In a lighthearted skit, onsite employee Leo Gumapas deals with a flat tire during his rush-hour commute, as teleworker Sarah (r) lingers over breakfast at home.

Leo’s workday started badly and only got worse. In a hurry, he left home without breakfast, got a flat in rainy rush-hour traffic on I-270, and was splashed by the NIH shuttle bus while changing the tire. He arrived an hour late to campus only to realize he’d forgotten his ID badge. After going through the visitor center entrance and searching for a parking spot, he was just getting to his desk when his boss dropped by to remark on his tardiness, push for urgent delivery of an assignment and wave off Leo’s application for telework as “a bunch of hooey.”

By day’s end, Leo would have to wrest a meager lunch of crackers from a vending machine, add a face-to-face meeting at an off-campus building to his already full schedule, navigate home through a fluke snowstorm and miss his son’s game-winning soccer goal. Mama said there’d be days like this.
more…

Dr. Paul Offit

In the myth of Sisyphus, our hero is continually frustrated when the boulder he is pushing up the mountainside rolls backward just as he approaches the summit. For veteran vaccine researcher, and now perhaps the nation’s default defender of vaccine use, Dr. Paul Offit, his Sisyphusian effort to place the boulder of vaccine safety and efficacy atop the mountain of evidence is thwarted not by the boulder’s rolling back, but by the mountain gaining a spurious kind of altitude, based largely on guff.

Offit, who is chief of the division of infectious diseases and director, Vaccine Education Center, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Maurice R. Hilleman professor of vaccinology and professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, did not begin his career aiming to be a weightlifter or mythological hero (although he did once yearn to fly like Superman). He spent 25 years studying rotavirus protein structure and function, eventually helping create an effective vaccine that endured a 4-year, $350 million, 72,000-child study conducted in 11 countries.
more…