What are you reading, Mr Nimo?
I spend my days analyzing the proteomic data of tumor microenvironments. Having grown up in Venezuela, I have suffered myself from Dengue and Chikungunya, which affect millions but remain tragically underfunded and understudied. This perspective is what drew me to my latest reading recommendation for you: "Everything is Tuberculosis" by John Green.
For the wet lab users here, our primary encounter with Mycobacterium tuberculosis might be the dreaded cell culture contamination, an annoying setback in the lab. This book powerfully reminds us that every year, for millions around the world, the same name is a terrifying diagnosis that brings with it the fear of death, social exclusion, and righteous anger at our collective failures.
“Everything is Tuberculosis” deliberately sidesteps microbiology. Instead, it explores our societal responses to the disease. For example, its historical shift in perception: once romanticized as a source of tragic inspiration for dying artists and affluent leaders like Simón Bolivar, tuberculosis became a racialized and stigmatized illness of the poor only after Robert Koch identified the bacillus as its cause.
The book's most urgent message, however, concerns the present. It exposes how a treatable disease is still ignored by much of the global north and how corporate greed prevents access to life-saving medicine. It forces us, as scientists focused on discovery, to confront a difficult truth: often the biggest bottleneck to saving a life isn't finding a cure, but affording it.
Germs are apolitical and colorblind, but our response to them is anything but. I was reminded of the realities I witnessed growing up in Venezuela. That the scientific challenge of many diseases is often small compared to the social and economic barriers. And this book reinforces that this is just one part of a larger fight for global health. For diseases like Tuberculosis, Dengue, or Chikungunya, the battle is also won and lost in the arenas of policy, economics, and social justice.
John Green: Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection. Penguin
