Dr. Andrew Huff

It's my boss, the other executives.

And then it drives more questions.

You know, what are we doing here?

So I sat in more executive meetings.

I learned more.

And I quickly learned that we were sort of functioning as a Beltway Bandit type of operation, meaning that we're trying to get large contracts and grants in our area, which is, in theory, predicting and forecasting infectious diseases.

But really what we were doing was the simplest way of explaining is that we were running around the planet collecting infectious disease samples to build a bank or a library of infectious diseases.

which was...

Odd.

Well, it was odd from the standpoint.

I was still looking at this as a scientist trying to figure out what we were doing.

And there's not a ton of publication value in cataloging infectious diseases.

You can get one simple publication from identifying a newer novel pathogen in a species, but it's sort of a one and done thing.

It doesn't really drive future research.

So if you find you discover something, it's great, you found it, it's a publication, but that's not going to drive your next cycle of funding because typically you want to be very strategic about this.

Well, then if you start to look at the other portfolio of research at Equal Alliance and what some of my peers, other vice presidents in their areas of research, what they're up to and the places where our employees had joint employment or co-employment with.

in the work that they were doing, it became apparently obvious.

We're engaging in gain-of-function research and viral discovery to make new novel pathogens.

And I wanted nothing to do with it.

No, this is, well, it wasn't even LinkedIn.