Our friend Atul Butte has died at age 55, a great physician and medical researcher who couldn’t be saved by our most advanced medicines and technology. He was always cheerful and curious.
Of his many online lectures, I think this one captures his spirit and enthusiasm well:
He and I were on opposite sides of the “saliva-soaked face rags for the general public will prevent SARS-CoV-2 transmission” debate, but it didn’t affect our friendship. Humans, even MD/PhDs, are social animals and it would have been tough for someone in the San Francisco Bay Area to take the “viruses are smarter than humans” position. Atul emphasized persuasion rather than coercion with respect to masks, unusual for an academic and doubly unusual for a University of California academic. (He did advocate coerced COVID vaccination, though, via employer mandates, and then COVID turned out not to be relevant to his own health and longevity.)
This is a sad loss for those of us who worked with Atul in the Boston area and, I’m sure, for the many younger researchers and docs whom he inspired. Also, on this Father’s Day, a terrible loss for his child. To channel Atul’s spirit, though, I guess we can be more optimistic about the future of medicine because of the techniques that Atul developed and taught to others. I’ll try to remember him every time I hear about a medical insight that came out of looking at a big data set.
From Atul’s PhD advisor:
Became disallusioned with the state of bioinformatics, reconstituting past wet lab work the same way the modern economy is based on reconstituting past creative work. Biology should be seeking a grand simulation from physics principles.
I’m sorry for your loss. An interesting essay by Francis Fukuyama against longevity:
https://www.persuasion.community/p/against-life-extension
tl;dr: the older we get, the more hard-headed we become. It is the young who innovate and adapt.
Technically this is called “wisdom”.