January 1, 2026
This one is personal. Very personal. I rarely talk about our grandkids (there are three) but every now and then, something comes up that catches my fancy.
Five years ago, at age 11, our granddaughter Lila Theodore wrote the following essay for class where she was asked to “reflect on a time when you were intellectually challenged, inspired, or took an intellectual risk – inside or outside the classroom. How has that experience shaped you?”
Her essay follows:
“Do you want to co-author a book?” my grandpa asked.
On a sunny June afternoon during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was lounging on my grandparents’ red brick patio. We had just finished a meal, our weekly pandemic tradition. My grandfather had retired from his job as a professor many years ago, but instead of fully retiring, he continued writing books on topics that he is interested in (although not always an expert), which range from chemical engineering to basketball. He had grown interested in infectious diseases and wanted to put together a reference guide on pharmaceutical companies.
I said yes to co-authoring this book without fully realizing how much of an intellectual challenge I had just taken on. This was something outside of my comfort zone, especially since I had never done research on that scale, and I was only eleven years old. It was intimidating that my writing would be published and distributed, especially on a topic that I knew little to nothing about. I also wondered if I really wanted to spend a good chunk of my summer researching the very thing that was making my life miserable: infectious diseases! Still, it was an amazing opportunity. I was in the midst of a quarantine, but there wasn’t much else to do. So, I accepted.
While I had always enjoyed writing, this was a major new challenge: there was a huge amount of work, there were hard deadlines, and in the end my work would be published. The thought of anybody being able to read this book with my writing in it was a bit scary. My part of the book was to research pharmaceutical companies and write short company profiles. At first this research seemed a little bit boring, and after my first few pharmaceutical companies, I wondered how I would get through the dreadfully long list.
After I had gotten into the flow of it, though, I started to enjoy it. In the beginning I thought of pharmaceutical companies as being these abstract anonymous things, and I knew my audience might think that way as well. As I worked my way through the list, I became interested in all of the individual stories of people who did research, invested things, started companies, went bankrupt, profited from unethical practices, and so on. I knew that my writing challenge would be to make my readers aware of the fascinating and sometimes shocking history of pharmaceutical research.
There was also something empowering about this work: being able to plan out a large project, stretch my writing skills, and making the deadline made me proud, even if I did hit a few bumps along the way. And, it gave me the opportunity to better understand some of the aspects of the disease that seemed to completely dominate my life at the time. The risk I took when I was eleven years old helped me become a better much more organized and responsible researcher and writer.
*****
NOTE: The book “Virus Contacts: Agencies and Organizations” was published by Amazon. It serves as a research guide for the practitioner and traveler.
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