A 28-year-old with a newly minted doctorate degree wants to start a company and cure cancer. In that order.
He’s already accomplishing his first goal while other grads are looking for jobs working for other people. Now he wants to develop a blood test that will alert people — perhaps every day — if they’re developing cancer.
Can he turn his company into a biotech player? We’ll be following him for the next few weeks as he tries. The first installment of our “Blood Work” series tells you what he’s up to.
In Other News:
• Local business leaders think Prop. D won’t solve the city’s financial crisis unless it gets some tweaks.
• Does the county have a fire department? This should be a fairly easy question to answer. It isn’t: even county supervisors disagree. We look at how this question has turned into a political football and an issue in this year’s supervisor campaign. The dispute has extra relevance because wildfires are often sparked in the unincorporated backcountry where the county government has special influence.
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• As political attacks go, this one is a haymaker: County supervisor candidate Stephen Whitburn accuses incumbent Ron Roberts of spending 16 years taking “advantage of the taxpayer funded slush fund to curry political favors and in that time he’s given away more than $100 million of our money.” Is he correct? Not exactly. San Diego Fact Check looked at his claim and declares it to be “barely true.“
• After more than two decades of delays, Barrio Logan’s Mercado Project is moving forward thanks to $18 million in state affordable housing tax credits.
• In arts, we talk to a retired scientist who’s created a forum that aims to explore what art and science have in common. He talks about what they share — “Creativity, Elegance and the Sublime” — and tackles the value of having great art in San Diego.
Elsewhere:
• KPBS has this story: “The local Democratic Party is calling out what it says are unethical actions by the local Republican party. The dispute involves money used to register voters.” The GOP says Democrats don’t understand what’s going on.
• A federal appeals court panel has ruled that Kristin Rossum, a county toxicologist accused of poisoning her husband, can pursue overturning her conviction. The U-T says the panel thinks Rossum’s attorneys botched her defense.
• Several years back, I watched local authorities put on a disaster drill, complete with mannequins playing victims of a biological attack. Halfway through, everybody took a break for a leisurely lunch. You know, just like in a real emergency.
Now there’s another disaster drill on the horizon. San Diego State today is simulating the mother of all emergencies: “a large quake off Huntington Beach ruptures three offshore oil platforms, a tsunami washes over the San Onofre nuclear plant, and across Southern California, freeways rip asunder and buildings collapse,” the OC Register says.
The general public can take part through Facebook and Twitter: “The bigger the jam-up, the better, organizers say; the idea is, in part, to test the capacity of social networking systems during a major emergency.” Let’s hope social networks don’t take any long lunches. Or have a technical meltdown like Facebook did yesterday. Otherwise we’ll have the the mother of all fail whales.
• Some of California’s rural state parks are about to run out of toilet paper. (LAT)
• CityBeat wonders why it cost the city $27,766 in its own money — plus $17,306 in donations — to install 15 wooden park benches in Sunset Cliffs. That’s a total of more than $45,000, or $3,219 apiece.
• CityBeat also reports that local labor is sending out a “NASTY” mailer urging voters to not get “Zapf’d” by City Council candidate Lorie Zapf and quoting her anti-gay comments from a few years ago that she’s disowned. The mailer could backfire, though, if more voters sympathize with the comments than are turned off by them.
• The sitcom $#*! My Dad Says is finally on the air, based on the super-popular Twitter feed created by a young San Diego man about the coarsely hilarious things his father likes to say. Critics are not impressed: “Curses, William Shatner’s new CBS show is complete ‘$#*!‘” and “Dear Dad: This show stinks.”
One can only hope the show is wittier than those headlines.
Please contact Randy Dotinga directly at randydotinga@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter: twitter.com/rdotinga.