When asked to defend humanity, author John Green wouldn't show art or technology, but a graph. The 60% decline in child mortality since 1995 proves humanity's capacity for collective action, compassion, and prioritizing the vulnerable, demonstrating our potential for good.

Effective vaccines eradicate the visible horror of diseases. By eliminating the pain and tragic outcomes from public memory, vaccines work against their own acceptance. People cannot fear what they have never seen, leading to complacency and vaccine hesitancy because the terrifying counterfactual is unimaginable.

Unlike a drug that can be synthesized to a chemical standard, most vaccines are living biological products. This means the entire manufacturing process must be perfectly managed and cannot be altered without re-validation. This biological complexity makes production far more difficult and expensive than typical pharmaceuticals.

The most profound innovations in history, like vaccines, PCs, and air travel, distributed value broadly to society rather than being captured by a few corporations. AI could follow this pattern, benefiting the public more than a handful of tech giants, especially with geopolitical pressures forcing commoditization.

CZI focuses on creating new tools for science, a 10-15 year process that's often underfunded. Instead of just giving grants, they build and operate their own institutes, physically co-locating scientists and engineers to accelerate breakthroughs in areas traditional funding misses.

A student project revealed the U.S. government could save $400 million annually on ink by switching from Times New Roman to the more efficient Garamond font. This highlights a powerful principle for large organizations: seemingly trivial operational changes can yield enormous financial benefits.

Selling low-cost vaccines to organizations like Gavi isn't just charity for pharmaceutical companies. It creates massive economies of scale, lowering the cost of goods for their high-margin primary markets and increasing overall net profit, creating a powerful win-win incentive structure.

Diseases like Ebola and malaria, which primarily affect poor countries, lack market incentives for vaccine R&D. The Ebola vaccine only progressed because it was briefly on a U.S. bioterrorism list created after 9/11, highlighting how market failures require creative, sometimes accidental, incentives to overcome.

Unlike labor-dependent services that get more expensive, prescription drugs offer a unique societal ROI because they eventually go generic and become cheaper. This deflationary aspect is a powerful, underappreciated argument for investing in drug development, as successful medicines provide compounding value to society over time.