Science and the lost genius of Mr. Beng Liu
Twitter time is the opposite of science, but my interest in this story begins with me being startled on Twitter roughly a week ago. In some coronavirus thread on Twitter, I stumbled across a reply which set off alarm bells. I read a post from a young looking man that said something like: I won’t give in, our work is needed by humanity and should not be sold off (hidden / bought / taken?) for the sake of private profit. I don't remember it exactly but it startled, shocked, unnerved me. There was something convicted and intense about it. What is this? I don’t know. I still DON’T KNOW. I cannot find the post. 😞
When I saw the photo of him in the article about the unfortunate death of a scientist at University of Pittsburgh, the face jumped out at me, and for some reason, my mind jumped to that tweet. Was it the same person? I have no idea. The face seemed familiar, but I’m old and not good with faces. All I know is, I am deeply troubled by not knowing. I DO NOT KNOW if the tweet I remember was related at all. So I won’t speculate on his sad death. The true cause of the loss of this clearly brilliant mind may be just as it has been reported, or it may never be known.
But in life, Mr. Beng Liu seemed to be a prolific and brilliant contributor to such an important field. His specialty seems to have been computational modeling applied to biological questions in human health.
In trying to find out more about him, I stumbled across his C.V. in an article about his death and looked into his most recent work. I found an open source / Creative Commons file, published on April 19, 2020. It is AMAZING. He, with colleagues, classified mechanisms of action for over 200 drugs, and were focused on autophagy (the way cells can eat themselves up or clean up hazardous material— which is incidentally probably quite important in cleaning up after a virus is reproducing so fast that your lungs get flooded with the detritus of a war with the immune system). They categorized various drugs based on the activators, inhibitors and dual-modulators that they affect, and predicted promising opportunities for repurposing of existing drugs. The visuals and data are linked or attached to the study. Mr. Beng Liu uploaded the files himself on March 21. Supplemental files are included that tabulate, for example, each signaling pathway, targets, and the drugs that affect it (in Supplement 6).
The models and work done in this paper are beyond my understanding, but even I can see that it is a valuable, intellectually beautiful, organized body of work. Despite the complexity of subject matter, the writing is clear and accessible - kudos to those on the team who wrote and edited. It is a testament to a group of talented scientists collaborating on such important research. I can see where humanity (as well as pharmaceutical companies) might benefit a GREAT DEAL by this work.
What a loss. May your gifts be given to humanity and carry on after you.
