From the Editor: January-February 2025From the Editor: January-February 2025

Cheryl Scott, Editor in Chief

When I was supposed to be writing this editorial, I instead was watching the funeral of former US president James Earl Carter of Georgia. The eulogy and speeches by family members and politicians were powerful and moving. The posthumous tribute of Gerald Ford highlighting an unlikely friendship born of rivalry, the inevitable historians’ assessments of a man who sweated the details even to a fault, Joe Biden’s presidential eulogy echoing many previous voices praising Carter’s character and life of service — each one reminded us that after despite recent tribulations, there are ideals worth striving for in a life well lived.

In his efforts toward the nearly complete eradication of guinea worm infection from our species, Jimmy Carter’s legacy bumps up against that of the biopharmaceutical industry. The Carter Center’s work demonstrates the importance of strategies and aspects of treatment that fall outside the realm of medication and vaccination. It serves as a model for addressing other neglected tropical diseases — one that the industry would do well to support — and a reminder that such endeavors are more than simply business models and pathways to profit.

Your companies are founded on science and technology but fueled by the desire to improve and save lives around the world. Each of us contributes to that goal in different degrees. My own role has been miniscule but hopefully positive, just as the one I played in the US space program at the start of my career, providing administrative support to space-and-sea-systems engineers working on the International Space Station in the late 1980s.

In the 2012 film adaptation of The Hobbit, the wizard Gandalf observes: “I have found that it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folks that keep the darkness at bay.” It’s easy to feel inconsequential amid the turmoil and uncertainty of the modern world. I suspect that’s got a lot to do with the perennially low voter turnout in my country. But each of us can give the pendulum of progress an infinitesimal nudge, and it’s up to us whether that is in the right direction or the wrong one.

“But in the end,” said the aptly named Samwise Gamgee in WWI veteran JRR Tolkien’s The Two Towers, “even darkness must pass. A new day will come, and when the sun shines, it’ll shine out the clearer.” He knew that was because people chose to push on rather than give up. “They kept going because they were holding on to something. That there’s some good in this world. . . and it’s worth fighting for.”

Sam was a gardener. He understood the value of planting seeds, nurturing seedlings, and trusting that his efforts will come to fruition at harvest time. Biotechnology is fundamentally no different: In many ways, you’re farming for the future. And just as every cell in a bioreactor contributes to overall culture productivity, so too do we all play our part — in both our jobs and lives. Let Gandalf’s words be my message to you as we begin 2025: “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”