2025 in Five Hot Takes

The algorithms that drive traffic on the internet love a hot take so here are five hot takes to sum up 2025. 

1. Maybe veterinarians should be in charge of our healthcare system. 

In February, our dog pulled out of her collar when I was taking her for a quick walk at night and ran directly in front of a car.  I heard two thumps and loud yelp.  When I ran to find her, she was bleeding profusely from her mouth, head, and her front leg hung at a bad angle.  She wasn't moving at all.  The poor woman that hit her was frantically trying to convince me the dog was going to be fine.  Spoiler alert, she was.  I feel bad but I was rude and told her that I couldn't deal with her and the dog and that I needed her to go away so I could get the dog off the road and to the vet. 

I called Leila, while my neighbor comforted the woman, and we loaded the dog onto a sled and took her to the emergency vet clinic.  I crouched in the back and tried to keep Holly - that's the dog's name, still while we drove in case she had a back injury.  I was really scared that this was the end of the puppy.  At end of the summer we took in this dog from Emily and Celia. They found her abandoned as a very small puppy in a Hy-Vee parking lot.  She was an adorable puppy with a ton of energy - but full of worms.  She was way too much dog for their already crowded apartment and busy lives.  This dog quickly decided that I was her person and we have spent hours every day walking off some of that puppy energy.  

The emergency vet clinic for the very reasonable price of $5000 performed two surgeries - one minor one to drain blood from her lungs and abdomen and another to reattach soft tissue of the side of her face back to her skull, multiple x-rays, three overnights in the clinic, anesthesia for setting her broken collar bone and the surgeries,  follow up visits, all of her prescription pain meds, antibiotics, and tranquilizers to keep her calm while she healed, and some free dog food. 

What would the cost have been if a human being in the US had gone to the emergency room for two surgeries, four days in the hospital, medicine, and follow up visits?  If you didn't have insurance? Don't even think about how much that would be.  

The dog has made a full recovery and drags me around the neighborhood multiple times a day. She loves chasing squirrels, deer, and leaves blowing in the wind.  She hasn't learned her lesson though and still wants to chase cars - especially my neighbor's purple pick-up truck, landscaping trucks and trailers, the mailman, and all delivery vans.  

2. Open office plans are a mistake

I had this rather posh corner office on the fourth floor since I moved to St Louis in 2016.  It had a white board, a small table for meetings, and large windows.  I used to write ideas and plans on all of the windows and the white board.  I had shelves of books and a place for my stuff.  

Because my office was assigned to a lab it escaped the open office master plan.  The rest of the offices were remade into huddle rooms and cubicles with no assigned seating.  They put in open areas with couches, long tables, foosball, and ping pong tables. During covid most people were required to work from home, but I didn't love that so I got permission to keep coming to the office.  I started drinking coffee that year and would hang out with the lab workers during my coffee breaks and ate lunch in the cafeteria with money from the Moderna vaccine trials.  I rode my bike to work almost every day and kept my bike in my office.  All the security and building management people knew me by name. It really felt like my home away from home. 

In April, the "back to the office" committee decided that I needed to move out to a different, smaller office, with no windows since they had given up on the open office plan and my team was assigned space in a different building. My new office had no desk, no shelves, or space for my things.  It did have a broken flat-screen TV on the wall next to a large table, six green chairs, and a white board since it had been converted from an office to a huddle room and now was being converted back to an office.  I moved my boxes of books and personal items along the back wall, stashed some of the green chairs in an empty office, and perched my computer on the table. 

The open office experiment has been a complete failure. The office buildings are still mostly empty.  Majority of employees liked working from home and spend most of their days in meetings on Teams/Zoom/etc. anyway and so driving to the office to work in a bland cubicle and shared huddle rooms seemed like a waste of time.  My work was mostly with teams around the world so I didn't need to come in either, but I used to like to.  Work spent significant money remodeling to the open office plan and now doing it all back again. 

Moral of the story - if you want people to come to the office you have to make it a place actual humans want to work.  Open office plans mostly aren't designed for that.  They are ugly and inconvenient and people like/need to have their own space.  

3. Money spent on my daughter's wedding was worth every penny

In July, my oldest daughter Lee and Celia got married.  I had saved money from one of my bonuses in an investment account to pay for the wedding venue, food, and Celia's mom paid for drinks and some other expenses.  Our neighbor was the wedding photographer.  The location was the Stone House - a dedicated wedding venue in St. Charles near us.  It was such an ideal set up - with beautiful facilities for getting ready, an outdoor ceremony, dinner, and dancing.  The owners of the location did so much work to make it a great experience helping with planning, coordination of the ceremony, decoration, set up, clean-up, music, and more.  

My liver doctor in Iowa had deadly pancreatic cancer.  He was a bit like the character from House - caustic wit and and abrasive personality. Most of my appointments he pulled along with him an IV bag connected to a port in his stomach. He told me that he was treating himself with an experimental cancer treatment so that he could make it to his daughter's wedding.  He proudly shared pictures of himself walking her down the aisle and dancing with her at the wedding at our last appointment.  

I didn't understand at the time why this was such a important milestone for him until I walked Lee down the aisle for her to marry Celia and danced with them after the wedding.  What a proud moment.  Leila and I had a very humble wedding and we didn't spend an exorbitant amount on the wedding for Lee and Celia but I get why that was so important for him now.  These moments need to be celebrated.  I may not be Mormon any longer, but there is a holiness that comes from such happy beginnings and I am proud we were able to make it a beautiful and fun time for everyone that could come. 

4. European's have the right idea about summer vacation 

The last few years I have been taking my vacation all at once in the summer.  One year we all went to Europe.  After the wedding I took a couple of weeks off of work and Leila and I went on a sailing cruise in Maine on the windjammer - "Angelique".  The boat is a large sailing boat that sails from Camden, Maine.  Leila found them online after watching some videos on Youtube.  

We flew into Boston, stayed overnight near the airport, and then caught a bus to Camden.  The first day we checked in and dropped our stuff in our small but comfortable cabin, met the crew, and then wandered the town and ate dinner at a restaurant near the water. There are rooms for around 30 passengers.  Our cruise wasn't full.  Many of the other passengers had been before on the same boat. We slept on the boat and helped set sail in the morning.  

Each day we had coffee and breakfast early and then helped put up the sails.  The route changed depending on the tides and weather.  We stopped each night at a protected bay and usually had some time to hike or sightsee at each location.  One night the crew purchased a pile of lobsters from a lobster boat and steamed them in seaweed over a fire on the beach.  I have so many beautiful photographs of the coast of Maine. It was quiet and restful. The captain and crew were great fun.  Food was amazing.  At night we would play music together in the small cabin and then sit on the deck looking at the stars and talking. 

 I highly recommend booking a vacation with them. 

When I got back to work after almost 4 weeks of vacation, everyone commented on how rested and relaxed I was.  I felt so much better.  I had been stressed and frustrated with work. I am not sure it matters where to go or what you do, but the luxury of taking a big block of time is something we should all get.  In EU and in NZ/Australia this is expected.  In the US, such vacation time is rare.  I think it has made me a better employee and a happier person than slogging through the year with no breaks. 

5. The future is Africa

I shared this photo over Instagram and internally at Bayer to leadership and HR when I decided to change jobs in November. It shows the contradiction, optimism and opportunity that I felt when I was in Africa. I have been to Africa three or four times over the last few years visiting Nigeria, Kenya, and Botswana.  I took this photo of a small pride of lions after they caught a zebra just off the road in the wildlife reserve close to Nairobi, Kenya.  Our guide parked the truck just feet from them while they ate and the sun set on the city behind them. Nairobi was so different than I had imagined. The city feels vibrant and growing. The tourism business helps to keep some space for the wild parts of Africa so close to the huge and modern city.  

In June there was an opening at Gates foundation to be a program officer on the Ag development team and I decided to apply.  It took a few months for interviews and a month or two to get an offer, but I decided to leave my job at Bayer and move to the Gates Foundation in late November.  I had worked with them - reviewing grants and as a consultant for some of their plant breeding projects that they funded over the last 5 years and have been fascinated with the projects they have funded since I started in plant breeding.  

The inception of my career started when I was a Mormon missionary in Nicaragua.  I have always liked plants and biology but wasn't sure what to do with that.  I was on a bus one day near the end of my mission and talking to the man next to me about rice farming.  He was lamenting that the rice he wanted to eat was not profitable for him to grow in Nicaragua.  Instead they imported long grain rice from the United States or Columbia and exported a short grain rice that yielded well in Nicaragua to the US.  He wondered how you could make the grain he wanted grow well where he farmed. When I returned home and took a genetics class I realized that this was actually possible and was excited to find out this was an actual job - plant breeding and genetics became my major and set me on the career path I am still on. 

When I was in graduate school, Norman Borlaug was still faculty at Texas A&M University.  He gave these rambling seminars where he told stories about his life - in Mexico developing green revolution varieties of wheat and rice, in Africa about farm to market roads and the importance of fertilizer and soil health, in India developing mechanization and tractors for small farms and global policy and agriculture development.  They say you shouldn't meet your heroes, but Norman Borlaug lived up to the myth that has grown around him.  I wanted to be like him and be part of the next green revolution.   

I graduated and took a job with Ag Alumni - a small non-profit foundation and hybrid seed company that was part of Purdue University, breeding popcorn mostly for South America and then joined Monsanto.  At Monsanto I worked on improvements to plant breeding methods in the discovery teams for the last 16 years.  As part of that job I was able to work on external collaborations including the institutes where Norman Borlaug worked - CIMMYT, IITA, IRRI, etc.  I have always wanted to go back to the kind of projects that idealistic graduate student me dreamed of working on.  

On paper I had stepped away from the type of job I imagined at the beginning of my career.  Monsanto and Bayer let me reinvent myself multiple times and write my own job description as I changed roles and projects, but it was a large corporate seed company. I haven't been back to develop the rice hybrids that the farmer in Nicaragua wanted. 

This is a slide that Bayer HR used to explain their new paradigm for career development.  Bayer has continued to evolve the structure and teams with "Dynamic Shared Ownership." There are a bunch of interviews from the Bayer CEO and leadership touting this as the future org innovation that will make it great again.  Ask me off-line and I will tell you my full opinion about this org change. It makes the traditional career path increasingly difficult with fewer leadership roles and layers.  It reinforced to me that maybe I needed to make a change in my career. It was a hard decision because I loved the projects I worked on at Bayer, the people on my teams, and the collaborations I was able to set up, but it felt like time to step away from my more linear traditional career to a Non-linear "squiggly" career. My mentors and leadership at Bayer were supportive of the change. I decided to take the offer. 

So in late November I packed up my office and flew to Seattle for onboarding in my new role as a program officer at Gates Foundation.  My job there will be to set up projects to help deploy gene editing as a breeding and improvement tool and to enable development of improved hybrids for Africa and Asia. So far it looks like it will be a great job.  More travel than I really would like, but will work from home most of the time.  

This I hope is a chance to build on both the optimism and inspiration of the beginning of my career and the technical, leadership and project management skills that I developed at Monsanto/Bayer to make a big impact on the world.  It also is a chance to help build the future that I think shows in the picture of those lions at sunset.  Africa is huge with so many diverse countries, people, languages, environments - big problems and potential.  I have felt each time that I have been there that it is up to that challenge.  It is where the future growth will be if it is given a fair chance. 

Stay tuned for more details in 2026.