Jacob Trefethen's blog

Subscribe

Latest — Jun 14, 2025

Lenacapavir and Thom Gunn

I assume many people working in medical research fantasise about talking to Saloni Dattani. I assume that because I did, after reading Saloni's writing and listening to her interviews. Now, I thought, there is someone who focuses on issues that matter and pays attention to the details! Someone

More issues

Science writing from the last two years that stuck with me

This list consists of writing that ticked two boxes: 1) did I think about the article again more than a week after reading it?, and 2) was it written for a popular audience? So, academic papers, including review papers, don't count. Books are out too. Blog posts, magazine

A Quantitative Approach to Vaccine Funding

It is always easiest to insult your own work, so let me tell you what's wrong with the piece Rafael Dib and I just published on vaccine R&D. Our analysis is driven by a practical question: how should Open Philanthropy spend money on science if we

Generosity

Why should we have to pay for projects in foreign countries with our tax dollars? Well, we don't have to. It is a decision. At the moment the decision costs $15 per month each, $200 per year. The United States represents around 25% of global GDP, with around

The NIH and NSF

This decade brought two inventions that will prevent a million deaths in America. One came from a German company who partnered with Pfizer to make Comirnaty available nine months into the COVID pandemic, becoming the most used vaccine in the U.S. at its peak (vs Moderna’s and J&

Effective nonprofits

The most striking fact about philanthropy to me is how little money rich people give away. It is well known that we all die, and that leaving overwhelming wealth to your children can make their lives worse not better, so the alternatives don't seem that hard for philanthropy

FDA, ARPA-H, & CDC – policy ideas part 2

CDC 6. Start convening ACIP Work Groups on diseases/infections that have no vaccines, many years ahead of there being particular candidates to assess. Publish the rough parameters under which ACIP would expect to recommend a vaccine rollout. [This whole post is personal, not written as part of my job.

10 U.S. policy ideas for 10 lifesaving technologies

Tom Kalil responded to my first blog post on 10 technologies that won’t exist in 5 years, asking: OK, how do we make them happen? Ashish Jha responded saying we as a society can decide to make new lifesaving technologies, and it’s a policy choice: True We CAN

No more strep throat

I last got strep throat the first month out of lockdown. I had been indoors, in public, and was being punished. It was cruel and unusual to check me just when we were allowed to enter the world again. I went to my doctor with three negative COVID tests to

Conferences are great for scientific entrepreneurs

Scientific conferences are great even if you’re an outsider to the field. That's common advice for students, and there are useful guides written on how to get the most out of conferences you're new to. But I suspect people at all career stages could benefit