to healthcare professionals, researchers, and front-line workers for their tireless efforts.

Photo by Nicholas Bartos on Unsplash

As we head into the holiday season we won’t have the same opportunities to be with our loved ones. But doing our part by following health guidelines is the best way for us to show gratitude to the people that are keeping us alive and well and leading us out of this struggle.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Kidneys for Strangers
Newsletter Past Issues of Good at Work

Kidneys for Strangers

Comparing remarkable generosity with the mundane

I’ve spent the last year recording twelve interviews for a first season of a podcast I’ll be launching. (It’s called Good at Work, just like this newsletter.) One of those interviews is with Dr. Abigail Marsh. She’s a neuroscience and psychology professor at Georgetown University, TED speaker, and author of The Fear Factor. Her research is about the neuroscience of altruism.

Altruism is hard to study. Almost everyone is generous to some degree. How do you identify an altruist and what makes them clearly different from everyone else?

Dr. Marsh and her colleagues had the inspired idea to study people who have donated kidneys to strangers. This is called a non-directed kidney donation, and around 300 Americans do it every year. Dr. Marsh calls these people “extreme altruists.”

I don’t want to revisit her findings here, but I encourage you to watch her TED talk, embedded below. Needless to say, it’s fascinating. But I do want to highlight one important idea. She notes that many of these donors feel like they are no better than their kidney recipients. They don’t see themselves as special compared to others.

Dr. Marsh calls these people “extreme” altruists because of how uncommon it is to make a non-directed kidney donation. But I think that, taken the wrong way, the word “extreme” distracts us from an important truth.

These unique kidney donors give up an organ to a stranger—which is no small thing—but they don’t regularly cook for those kidney recipients. They don’t wake up in the middle of the night to calm them after a nightmare. They don’t invest many thousands of dollars in their welfare over multiple decades. They don’t worry about them constantly.

Parents do all of these things for their children. But the altruism of parenting is not uncommon and therefore not “extreme.” The same goes for the care we give in all of our closest connections. We go to incredible lengths to help the people we love the most. In fact, these relationships involve far more than a kidney, and would include that, too, if the need arose.

Why the difference? Unlike nondirected kidney donors, parents don’t merely think: my kids are the same as me. Instead they think: they are part of me. That formulation—making someone else part of who we are—is the most powerful motive for altruism that we can find. Just look at all that it gets us to do.

The most common and mundane altruism we experience is likely the strongest love out there, and it’s nice to stop and admire it.

Here’s Dr. Marsh’s wonderful TED talk.

Seeing Good at Work

We tend to think of organ donations domestically, but the need spans the globe. Part of the challenge is getting more people to declare themselves as kidney donors for after they’ve died. The MOHAN Foundation has tackled the issue in India with extensive advocacy programs to overcome religious and cultural stigmas against organ donation.

Since 1997, they have built a network of 2.5 million donors, saving 4,500 lives.

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As I mentioned, I am working on a podcast about having a life and career of meaning, virtue, and impact. I don’t have anything to ask now, but when it launches I hope you will be willing to share it with other people. More to come.

Lessons from Chess Masters
Newsletter Past Issues of Good at Work

Lessons from Chess Masters

How far our expertise goes (not very)

I’m fascinated by the game of chess, even if I’m not a good player. It’s immensely complex. A given turn might have up to 218 possible moves down to zero, where the game ends in checkmate or stalemate. This means that the number of possible games in chess—or combinations of different moves—is about 10^123, a number 1 with 123 zeros behind it. Defying intuition, chess has more possible games than there are atoms in the known universe. (There are “only” about 10^80 atoms.)

Players with a Master rating, as defined by the US Chess Federation, have an incredible grasp of this complexity. The famous psychologist Herb Simon found that if you stop a game mid-play, and show the board to an average person for five seconds, they can only remember the positions of about 15% of the pieces. A master can look at the same board for five seconds and remember where 80% of the pieces go. A huge difference thanks to their expertise.

Here’s an example of the kind of board Simon used.

But what if the pieces aren’t positioned as the result of a game? What if they are just randomly placed, in a board like this one?

Amazingly, chess Masters go back to remembering the random-placement board just as poorly as the average person. The reason is because a Master’s expertise comes from practice learning positions that result from a game, not from simply having a good memory. In fact, all expertise follows this pattern.

And expertise, it turns out, has very low portability. Researchers call this transfer. Near transfer works for some kinds of expertise, but far transfer doesn’t even really exist. Science consistently shows that even being extremely good at something doesn’t make you good at very many other things, chess included.

One kind of expertise we all have is in the lives we live. We’re very good at all kinds of things like our work, hobbies, or passions. We know the important people in our lives better than anyone else knows them. All of this makes us unique experts. If someone else showed up to live your day, they would have a very hard time doing it as well as you.

Here’s the other side of that coin: you probably couldn’t live someone else’s life as well as them. Whatever opinion we have of their choices, to some degree we’re trying to get away with far transfer. To use the chess example, their game feels the same because we have the same set of pieces on the same kind of board, but the truth is that their game—with all of its complexity and history—looks very different from our own.

Where we can use our expertise is to empathize in the game itself. We know what it’s like to have a plan fall apart, or to have a move catch us by surprise. We’ve sometimes had to sacrifice a piece to make room for our next move. We can relate to the feeling of winning and of losing. These are experiences we all can share.

Is there someone in your life who needs your empathy more than your expertise?

Seeing Good at Work

It’s Veteran’s Day in the US is this week, and I wanted to highlight a group with a huge positive impact for veterans and their families. Veterans of Foreign Wars provides direct aid, claim assistance, and other support to hundreds of thousands of former service members.

In 2019, the group helped 108,000 veterans submit new benefits claims. Impact Matters estimated that a $40 donation to VFW increases disability benefits to a veteran by $10,000.

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Is there an area of impact that you’d like to see highlighted in a future article? Drop me a message and tell me what you’d like to see.

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