9/19/2022

For the last two years, the Golden Goose Award has been 50% of my day job. The award honors seemingly obscure, “silly” federally-funded research that’s led to major breakthroughs in science. Every year, I’ve gotten to meet a team of incredible awardees, get to know them, and help shape their stories. It’s been a joy.

This year, I worked with a team of scientists from Utah and the Philippines. Impeded by supply chain issues while conducting DNA research in the Philippines, Lourdes Cruz and Baldomero Olivera began examining cone snails, a group of highly venomous sea mollusks which happened to be in abundant supply along the country’s coastal waters. Several decades and countless airline miles later, and with the help of then-undergraduate students Craig Clark and Michael McIntosh, the team would go on to discover the raw material for a non-opioid pain reliever and a powerful new tool for studying the central nervous system, all hidden in the cone snail’s potent venom. You can read the rest of the story (it’s a good one!) here.

Another exciting Golden Goose-related update: I took one more step in my very slow, very passive quest to give up writing forever and become a voiceover STAR by narrating this tribute video for Rep. Jim Cooper, a Congressman from Tennessee who came up with the idea for the award and who is being forced into retirement this year due to horrifically cynical gerrymandering and voter suppression 🙃