Monday, August 8, 2022

Another reason not to work in Indiana

Smithsonian Institution
     Congratulations! After years of gerbil-on-a-wheel effort at the Feinberg School of Medicine, you’ll be getting your degree in pharmacology this spring. The world is your oyster.
     But where to scale Mount Pharma? You could stay close to home and go to work for AbbVie or plunge into the sizzling hot San Francisco biotech scene. But you’ve already been in Chicago — well, titrating urine in windowless labs in Chicago anyway — for seven years. And the cost of living is so high in the City by the Bay. You’ll end up in Oakland if you’re not careful.
     Eli Lilly looks intriguing, and your paycheck will certainly stretch further in Indiana — median home values there are 20 percent less than Illinois. Yes, Indianapolis, where Lilly has its headquarters, is not exactly Fun City.
     But isn’t Indiana sinking back into some kind of medieval fiefdom when it comes to women, having enacted a near-total ban on abortion Friday night? The first state legislature to kneecap reproductive rights since Donald Trump’s personal Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade.
     Nobody picks their career path based on convenient abortion access. And with what Lilly pays you — research scientists there can pull down $140,000 or more a year — popping into Illinois to do the deed won’t be more than an expensive annoyance.
     But the ban does set a tone, doesn’t it? Because zealots, like sharks, must move forward or they can’t breathe. Shutting down abortion clinics leads to controlling the ability of women to travel freely, or order certain medicines in the mail or even talk about particular medical options.
     Before long you’re living “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Do you really want to raise your family in the Republic of Gilead?
     What’s amazing is how fast Lilly understood their business model — hire smart people to invent new drugs — is threatened by Indiana telling women to shut up and get back in the kitchen. Hours after Gov. Eric Holcomb signed Senate Bill 1 into law, the 148-year-old company issued a public statement.

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12 comments:

  1. Bravo. Should be required reading for everyone in the country that was a democracy before Donald Trump's pathology was allowed to fester.

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  2. To follow on with more on Indiana in the 1920s, when the Klan ruled the state, there was an actual attempt in the Indiana legislature to change the value of pi from 3.1415 to just 3.
    The Klan goobers actually thought they were smarter than mathematicians & could change the value of the single most famous thing in math!

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    1. Your description of Indiana Ku Kluxers as "goobers" is slightly misleading. That term should be reserved for people born in the South. Given that many Indiana KKK members probably were homegrown Hoosiers, you paint too broad a swath with your barb. It is appropriate, however, to refer to them as Vaseline-haired barn dwellers and fogheaded dungstompers.

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  3. I’ve heard this often: “Shutting down abortion clinics leads to controlling the ability of women to travel freely”. How? I’m confused by the idea that a pregnant woman can somehow be prohibited from traveling to another state for an abortion. How would that work? Are these no-abortion states going to put ankle monitors or implant tracking devices on all pregnant women to keep tabs of their whereabouts, or all woman of childbearing age will need papers to get from one state to another? How can a person’s ability to travel from state to state be restricted? What am I not understanding?

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    1. This might help: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/29/abortion-state-lines/

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    2. Thx. I guess I'm confusing making it a crime and breaking the law and doing it anyway.

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  4. Bravissimo, Mr. S--you knocked it out of the park once again. Indiana has never been anything more to me than a place to be endured and traveled through, as quickly as possible. I fill my stomach and fuel tank there only out of necessity.

    I don't even like paying the tolls in Indiana, but a detour would just mean slower speeds...and more time spent in that benighted state, where Lucas Oil filling stations have huge signs that say LUKE (Bible reference).

    Hell, I don't even want to use Indiana urinals anymore. I'd rather just find a secluded tree...or even a bush. Then I would not only be whizzing IN "West Missitucky"--I'd be (quite literally) whizzing ON it.

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    1. Don't forget, Grizz, that this is minority rule at its worst -- a clear majority of Hoosiers are sensible and support at least a modicum of choice. Don't throw out the bathwater with the baby...or something like that.

      john

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  5. Eli Lilly should open a research center in the old Searle building in Skokie. Illinois probably renovate it for them for free. Chicago has a huge pool of educated talented people to choose from. Illinois probably has more colleges than Indiana and Wisconsin combined. You want a big warehouse with forklift drivers, Wisconsin and Indiana is a fine place, but if it's highly educated people you need, Chicago area is where you'll find it. But trust me, I worked at a company near the border and many people thought big companies are going to move their headquarters out of state for less taxes. I told them deals get done downtown not in a cornfield. They'll never get it.

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    1. During my teens, my buddy was the youngest son of one of the endocrinologists who developed the first birth control pill at G.D. Searle. In 1960, while he and his wife were attending a medical conference in Germany, their bus hit a tree. They were badly injured but survived. Those around them were not as fortunate. Had my buddy's father been sitting one seat closer to the driver, history might have been dramatically different.

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    2. The old Searle Building is now called the Illinois Technology Center. But the small building on Niles Ave. that was the home of Searle Research, where the first birth control pill, Enovid, was developed was torn down.

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