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Source: http://mspmag.com/arts-and-culture/m...ms-last-stand/
Mike Osterholm's Last Stand
Minnesota’s homegrown epidemiologist has spent a lifetime preparing for this pandemic. Can he rise above the chaos to be heard?
by Steve Marsh
July 19, 2020
This spring, like seemingly every other human in the COVID era, Dr. Michael Osterholm, the University of Minnesota’s superstar epidemiologist, decided he needed to improve his livestream backdrop. Maintaining his isolation under the cover of darkness, he went into his office at the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP)—the center he founded in 2001—to borrow a green screen. He needed something that looked better on national media appearances. For several weeks during those early days of the pandemic, he broadcasted from his St. Louis Park home as if he were levitating in front of the 3rd Avenue Bridge with the Minneapolis skyline behind him.
The uncanny valley of the Zoom fa?ade may be an ambiguous look for a scientist, and is even a little weirder when held in relief by Osterholm’s folksy directness, but he’s game to play the part. And technology has its benefits. “I found out if I get up and walk back into the screen behind my computer, I disappear.” This delighted his grandkids. He said they started squealing, “Grandpa! Grandpa! Do it again.”
Osterholm built his career playing a less powerful but more heroic part, as an epidemiological Indiana Jones, logging up to 200,000 airline miles a year for his work, which includes investigating deadly diseases in Minnesota and the rest of the world, trying to share what he had learned as widely as possible. He developed a reputation as a dogged truth teller, to some an alarmist, but clearly a man out to save the world from itself...
Mike Osterholm's Last Stand
Minnesota’s homegrown epidemiologist has spent a lifetime preparing for this pandemic. Can he rise above the chaos to be heard?
by Steve Marsh
July 19, 2020
This spring, like seemingly every other human in the COVID era, Dr. Michael Osterholm, the University of Minnesota’s superstar epidemiologist, decided he needed to improve his livestream backdrop. Maintaining his isolation under the cover of darkness, he went into his office at the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP)—the center he founded in 2001—to borrow a green screen. He needed something that looked better on national media appearances. For several weeks during those early days of the pandemic, he broadcasted from his St. Louis Park home as if he were levitating in front of the 3rd Avenue Bridge with the Minneapolis skyline behind him.
The uncanny valley of the Zoom fa?ade may be an ambiguous look for a scientist, and is even a little weirder when held in relief by Osterholm’s folksy directness, but he’s game to play the part. And technology has its benefits. “I found out if I get up and walk back into the screen behind my computer, I disappear.” This delighted his grandkids. He said they started squealing, “Grandpa! Grandpa! Do it again.”
Osterholm built his career playing a less powerful but more heroic part, as an epidemiological Indiana Jones, logging up to 200,000 airline miles a year for his work, which includes investigating deadly diseases in Minnesota and the rest of the world, trying to share what he had learned as widely as possible. He developed a reputation as a dogged truth teller, to some an alarmist, but clearly a man out to save the world from itself...