#5SmartReads - February 7, 2022

Hitha on copycat vaccines (and why it's good!), Tunde Oyeneyin, and how to be good

South African scientists copy Moderna’s COVID vaccine (Nature)

First and foremost, I understand that overseeing technology transfer to new facilities (basically, manufacturing a drug at a new site) is hard.

I’ll spare you the details, but it requires a number of engineering batches (trial runs) at the new site before you can begin manufacturing the medicines that will end up in arms.

That said, I wish BioNTech, Pfizer, and Moderna were more forthcoming with sharing the technology transfer packages with other manufacturers the way Pfizer was with their antiviral pill, instead of stating they would not enforce patents.

Despite the hurdle of reverse-engineering the mRNA vaccine, Afrigen figured it out. And while there’s a lot of scale up work to do to begin supplying African countries, it’s a really important first step that we need to celebrate.

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How Tunde Oyeneyin Went From ‘Last One Picked’ To Peloton Instructor (ELLE)

Tunde Oyeneyin has made me laugh, cry, and fall off my bike in total physical and emotional exhaustion.

And still I return to her workouts - clipping into the bike, picking up the light weights, and feeling stronger and better every time I work out with her.

Tunde has one of the most inspiring stories that led her to Peloton, and I loved getting to know her better in this interview with ELLE. I value her honesty (dropping a f-bomb at her Peloton audition, how she uses her voice in the hardest moments, and what she really thought of cycling before she clipped in for the first time).

Be sure to pre-order her book! I can’t wait to read it.

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The end of the metaverse hopefully (Garbage Day)

If you’re wondering why I keep pushing my newsletter, it’s because of this.

#5SmartReads may have been born on Instagram Stories, and I’ll continue to sharing them there. And for as much as I still enjoy Instagram, I do not feel the same about Meta and Meta’s leadership (read this book if you haven’t yet).

“Unlike YouTube, which, for all its mistakes over the years, actually seems to be regularly in public conversation with its creators, Facebook, from what I can tell, has pretty much ignored theirs. Their biggest creators, both video creators and native publishers, are not only absent from pretty much all publicity the company does, but the platform’s algorithmic tweaks over the years seem to be actively antagonistic to them, which has, it seems, only made the surviving creators and the content they produce more aggressively shameless.”

I have no desire to be shameless or inflammatory. So it feels like my time is limited on Meta-owned platforms, unless they change (and they show no willingness to).

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Want to be a good person? Stop trying so hard. (The Harvard Gazette)

I’m rewatching The Good Place right now, and have spent more time than I should be on what it means to be good.

I also think a lot about frozen yogurt and if Blake Bortles liked the show. But I digress.

What does it mean to be good, and why is it so hard? Dolly Chugh knows a thing or two about this, and her advice is to focus on being goodish - embrace acknowledging and learning from our mistakes, and embracing being both believers and builders.

I choose to have hope that somehow we, as a society, can remember the many things that unite us and move together as goodish as we can.

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A roadway will charge your EV while you're driving (Axios)

This is so, so, so cool.

The headline basically says it all. But we’ll know how feasible this is when the pilot launches in Detroit next year, and could help scale both the production and demand of electric vehicles in the United States.

Part of me also wonders if the heat generated by electrified roadways will help melt snow and ice, giving them a double-duty effect for colder climates.

I also wonder how this could plug into renewable energy sources that are local to the roadways, minimizing transport and storage needs.

It’s a really cool advancement, and I really hope it’s successful.