What Can You Do To Actively Fight Covid?

We had a conversation with Chiara Chianese, founder and CEO of FertiLife. Someone told her: “you need to stop being the sweet girl who wants to change the world; nobody invests in that.” She took the advice and is changing the world, now from a business.

(This article highlights some of the ideas from the conversation in Spanish we had for the podcast A Moment With.)

She has an impressive curriculum, but the first thing she mentions to define her is that she loves to learn, never stop learning. With a Ph. D. in male infertility genomics, she has worked in major hospitals researching about cancer. But after ten years, she wanted to try a new path, feeling appealed by the business side of research, and that’s why she ended up doing an MBA in Barcelona and entering the startup world. She founded and is developing a new venture linking AI and infertility.

Born and raised in the chaos of a city like Naples, she made in the scientific world by discovering that although hard work is needed, luck, chance, and mistakes also lead to breakthrough achievements.

Chiara is a natural optimist, and that’s why she thinks science will have a crucial role in helping the development of the human race. However, we should give more space and resources to sciences not only when we are under pressure of situations like covid-19, but as a general rule. We need to involve science, and scientific community, into government decision-making, economic policies. Seriously.

Real attention to science and its potential

We need to turn the current pressure into higher consideration for science.

We have a problem as humans because we’re selfish, mean, we want to be the star in every movie. Did we learn anything from the situation of the pandemic? Will we move resources from wars to research? Will we change regulation and cut the red tape to channel investment to science quicker and better? Some preliminary results are showing positive signs, but many big changes still must be implemented. Ethics will get on the way of many of these changes, and that’s why politics have to work a lot on that, together with society. The question is whether we will create higher inequality as we develop unprecedented levels of scientific development. In this sense, governments must work to provide equal opportunities in access to this new world.

A focus into the more promising projects

There are not enough resources for everybody, and scientists are not exceptionally skilled in making things easy. It’s almost impossible for ordinary people to understand science, and it’s getting even more difficult as it gets more and more complex. Scientists could spend their whole lives reading thick and confusing articles and getting even more confused about their own discipline. Let alone a politician.

But we need to focus. In this increasingly complex mess, we have to pick up the projects that show the highest potential, the highest impact, the best results. How do we funnel the massive amount of current science into a tangible achievement for our reality? We could pick up three main elements to feed our decision-making process:

1. Challenges: we have issues that are more urgent than others, like climate change, or pandemics, of energy, or scarcity of natural resources, or extreme poverty, or the aging population. We can use these fields to drive our decisions and focus on what’s more important in our current world.
2. Artificial intelligence can help us use it more intensively to be much more efficient, quick, and impactful. Let’s allow AI to assist us as one more player in the game. Let’s overcome the fear and trust it, cooperate to build a better world. Could we do an AI fast-reader for all the literature related to a specific tumor or disease in every language of the world?
3. Economic and political priorities. Every country could choose a different focus to grow a more significant impact on its research investment: renewable energy? Health? Greenhouse effect? Living conditions? Metropolises and cities?

And finally, what can I do to be a true protagonist of these changes?

Science is not only techniques, methods because the main focus must always be the final user of those discoveries. How can I help as a citizen? Many projects are becoming more open to feedback from potential users. As a patient, you can be part of new platforms, and share your experiences when having a treatment, when taking a medicine, when going through a recovery process. Science doesn’t know about many things that are obvious to us. Again, technology is becoming of much help. It could channel all this knowledge from “normal people” into the scientists and companies that are pursuing developments and solutions.

So science is not only for scientists. Now we know that everyone should get involved: governments, societies, individuals, companies. All of us can, and should, play a role and be part of the solutions.