Great story and glad about the positive outcome. But also highlights the benefits of being well connected. Doubtful a couple in a similar situation that were not a professor and associate dean at a well known university could've obtained the same outcome.
Yes, I had the same reaction. Altogether it's inspiring and I'm happy to see novel treatments like it when antibacterial therapies are desperately needed. At the same time seeing these inequities in the system was disturbing to me.
It's not only the special privileges the couple enjoyed -- how they received the treatment and another did not -- it's also how generating some sort of enthusiasm about a research area can require this kind of private string pulling. If one of those researchers had submitted a research grant on phage therapy would it have been approved?
I liked the article and am not meaning this as a criticism of it, the couple, the people involved, or the therapy. It's just revealing of structural problems in academics, health care, and society.
> Legal staff at Texas A&M expressed concern about future lawsuits. "I remember the lawyer saying to me, 'Let me see if I get this straight. You want to send unapproved viruses from this lab to be injected into a person who will probably die.' And I said, "Yeah, that's about it,'" Young said.
>"But Stephanie literally had speed dial numbers for the chancellor and all the people involved in human experimentation at UC San Diego. After she calls them, they basically called their counterparts at A&M, and suddenly they all began to work together," Young added.
>"It was like the parting of the Red Sea -- all the paperwork and hesitation disappeared."
