5SR - October 31, 2023

Hitha on antibiotics, mentors, and the latest from apple(s)

Author

Hitha Palepu
October 31, 2023

Today’s curator is the founder of #5SmartReads, Hitha Palepu. She’s a consummate multihyphenate - CEO of Rhoshan Pharmaceuticals, author of WE’RE SPEAKING: The Life Lessons of Kamala Harris and How to Pack: Travel Smart for Any Trip, and professional speaker. Hitha is an unabashed fan of Taco Bell, Philadelphia sports teams & F1, romance novels, and is a mediocre crafter. She lives in NYC with her husband and two sons.\

There’s a lot of misinformation about the safety of GMO food. But what we’re not talking about enough is that we cannot afford to feed everyone on this planet without it, both in terms of our population density and the impact of climate change on our crops.

Take apples. Apples traditionally need a temperate climate for normal harvests - the warmer, more humid weather (and labor shortages) have contributed to a decline in apple outputs globally.

But new apple variations - where the trees are smaller and require less pruning, and are thus more resistant to fire blight (a bacterial disease that can destroy apple crops) - are positioned to improve apple output for the climate we have.

Do you have a personal board of advisors?

I can’t remember when I first received this advice, but it has changed the trajectory of my career early on. And I love the tactical, specific tips that Vestiaire’s president, Samina Virk, has about building your own (and so much more about personal development).

I especially love her advice on vision mapping:

“Every year I have a moment where I do a personal whiteboard session. I believe very much in, “If you’re not sure, the best way to define it is to write it down.” Write it down, talk about it, tell people where you want to go, do the work behind it. There’s something about putting it out into the universe that makes it happen.”

I also recommend this episode on cultivating relationships with mentors, advisors, champions, and coaches (and knowing the difference between them all)

Something that keeps me up at night is the lack of investment and development of new antibiotics in a time where antibiotic-resistant infections are on the rise.

But I might be able to sleep a bit easier tonight, given this beautiful merger of cutting edge science and natural history.

César de la Fuente’s lab at the University of Pennsylvania is working on just that. They began by using AI to examine old, fairly ineffective antibiotics and evolve them to be more effective (validated in preclinical studies in mice). They then turned to our earlier ancestors - Neanderthals and Denisovans - to examine their genomic and proteomic data to find peptide sequences that could be good antibiotic candidates.

They’re now studying some of these candidates in in-vivo and in-vitro studies, and it is just so cool.

It’s also helping me sleep better at night (aside the state of the electrical grid, the lack of adequate funding to the ATF, and the general state of the world)

I know spooky season technically ends tonight, but that’s okay because this book isn’t specifically witchy/spooky (though it definitely has those vibes).

It’s got a bit of Outlander (without the time travel, but with the history), a little Indiana Jones, and the trademark Rosie Danan fire that I am a fervent fangirl of.

It’s also got some excellent, obscure Philadelphia references that I always love.

This excerpt is from the beginning of the book and gripped me immediately. I hope you preorder this book (it’s out November 14th) and enjoy every single second of it.

When I get dejected about the lack of federal policy on important issues - like affordable and accessible childcare - I go down a Google rabbit hole to find hope at the local level.

And that’s exactly what I discovered in American Falls, Idaho, with their “read, talk, play” campaign that has informed their entire early childhood program in the town, from the homes to the care centers and schools.

“Allen has led St. John’s Preschool in a church basement for a decade but said she never had a curriculum before, just “pulled stuff off the internet.” Now, with all preschools in town using the same vetted curriculum — a change ushered in by the collaborative — she said her program’s quality has noticeably improved.

So have student outcomes. The school district’s kindergarten readiness scores, which measure early literacy skills, increased from 19.7% proficiency in fall 2019 to 40% this September — a rare story of progress made during the pandemic.”

The data doesn’t live - investments in early childhood education and the care economy produce outsized returns across the board. Programs like these support the case for these programs at the federal level, and we also must continue to push for them at the state level as well.

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