Jennifer Doudna at work in her lab at UC Berkeley. —Photo by Robert Durell

As word spread around the globe in the early hours of Oct. 7, 2020, that biochemist Jennifer Doudna ’85 had just been awarded a Nobel Prize in chemistry, the honoree herself was sound asleep.

“It’s a little bit embarrassing,” she admitted at a press conference later that morning from the University of California, Berkeley, where she is a professor of biochemistry. Even though—or perhaps because—she had been short-listed for the award by various prognosticators for several years, Doudna hadn’t given the impending announcement so much as a thought when she’d gone to bed that evening. She had even silenced her phone.

“I was awakened just before 3 a.m.,” she added. “My phone was buzzing, and for some reason, it finally woke me up because it turns out it had been buzzing before that, and I hadn’t heard it. But anyway, I picked up the phone and it was Heidi Ledford from Nature magazine, who is a reporter who I know, and she wanted to know if I could comment on the Nobel. And I said, ‘Well, who won it?’”

The answer to that question may have surprised Doudna, but it came as a shock to just about no one else in the world of science. In the eight years since she and her research collaborator, Emmanuelle Charpentier—with whom she shares the 2020 award—first described the gene-editing tool known as CRISPR-Cas9, their discovery has taken the world of biological, agricultural and medical research by storm. It has transformed genome editing from a complex, costly, time-consuming and imprecise endeavor into something that can be done with speed, economy and relative precision in just about any modestly equipped research lab in the world. By giving scientists everywhere—in the words of the Nobel committee—“a tool for rewriting the code of life,” Doudna and Charpentier have unleashed a flood of promising new science in everything from agriculture to cancer research, from faster COVID-19 tests to potential cures for such genetic diseases as sickle cell anemia.

By that day in early October, the two chemists had already received just about every other international science award possible, including the $3 million Breakthrough Prize for Life Sciences, the Canada Gairdner International Award, the Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics, the Princess of Asturias Technical and Scientific Research Award, the Gruber Prize in Genetics, the Tang Prize, the Japan Prize, the NAS Award in Chemical Sciences, the Kavli Prize in Nanoscience, the Harvey Prize in Human Health and the Wolf Prize in Medicine.

The Nobel Prize came as a giant exclamation point on the end of that list, ensuring that the discovery of CRISPR-Cas9 will be remembered as one of the most significant in the history of science.

And if that sounds like hyperbole, check out this statement from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences: “Since Charpentier and Doudna discovered the CRISPR-Cas9 genetic scissors in 2012, their use has exploded. This tool has contributed to many important discoveries in basic research, and plant researchers have been able to develop crops that withstand mould, pests and drought. In medicine, clinical trials of new cancer therapies are underway, and the dream of being able to cure inherited diseases is about to come true. These genetic scissors have taken the life sciences into a new epoch and, in many ways, are bringing the greatest benefit to humankind.”

Jennifer Doudna (right) and Emmanuelle Charpentier receive the Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research from Spain’s King Felipe VI at a ceremony in Oviedo, Spain, in 2015. —AP Photo/Jose Vicente

The Formation of a Nobel Laureate

Growing up on Hawaii’s Big Island, where her father was a professor of English literature at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, Doudna fell in love with nature early on. But hers wasn’t the poetic love of a romantic—it was the analytical love of a budding scientist.

“Father’s big disappointment was I didn’t become a literature guru of some kind,” she said with a laugh. “It’s one of those funny things. It’s just who I am.”

For instance, during the energy crisis of the 1970s, Doudna spent long hours in the school library researching alternative forms of energy, such as geothermal. “I was just always fascinated by science and technology solutions to problems that we face in the world—and never imagined that I would become a scientist until I think I was maybe in 10th grade in high school, when we had a lecture series by people around the state of Hawaii who were professional scientists. A number of really fascinating people came through—marine biologists, volcanologists, astronomers—but the one that really caught my attention was somebody who was working on cancer biology.”

As the researcher talked about her path to becoming a biochemist, Doudna says she felt a light go on. “I thought, ‘That is exactly what I want to do. That sounds so interesting and so fun. I can’t imagine anything more interesting than that.’ That’s why I actually went to Pomona, right? I started thinking, ‘I want to be a biochemist.’ In those days—this is in the late ’70s, I guess, early ’80s, right around 1980—there were not very many undergraduate colleges that had a focus or even a class in biochemistry, much less a major.”

At Pomona, professors like Fred Grieman, who taught the yearlong physical chemistry sequence for seniors, and Sharon Panasenko, who had just been hired to teach biochemistry, would become the first of a series of key mentors who would help shape Doudna’s career. “Mentors are critical,” Doudna told UC Berkeley’s California Magazine. “And fortunately for me, I’ve worked with absolutely outstanding scientists at every stage of my career.”

What set Doudna apart, Grieman recalled, “was her excitement and joy about learning everything.” At times, he said, students can be put off by the challenging nature of chemistry. Not Doudna. “She really enjoyed the rigor and the excitement of learning something that was that difficult—but also something that she could apply later.”

Panasenko—now Sharon Muldoon—has long since retired, but she retains fond memories of Doudna as a junior in her biochemistry class, preparing to enter what was then an intimidatingly male-dominated field. “Most of the students were going to medical school,” she said in a 2017 interview. “Jennifer was one of the few who were interested in a research career, so we talked a lot about it.”Muldoon was so impressed by the young Doudna that she invited her to work in her research lab, studying the bacterial communication systems that permit organisms like Myxococcus xanthus to self-organize into colonial forms. “She really showed a tremendous amount of aptitude and talent for lab work, which certainly helps if you’re going into a research career.”

Doudna remembers being astounded to have been chosen to work in Muldoon’s lab in the first place. “I got this opportunity to work with her over the summer, and really work with her,” she recalled. It wasn’t just that she threw something over the fence and said, ‘Come back in 10 weeks when you’re done.’ It was every day, going in and planning out experiments with her, and it was just the most amazing thing.”

Doudna still cites her Pomona education as a key ingredient in her success. “I am grateful to Pomona every day, honestly,” she said, “because it was a liberal arts education that exposed me to so many ideas that I would never have come in contact with, probably, without having attended Pomona.”

After Pomona, she earned her doctorate at Harvard under the supervision of geneticist Jack Szostak, who later won the Nobel Prize in medicine. It was under his tutelage that she began working with ribonucleic acid (RNA), the biochemical cousin of DNA, which she has continued to study throughout her career. She then did a postgraduate fellowship with another Nobel laureate, chemist Thomas Cech of the University of Colorado, Boulder, and went on to teach at Yale University. In 2002 she returned to California as a professor at UC Berkeley, where she now holds the titles of professor of chemistry, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, and the Li Ka Shing Chancellor’s Chair in Biomedical and Health Sciences.

A former member of the Pomona College Board of Trustees, Doudna has been back to campus many times since graduating. Most notably, she returned in 2009 as the featured speaker for the Robbins Lectureship, which has brought to campus a veritable who’s-who of the world’s preeminent chemists, including a number of Nobel winners. The news that Doudna would be joining that exalted group of laureates—becoming the first graduate of Pomona College ever to receive a Nobel Prize—was met throughout the college community with an outpouring of Sagehen pride.

“Jennifer Doudna’s revolutionary research in gene editing and her thoughtful consideration of its implications hold the potential to change the lives of countless people around the globe,” said Pomona College President G. Gabrielle Starr. “We are so proud that she  received her undergraduate education at Pomona College and that she continues to engage in the life of our community. Her sense of discovery, her commitment to rigorous work and her willingness to reflect on its meaning embody some of the highest values of the College.”

Early on Nov. 7, Jennifer Doudna sits on her patio, taking congratulatory calls. —Photo by Brittany Hosea-Small

The Aha Moment

It’s hard to say where the road to discovery begins, but a conference of the American Society of Microbiology in Puerto Rico in the spring of 2011 is as good a starting point as any. That’s where Doudna, a biochemist specializing in the study of RNA, met Charpentier, a French microbiologist studying how bacteria cause disease.

Both, as it turned out, were intrigued by a type of genetic sequence in bacteria known as CRISPR—which stands for “clustered, regularly interspaced, short palindromic repeat.” These odd DNA sequences play a key role in a bacterium’s first line of defense against viruses by allowing it to recognize and cut up viral DNA. Charpentier had already demonstrated that RNA played a key role in that process, so it made sense for her to ask RNA expert Doudna if she’d like to team up. Doudna, impressed by Charpentier’s passion for her work, immediately said yes.

“We decided there to start working together on one particular element in the CRISPR pathway, a protein called CRISPR-Cas9 that, at the time, was clearly important for protecting bacteria from virus infection, but nobody knew how it worked,” Doudna explained. “And so that was the question we set out to investigate.”

Working with Doudna’s postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley, Martin Jinek, and Charpentier’s research student, Krzys Chylinski, they began to do experiments. One discovery led to another, and Doudna still remembers the aha moment when she realized how important CRISPR-Cas9 could be.

“Martin Jinek in the lab had done experiments showing that not only could we control the DNA sequence where Cas9 would make its cut in the double helix, but also that we could engineer it to be a simpler system than what has been done in nature,” she recalled. “And I think—you know, I remember that moment very, very clearly—that Martin Jinek was in my office, and we were talking about his data. And we looked at each other, and we realized that this could be an extraordinary tool in other kinds of cells because of its ability to trigger DNA repair, and thereby to trigger genome editing. And that really set us on a course that has been just amazing over the last eight years after publishing that original work in 2012.”

That first article, published in the summer of 2012 in the journal Science, one of the world’s foremost scientific publications, exploded onto the scientific scene like a Fourth of July rocket. Within a year and a half, labs around the world had confirmed that CRISPR-Cas9 was a truly revolutionary discovery. As Adam Rogers ’92 wrote in his 2015 article about Doudna and her discovery for PCM, “Not only was CRISPR a quick-and-easy way to edit a genome as easily as Word edits a magazine article, but it worked in just about every living thing—yeast, zebrafish, mice, stem cells, in-vitro tissue cultures and even cells from human beings.”

That’s what you call revolutionary. But as Doudna would soon discover, it can be just as hard to rein in a revolution as it is to start one.

Later that morning, Doudna sits in a studio at UC Berkeley taking Zoom questions from reporters around the world. —Photo by Brittany Hosea-Small

The Accidental Ethicist

It’s easy to see the almost infinite possibilities for important and beneficial science embodied in the CRISPR revolution. The most compelling of these for Doudna is the potential for curing a range of terrible genetic diseases.

“When I was in graduate school in the 1980s, my lab was located at the Massachusetts General Hospital, where a professor named Jim Gusella was mapping the gene that causes Huntington’s disease, which is a terrible neurodegenerative disease that people get usually in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and then they suffer from it for many years with sort of progressive loss of neurological function,” she recalled in an interview for PCM. “And so being aware of that gene-mapping experiment that was done in the ’80s, and then fast-forwarding a couple of decades and realizing that now there was this technology that, in principle, will allow correction of that kind of mutation is really a profound thought.”

However, there’s another side to the CRISPR revolution that Doudna hadn’t anticipated.

Previously, the two preferred techniques for gene editing—“zinc-finger nucleases” and “TALEN”—required the creation of custom-engineered proteins that were challenging to make and difficult to use. Buying one could set you back $25,000. Quite simply, the state of the art acted as a brake on the ambitions of aspiring gene editors everywhere.

Enter CRISPR. Today, a starter kit for using this relatively simple and precise technique costs about $65, plus shipping. Suddenly scientists all over the world have the tools in their hands to rewrite any gene they wish, pretty much at will.

What could possibly go wrong?

“People are people,” Doudna said in a recent interview. “If you have a powerful tool, there is some type of person that wants to use it for whatever—anything, right? Anything that can be done should be done. I think that CRISPR’s been no exception to that. What we’ve seen with CRISPR over the last few years is that there are a couple of things that’ve been done with CRISPR that are clearly, I think, irresponsible and shouldn’t be done. One of them, probably the one that got the most attention, was CRISPR babies.”

What she’s referring to is Chinese researcher He Jiankui’s announcement in 2018 of the birth of twin girls whose genomes he had altered in vitro using CRISPR. This shocking bit of news ratcheted up the ethical debate around the use of CRISPR and, a year later, landed the researcher himself in prison, with a three-year sentence for “illegal medical practices.”

Doudna’s reaction to all of this was clear: “Using CRISPR to change the genetics of human embryos, not for research but for actual implantation and to create a pregnancy—I think that clearly is something that just, at least right now, shouldn’t happen, because the technology isn’t ready, and we’re not ready, right? Society isn’t ready for that.”

But where should the lines be drawn?

Long before He’s ill-fated foray into designer babies, Doudna had decided that her personal responsibility in these matters went far beyond simply publishing her work. “I went from being a biochemist and structural biologist, working in my lab on this esoteric bacterial system, to realizing that I needed to get up to speed quickly on how other kinds of technologies that have been transformative had been managed and handled by the scientists that were involved in their genesis. Because things were moving so quickly that the ethical discussions needed to get going very fast.”

In 2015 Doudna organized a meeting of top biologists to discuss these issues and became the lead author of their report—also published in Science—calling for a moratorium on the use of CRISPR to edit the human genome in heritable ways. Her concerns also helped shape the book she was working on at about the same time. A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution, published in 2017, wasn’t just the story of a groundbreaking discovery and its potential benefits—it was also an exploration of the ethical dilemmas involved in controlling irresponsible use of that breakthrough.

“What I worry about the most,” she explained, “is a rush to apply genome editing in ways that might harm people—because of over-excitement or the desire on the part of a scientist somewhere to do something first. I think that can be a very healthy drive in science, or in anything. In human endeavors, you know, people are competitive, and they want to move ahead with things and move ahead with ideas. I think it can also lead to problems, and in this case, I really hope that there’s a concerted effort globally to restrain ourselves and do things in a measured and thoughtful fashion that doesn’t get ahead of the technology or ahead of the ethical debate.”

Doudna raises a glass of champagne as she celebrates with her research team. —Photo by Brittany Hosea-Small

Of Patents and Pandemics

From the start, one key question has remained unanswered, and even now, eight years later, it still hangs in the legal balance.

Who owns CRISPR?

In a world where seemingly every scientific breakthrough gets monetized, that’s a very important question. Over the past few years, the competition for the legal rights to this revolutionary technology has pitted two main camps against each other in a series of courtroom battles. On one side is a group known as CVC, led by UC Berkeley and based on the work of Doudna and Charpentier. On the other is the Broad Institute at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), based on the work of MIT researcher Feng Zhang, who published his own work on CRISPR seven months after Doudna and Charpentier, but with one key addition—evidence that it could be used to alter genes inside eukaryotic cells, the kind that make up all plants and animals.

Though Doudna and Charpentier were the first to publish about CRISPR-Cas9, Zhang’s team was the first to obtain a patent. Since then, competing claims have been caught up in the byzantine complexities of patent law, as adjudicated by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, which has seemed to try the Solomonic approach, cutting the CRISPR baby in half and granting each side a piece of the action. This has left a rather confusing dividing line between the two claims while leaving the door open to further challenges. As a result, it’s still hard to say exactly who owns what.

In the meantime, startups galore have taken CRISPR and run, doing science that has the potential to improve people’s lives while banking on future profits. Doudna herself is the founder or co-founder of four startups now focusing on areas of research ranging from diagnostic tests to gene therapies. Other firms are trying to use CRISPR to detect genetic mutations, create customized plants and even grow human-compatible organs inside pigs.

So it’s no surprise that CRISPR is already playing an important role in COVID-19 research.

Way back in March, Doudna pivoted in her work to seeking ways to play a constructive role in bringing the pandemic to heel. “When it was clear that we were facing a global emergency with this pandemic back in the early part of this year,” she explained, “many of us asked ourselves, ‘What could or should we be doing to use our own expertise in this time of real need?’”

Her immediate answer was to start a clinical testing lab for the virus through the Innovative Genomics Institute, where she is president and board chair. “We also raised quite a bit of donor support for this,” she noted. “Because of that, we’ve been able to offer this test for free to many people in the East Bay Area of California, where quite frankly, many of those folks don’t have access to health care. They don’t have access to testing. A lot of our partner health care organizations service the unsheltered, the uninsured folks that are first responders, people that work in the California energy sector that are keeping our power plants running, police, firefighters, people working in nursing homes.”

Those tests don’t involve CRISPR, but research on CRISPR-based tests is ongoing. And just two days after the Nobel announcement, a new article in Science revealed that one of Doudna’s research teams has developed far and away the fastest diagnostic test for the novel coronavirus yet. Though this CRISPR-based test is not yet as sensitive as tests that take a day or more to process, it can detect the virus in five minutes flat. And it can also do something else that no other test can do—quantify the amount of virus in the sample, potentially enabling doctors to tailor their treatment to the severity of the patient’s infection.

Eyes on the Prize

On Dec. 10, there will be a big celebration in Stockholm, Sweden, with fanfare befitting a new bevy of Nobel laureates. When Doudna and Charpentier receive their award—whether or not the pandemic permits them to actually step onto the stage to accept their medallions from the hands of King Carl XVI Gustav of Sweden—it will be the first time in history that two women have shared the prize in chemistry.

The monetary value of the prize they will share is 10 million Swedish krona, a bit more than $1 million. However, its value in terms of prestige and history is incalculable. Patents and startups may come and go, but a Nobel Prize is forever.

For Doudna, however, the reward is still in the work.

“I still, in my heart, think of myself as that young girl growing up in Hilo and thinking to myself, ‘Gosh, I wonder if I could be a biochemist someday.’ I still think of myself that way, right? Honestly, I still have moments when I look around at my colleagues and the people I’m so lucky to work with every day, and I think, “Wow, I’m so lucky.’ I just feel grateful. For me, that’s what it’s about. It really is. It’s about doing work that I enjoy, where I feel like I’m making a contribution.”

In 2020, humanity slammed on the brakes, arguably for the first time in modern history.

If you could watch the passing centuries of human movement on an animated map, you would see oceans grow dense with activity as coal replaced wind, as oil replaced coal and as air travel became commonplace. Other epidemics wouldn’t even have registered: In the 19th century, as this frenzy of movement was gaining speed, six cholera pandemics killed millions, but people kept moving. “That was when steam power became common; people were just moving faster and farther than ever,” said Joyce Chaplin, author of Round About the Earth: Circumnavigation from Magellan to Orbit. With the exception of a few blips during world wars—when travel, trade and fishing fleets were supplanted by battleships—this toy model of movement would have told a single story of acceleration. That story ended in March of 2020, when every government in the world said: “Stop. Stay home.”

Of course, we didn’t totally stop. A few Airbuses still paint contrails across the skies, though often carrying only a handful of passengers. Farmworkers still rise before dawn to pick the food that feeds the quarantined masses. Medical workers, cleaners, truckers and grocery-store stockers buzz even more urgently than before. Our map of movement hasn’t gone black. But it has dimmed more significantly than ever before.

This timeout is momentary. The trend of acceleration has already begun to resume. But the pause will also trigger lasting changes, and Pomona alumni working in transportation already have a sense of the long-term implications.

Rockwell “Rocky” Smith ’77 was looking forward to a few uneventful months to wind down his career at the Crowley Maritime Corporation when the realization set in that the pandemic would change everything. Crowley is—by and large—a shipping company: It moves products. And so, when the economy halted, Smith had to ask: Would anyone want to move clothes from the factories in Guatemala to the United States? Would towns in Alaska still need fuel oil deliveries? “In Alaska we were expecting huge impacts,” he recalled. “The tourists disappear; there are going to be no cruise ships. No one is going to need fuel.”

John Urgo ’03 was also at the cusp of a career transition. In February he was preparing for a move to Santa Cruz to become the planning director for the transit system there. But how do you plan for the future of a bus network when authorities are telling everyone to stay off the bus if possible? “My wife and I were like, ‘We have decent jobs in the Bay Area. Is this crazy?’” As soon as he landed in his new home, he faced a crisis: Half the routes had to be cut, and it was Urgo’s job to pick them. “No one else wanted that responsibility. In some sense it was good to be an outsider and an easy scapegoat to make bad decisions,” he said.

Urgo was willing to be the bad guy for a moment. He had bigger concerns: Once people finished complaining about the bus cutbacks and found other ways to get around, would they ever come back? Ridership plummeted by 90 percent.

There’s good reason to believe that some of those riders will never return. They’d stay home, not just in Santa Cruz, but everywhere, just as some of the highway commuters are done for good, according to Jarrett Walker ’84, author of Human Transit, who has become something of a public intellectual on the subject.

“I would be surprised if everyone now working from home ever goes back to the office,” Walker said.

Before the pandemic, employees were already starting to schedule days to work from home, and bosses were trying to figure out if they approved of the trend. Society was dipping its collective toes in the work-from-home water. Then the coronavirus came and pushed us all in. “At our company we discovered in the span of a few days that, hey, this is working pretty well,” Smith said. “People can do all this from home. Maybe we don’t need offices anymore.” His company and many others began scrambling to end leases. Rush hour disappeared overnight. Smith marveled at how quickly it was all happening. “If you think about this history of how we went to open offices and then to cubicles, it took a few years before people got it figured out,” he said. “But in the case of COVID, nobody could go to work tomorrow.”

Working from home saves companies rent money and saves workers the time and cash they devoted to commuting. Some are bound to decide they like it. That newly homebound workforce will reduce the number of commuters at rush hour. And even if this reduction is small, it will trigger huge changes.

Planners design every road and subway station for the rush-hour crush, Walker said. That means that for the rest of the 20-odd hours in the day, they are overbuilt and underused. It’s a ridiculous but unavoidable waste of money. Or at least it used to be unavoidable.

“That billion-dollar cloverleaf maybe doesn’t need to get built now,” Walker said.

The work-from-home revolution will also decrease the smog and greenhouse gases billowing off gridlocked freeways. In the United States, transportation is the single largest source of globe-heating gases. So the decline in commuting is a boon. But it also has a dark side: As white-collar workers stop commuting—and dispense with collars entirely—they may stop supporting the transportation systems that others still need.

Briana Lovell ’08, who manages transit strategy for the city of Seattle, noticed the dramatic decline in transit ridership. She also noticed a change in the demographics of the people on the buses. It was clear in the data she saw professionally and her own observations on the bus: There were fewer white people, fewer ties, fewer sloppy-on-purpose hoodies. But there were still riders: essential workers in scrubs or steel-toed boots, people in heavily worn clothes, people tucking sacks of groceries under the seats.

“The assumption that because a lot of high-wage, white-collar jobs may be able to telework we don’t need transit is just incredibly small-minded,” she said. “Transit is not just getting people to their jobs, but also to the doctor and to shopping.”

The pandemic provides a natural experiment, she said, showing transit officials exactly where and when people ride who truly have no better options. Instead of rush-hour commuter routes, people now are riding buses and trains more uniformly across nights and weekends and in the middle of the day. “For instance, the route that goes by my house: On weekends there’s a food bank, and there’s a ton of people who take the bus and come back with huge boxes and bags.”

In the before times, when well-connected professionals had to slog through traffic jams or endure delays on transit, they would complain about it, and they would sometimes even organize themselves to do something about it. Now that political pressure may evaporate.

“When fortunate people stop having a problem themselves, they tend to stop supporting solutions around it,” Walker said.

If that happens, some transit systems will die. The government stimulus package—the CARES Act—funded transit agencies around the country through the end of the year. But that money will run out long before there’s a vaccine, so there’s bound to be a reckoning. The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, which runs Boston’s T, has a half-billion-dollar hole in its budget next year, said Chris Dempsey ’05, director of a coalition of nonprofits and regional transportation planning agencies called Transportation for Massachusetts. “That’s extremely concerning to anyone in greater Boston who wants to make sure we have a viable transit system in the years ahead,” he said.

The T system isn’t going to disappear. In big cities a lack of money means that projects will be delayed and maintenance deferred, but transit will endure because it is simply irreplaceable: Trains and buses can move a lot of people in a small space, providing a solution for the implacable problem of geometry in cities. Without mass transit, city automobile traffic goes into a permanent stall, and movement slows to the pace of a brisk walk.

But in smaller sprawling towns, where cars are a viable alternative, the pandemic really could kill transit. In Santa Cruz, where Urgo is trying to plan for the revival of movement by bus, it’s possible residents will instead revive their affection for cars, which carry them so easily through, unbound by commuter traffic.

There was one positive change that Dempsey saw—one he hoped would become permanent. Cities and towns across Massachusetts were making room on the streets for pedestrians, cyclists and outdoor dining.

His own bike commute to his office in downtown Boston transformed when the city plunked down new traffic barrels separating cars from cyclists. “It had been honking cars, exhaust in your face, trucks and commuters jostling for space in a turn lane,” he said. “Now you cruise by them on your bike.”

In Europe the changes have been more profound: Paris is adding 400 miles of new bicycle lanes, and the United Kingdom is spending $2.5  billion on building better sidewalks and bike lanes—a “once-in-a generation change to the way that people travel in Britain,” according to Grant Shapps, the country’s transportation secretary. These cities are putting down concrete, not just traffic cones. But even traffic cones provide a glimpse of a different world.

“I think people have come to appreciate the value of being able to take a walk around their neighborhood in a way that maybe they never fully appreciated before,” Dempsey said. “The hope is that we experience that, we love it, and we decide to keep it in years ahead rather than giving that space back to vehicles.”

Back in Seattle, as the plague months ticked by, Rocky Smith was breathing easier. The pandemic hadn’t been the catastrophe for shipping that he had feared. The crash in Alaskan oil demand never came. “A lot of the fuel we sell is subsistence fuel—you gotta have the lights on, and it’s running the generators. In the winter you gotta heat your shack in Nome.”

And so the ships kept cutting through the water. They kept moving in the Caribbean as well. Sure, there might have been fewer orders from the big clothing companies for the factories in Central America, but there were also new orders for masks and protective gowns. Smith could retire with a clear conscience: He’d leave the company in a time of flux, but not in crisis.

For John Urgo, in Santa Cruz, the future looked much more uncertain. Surveys showed that people had no interest in getting back on the bus. Someday the students would return to the local colleges, and surely they would want to take the bus again—or would they? And when would that day come? Santa Cruz is famously progressive and green, but how long would it support a bus service that very few people were using?

The key to thinking about all this, said Dempsey, is to maintain perspective. The pandemic will end. A new normal will emerge. This isn’t—as some have suggested—the end of cities. “You can go back in time to the 16th century and find that people predicted the Black Plague was going to be the end of London,” he notes. London—let’s just check—still appears to exist. “We need cities. They are places where people innovate and share experiences and meet each other serendipitously and interact in ways that are really important to our economy and really important to our health and really important to our society,” Dempsey said.

It sometimes feels like the shutdown will never end. Decades from now, will future historians note this period as another curious blip on the graph? Joyce Chaplin, a present-day historian, isn’t so sure. Some changes will endure. Air traffic, which is both a speedy spreader of disease and extremely vulnerable to future shutdowns, will have to evolve. Airplane designers are proposing new ideas—flipping middle seats to face backward, raising dividers above armrests and transparent bubbles around headrests. And Chaplin expects that airlines might need to more nimbly impose flight quarantines to contain future epidemics.

If we return to that imagined map of transportation through the centuries: The modern perspective suggests an inevitable growth in movement up to this point. But, Chaplin said, if we broaden our view to the entirety of human history, we’d likely find other pauses—not because everyone got together and decided to quarantine, but because of past climate change. Surely the ice age and its end changed the way people moved around the world. “Yes, on a planetary scale we are living in an unusual moment,” she said. “But it may also be a return—part of a longer cycle that we never left.”

For a lot of Americans, sports equals normalcy. So the return of professional sports last summer brought a sigh of relief and a hope that things might be returning to normal, albeit a strange new normal of bubbles, air high-fives and fans checking the day’s COVID tests instead of scores. But amid all the weirdness, there was also the comfortingly familiar—the slam-dunk, the slap shot, the corner kick, the crack of the bat.

Yes, pro sports were back.

College sports—not so much.

College Sports in Limbo

All across the country last summer, colleges were faced with the impossibility of holding fall sports as usual in the face of an ongoing pandemic. Unlike their professional counterparts, they didn’t have the option of wrapping themselves up in a protective bubble.

“I was on a call the other day,” says Pomona-Pitzer Director of Athletics Miriam Merrill, “and a parent said, ‘Well, do you think you all will use the professional bubble philosophy?” And I said, ‘No, because we’re not professional athletes. The students need to be integrated into the community just like the rest of their peers.”

As the summer surge receded and the fall surge began, just about the only part of college sports that tried to bob and weave its way through the pandemic instead of ducking and covering was major conference football. In the process, America’s favorite college sport became the poster child for how not to prevent the spread of COVID-19, as coaches and players—in some cases what seemed like whole teams—tested positive. As this goes to press, 81 games (and counting) had been canceled or postponed due to the virus.

For some sports programs that were already facing challenges, the pandemic proved to be the final straw. Pomona-Pitzer’s oldest continuous sports rival, Occidental College, announced in October that it was eliminating its football program after 133 years. Losses like these will be felt by future college athletes—not to mention fans—for many years to come.

But even as the virus resurged in the fall, there remained a slender thread of hope that at least some fall sports at places like Pomona might not have to be canceled—just delayed. Merrill noted that changes in NCAA policy have opened the door to the possible shift of fall athletic seasons into the spring, pandemic permitting. “There is conversation now of  ‘How can we support competition in the spring?’” she says. “And that would be fall, winter and spring sports, all happening during spring semester. Ultimately, we’d love to provide an opportunity for students to have a sport-related experience.”

In the end, however, the pandemic will decide what’s possible.

Pro Sports in a Bubble

While college athletics remain in coronavirus limbo, professional sports managed to make a tentative comeback in 2020, but not without some dramatic changes. Venues were empty of fans. Seasons were abbreviated. Several leagues, from the National Women’s Soccer League to the National Basketball Association, opted for the bubble approach—sequestering all of their teams in a single location until the season was over.

Mike Budenholzer ’92, head coach of the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks, credits NBA Commissioner Adam Silver’s office and the NBA Players’ Association for working together to come up with a workable solution for basketball in a bubble. “The collaboration between those two groups,” he says, “has put us in an environment where we can have a very safe and healthy space and an opportunity to compete and play basketball again and bring NBA basketball back to the fans, and the chance to compete and crown a champion.”

Pandemic seasons were also seasons of experimentation. Major League Baseball probably set a record for significant rules changes in one year—and with none of the usual pushback from its famously traditionalist but now famished fans. Seven-inning double-headers? Sure. Runner on second at the start of extra innings? Fine. The designated hitter in the National League? Why not? Expanded playoffs? Absolutely. A World Series in a neutral-site bubble? Whatever. When the alternative is zilch, it’s amazing what fans will accept.

How many of those changes will become permanent? No one knows, but with COVID lingering, the smart betting is on most.

According to John Tulchin ’83, CEO of The Promotions Department, a company in Torrance, California, that provides in-stadium promotional materials for some 35 pro teams, the pandemic has simply given pro sports a hard shove in a direction it was already headed. “In so many ways, and in our industry too, COVID-19 is mostly an accelerator of other trends, trends that were already going on,” he says. “So, you know, things like remote viewing of games and ways to reach fans outside of the arena experience and enhancing the arena experience with technology—all of those things were happening, and this is just sort of ratcheting things up and making them happen quicker. It’s forcing teams to move more quickly in some of those areas.”

Planning Ahead

Today colleges are looking ahead, trying to plan for a variety of scenarios, including the possibility that the coronavirus never completely goes away. What’s possible, Merrill said, depends in part on the sport involved. “The NCAA has categorized sports based on risk level,” she notes. “So there are low-risk sports, like golf or tennis, where you can socially distance; you can wear a mask. And then there’s medium risk, and then there’s the high risk, which is where people are on top of each other, like in contact sports.”

For some sports, there may have to be some creative rethinking of rules, in the same way the pros have done. “Like cross country—maybe we can check times for everyone, and instead of everyone starting at once, maybe we have wave one go, and then wave two,” Merrill explains. “So there are all of these out-of-the-box ways of thinking about the sport while still staying true to the essence of the sport.”

For Budenholzer, it’s all about keeping his team going until the fans return, whenever that may be. “When that is, we’re not sure,” he says. “You know, the league and everybody will have to figure out how we get from here to there and how we can survive and be good and solid financially. But long term, I think, everybody is hopeful that we’ll be back with playing in front of the fans, and all that that provides.”

Part of the Show

In the absence of flesh-and-blood fans, pro sports leagues have experimented with a range of simulations, from low-tech (cardboard cutouts to fill seats) to medium-tech (recorded crowd noise) to cutting-edge (real NBA fans cheering from virtual seats on giant screens).  All that effort to simulate their presence is a reminder that fans aren’t just consumers—they’re an important component of the show itself. The title of an article in The New York Times last summer maybe said it best: “If a Dunk Echoes Across an Empty Gym, Is It Still Must-See TV?”

“We really miss the fans just from an emotional point of view,” Budenholzer says. “They’re a big part of the game, and you start talking about the business side of it—the role that our fans play in our sport is critical. We’re all hopeful that eventually we’ll be back to playing in front of fans and stadiums with excitement.”

The tentative return of live fans actually began this fall with the start of both major college and pro football seasons and baseball’s World Series, but the numbers admitted were only a fraction of stadium capacity. With the virus threatening to hang around much longer than originally expected, teams may have to find a way to survive with sharply reduced levels of ticket sales—not to mention crowd noise—well into 2021, if not beyond.

Though Tulchin’s company can’t sell the usual quantities of bobbleheads or rally towels right now, he’s been having discussions with teams about what it will look like as they welcome back fans with health protocols still in place. “How do you get people in and out without it being crowded?” he asks. “How do you avoid concession lines? So they’re having to figure out creative ways around that, with mobile ordering and that kind of thing.”

Tulchin’s firm had already been helping teams obtain hard-to-find masks and hand sanitizers, both for use internally and as branded outreach to fans. But now he sees a need for a range of new logistical items geared to the pandemic. “There’s a whole host of things that we’re likely to be involved with—not only things that might be promotional items in the arena, but, you know, how do you promote social distancing?” he says. “You’re going to need a lot of signage, a lot of floor decals, and you’re going to need personnel that may need to be identifiable. How do you block off seats so that people don’t go and sit down somewhere where they’re not supposed to? So those are all things that potentially are opportunities for us, although I’d much rather provide 10,000 flags that everybody gets as they come in the gate than this other stuff.”

Manhattan, New York. August 26, 2020. A man wearing a mask walks in front of a temporarily closed movie theatre on 42nd street in Midtown.

We all have our own memory of the moment when our world abruptly shut down: the cancelled trip or postponed birthday party, the day the office or school announced it was closing its doors. The way veteran film producer Linda Obst ’72 recalls it happening in Hollywood is that “Kobe’s plane went down, and everything went down with it.”

“That was the L.A. zeitgeist horror,” she says of Bryant’s death in a late-January helicopter crash. “And then all of a sudden, we were told, no reason to come into the office. You all can work out of your homes. The next thing I knew, I was on a Zoom call—and, of course, I didn’t know what a Zoom call was.”

For Aditya Sood ’97, it was a different celebrity who marked the moment: Tom Hanks’s COVID diagnosis happened the same day that Sood and his colleagues at Lord Miller Productions had agreed to send their staff home for the week and suspend the productions they had in progress—what felt like just in case, but turned out to be just in time. “We had already decided, but there was something about that that was so earth-shattering, particularly in Hollywood,” he says.

The pandemic came at what was already a tense moment for the film and television industry: The imperatives of an international business and the advent of streaming had already been producing creative, financial and technical upheavals, threatening the multiplex model and the dominance of the traditional movie studio. And yet in lockdown, what is there to do but consume whatever content we can get our hands on? Netflix alone added nearly 16 million paid subscribers globally in the first quarter—double the number it had predicted for that period. That’s a whole lot of money to put toward ordering new shows.

The past year has posed unique challenges and offered unique opportunities to the industry, so we consulted Obst and Sood, both of whom have multi-decade careers under their belts, about how lockdown has shaped Hollywood and what the consequences of those changes might be in the years to come.

All of Obst’s projects were in development in March, she says, so there were no sets to shut down. Still, she notes, since then it’s been hard to move those projects forward when the options for releasing them are so limited. “It’s very easy to keep things in development in the best of circumstances,” she says. “So now, when there’s a real reason not to give a green light… We were in a very productive swarm of shows getting made before this happened, and now much less is getting bought than before.”

That’s in part, she continues, because while sets are slowly opening back up again, they’re more expensive than ever to operate, thanks to the need for COVID plans and protocol supervisors, as well as testing and PPE. That means there has to be a lot of obvious financial upside to a project for it to be worth kicking into gear. “It was very easy for Nicole Kidman to get The Undoing back at HBO Max, because it’s what HBO Max depends on for you to order a subscription,” she says by way of example, adding that Disney’s The Mandalorian is in a similar position. “If you’re part of the mandate of a new streamer, you can get ordered. But if you’re not part of that mandate, Netflix doesn’t need you.” And if you’re hoping for a theatrical release, for now, there’s nothing doing.

Hollywood execs have long been worried about audiences preferring to stay home and stream rather than pay for an expensive movie theatre ticket (plus parking and popcorn), and there’s been some concern that lockdown will only accelerate that trend. But Sood is bullish about the future of movie theatres. “I think that people are going to come out of this really craving that large communal experience in a way they were maybe taking a little bit for granted,” he says.

Plus, “there’s something different about watching a movie in a theatre. Not just the big spectacle movies either. I remember seeing The Big Sick at the Cinerama Dome at the ArcLight, which is not a movie you think you need to see on a 50-foot screen. But it actually was transcendent that way, because all of a sudden, these very simple, domestic, mundane things became larger than life. The dinner scene, when you see it with 300 other people—it’s just different than watching it on your home screen.”

The biggest challenge for Lord Miller as a company, he says, has been making sure that everyone feels connected to one another—that they aren’t just talking work but finding ways to make up for the office camaraderie that usually comes from the hours spent in the same room together. To that end, the company has instituted a virtual movie night. “We’re on our third go-round,” he explains. “Every Tuesday night we watch a movie together and text about it, and it’s been a really nice way for people to stay in contact beyond the work stuff.”

Both Obst and Sood have spent multiple decades in the industry, and while they’re worried about the changes the virus will bring, they also note that this is not the first time the movie business has weathered what feels like an all-encompassing sea change. To those who think the future of film is iPhone shorts released straight to Netflix, as well as the camps convinced that we’re in for a lifetime of mega-blockbuster tentpoles that require a crew of thousands to make, Sood says, “We’re never all or nothing. This has happened before: In the ’60s, the studios decided, ‘We aren’t going to compete with television, so we’re only going to make the biggest entertainments possible.’

“At the same time, you had this new guard of filmmakers that were making these really gritty independent-feeling movies, even though at that time they were still distributed through the major studios. There was a countermovement that started at the same time. Much of the industry today is grown out of that part of the business, more than the classic studio business.”

Obst also notes that, unlike those changes, which were industry-specific, the coronavirus is a global phenomenon. “There’s no technological issue that’s fundamentally changing the foundation of the movie industry,” she says. “It’s just that if we can’t get people back into theatres, they’re going to be watching everything at home. So the question is, how long will it take to get people back in the theatres?”

“This is a sea change for everyone,” she says, “that we have to go through with everyone else.”

The changes aren’t just limited to the limitations imposed by lockdown. Sood points out that one of the most lasting shifts in Hollywood might not come from any of those considerations but from the social unrest that simmered in the U.S. over the summer and the effort to diversify the industry that’s come out of it.

“I think there’s a recognition that behind the scenes, behind the camera, in front of the camera, in the executive suite, there is a real change that needs to happen,” he says. It feels like Hollywood is ready for “changing representation of whose stories are being told, and by who. And the thing that I tell everybody is: More than ever, authenticity is a prized commodity. If there was ever a moment to be how you are, to embrace the stories that you want to tell—this is the moment to really seize these opportunities.”

He knows that following a nontraditional career path might feel especially daunting at a moment when everything seems to be in flux, but he encourages those interested in entering the industry to “know it’s possible, and that there’s been a great democratization of access to this industry that’s happened.”

“But also know there’s a long way to go,” he adds, “and the more people land on the beachhead and secure positions, the more they can change that and be part of that conversation.”

He particularly hopes that some young filmmakers will find a way to tackle this period in their work, to offer modern audiences a way to digest what’s happening to us, but also to memorialize it for future generations. “I think there will be great art that’s made about [the pandemic],” he says. “Interestingly, there’s very little great art that was made about the Spanish flu—the culture seems to have forgotten that period of time, maybe because it was so traumatic. But it would be nice to have some of that to help inform our thinking today.”

Images of an empty Times Square at 8PM during the COVID-19 crisis.

Thurgood Powell ’10 recalls walking through Times Square at 8:30 on a Saturday evening last July. A newly minted MBA from Penn’s Wharton School, he was starting a job at Goldman Sachs in New York. “It was really, really bizarre,” he says of the scene. There were a few homeless people wearing masks and gloves, some police on regular patrol—and no tourists. What he remembers is that “the lights felt overpowering. There are just so many of them. You don’t notice until that’s the only thing there.”

The COVID-19 pandemic that emptied out Times Square has also upended the U.S. and world economy in 2020. More than 30 million Americans filed first-time unemployment claims in just six weeks in March and April. Whole industries, such as travel and hospitality, faced sudden crisis. Small businesses struggled to hang on—and many didn’t make it. The U.S. Congress temporarily overcame political polarization to pass pandemic response spending bills totaling more than $4 trillion.

At some point—a study by McKinsey & Company estimates it is most likely to be in the second half of 2021 or later—the U.S. will reach herd immunity in the pandemic, allowing some kind of “normal life” to resume, to our great relief. Restaurants will fill up. Students will learn in person again. The lights will go on as workers return to megacity offices coast to coast and around the world.

Or will they? Will a few superstar cities like New York still dominate, post-pandemic? Or will work-from-home continue and make possible an exodus to places less crowded and more affordable? Is globalism dead? What will the new normal in the economy look like?

While some might think the sudden supply-chain disruptions and closed international borders of the pandemic year might take the luster off globalization, Manisha Goel, associate professor of economics at Pomona, says, “I’m a skeptic about that.” The reason why goods in various stages of production have been manufactured in multiple countries and shipped to markets around the world is because it was cost-efficient. “As long as the pandemic is not going to occur every three or four years, people will want to go back to the way they used to do things because that is what made the most rational sense,” Goel believes.

“COVID has accelerated trends,” says Powell, an associate in Goldman Sachs’s Merchant Banking Division and a member of the Urban Investment Group’s acquisitions team. “Like delivery. A lot of us use Amazon, but I’d never gotten groceries delivered. Now I can’t imagine not having groceries delivered. I just have to go to my phone and type in what I want.”

Yet there is a price for this convenience, often paid by small businesses. Fernando Lozano, chair of Pomona’s Department of Economics, sees a concerning trend in the closure of small and medium-sized businesses during the pandemic. “Larger firms have increased market share,” he notes. “Less people are accumulating assets. The distribution of wealth becomes more and more unequal.”

Industry consolidation, as smaller players are squeezed out, also increases the power of industry leaders to hire workers with lower pay, less benefits and worse conditions, says Lozano. “Whenever large firms increase their market share, they increase their own bargaining power.”

Goel describes a potential K-shaped post-pandemic recovery as top earners, many of whom can work from home, do even better, while those below them on the pay scale fall farther behind. She believes future tax policy needs to be more progressive. “The marginal tax rates for the rich should not be lower than for the middle- and lower-income households,” she says. “They should be substantially higher. The trickle-down policies haven’t really worked.”

Four months into his new job at Goldman Sachs in New York, Powell has never been to the office. He is part of the huge cohort of workers for whom “Zoom” is now both proper noun and verb. “I’m working from home, doing everything I would do in the office. I’m using a technology that makes it so I have the same desktop I would have in the office,” he says. “A lot of businesses,” he notes, “are thinking, ‘Do we need all this office space?’”

COVID-19, Powell believes, is also making employees rethink their own housing situations. Some are asking, “Why am I paying $4,000 a month for a 900-square-foot apartment with a screaming child in the bedroom next to me?” he remarks. For some slice of those now working remotely, the answer is to move to a place like the Hudson Valley or North Carolina or Reno.

Work-from-home, if it becomes widely accepted long-term, offers potential benefits for women, whose workforce participation during the pandemic has dropped to 1987 levels, Goel says. A vital need is accessible, quality childcare. Without it, she says, women dropping out of the workforce “may end up being the new normal.”

Academia, like the rest of the economy, has faced major adjustments in the transition to work- and learn-from-home. “In today’s world, what is the value of the physical space?” asks Erika James ’91, dean of Penn’s Wharton School. “I personally believe that the value of physical space resides in the ability to create community and culture and sociability, which also drives performance,” she says. “Zoom and Microsoft Teams and all these platforms are great for providing a mechanism to converse and to exchange ideas, but sometimes those ideas happen most creatively when you can build on a thought someone else has, or when you have a thought and walk down the hallway to step into someone else’s office and say, ‘I’ve been thinking about something. I want to run this by you.’ That option doesn’t really exist with these online platforms.”

As a member of California’s newly formed Council of Economic Advisors, Lozano cannot reveal the group’s confidential discussions. But, he says, “it is safe to say all of those in the council are really concerned with equity, with social justice, with how to alter the very perverse consequences of the pandemic.” One area he singles out as an urgent need in the new normal economy is equitable access to broadband so that students and employees don’t have to go to McDonald’s to get online for school or work. Universal health care is another essential change, he believes, in the shadow of a pandemic in which laid-off workers not only lost jobs but their health insurance as well.

Both Lozano and Powell see merit in universal basic income—an idea championed in the 2020 presidential primaries by Andrew Yang. Lozana disputes the idea that “if you pay people, they won’t have incentive to work,” saying that argument “has been refuted over and over.”

The political will to bring about such major changes in access to technology and in the social safety net may well come from young adults in Powell’s age group or the current Pomona students Lozano teaches. One of them is Erika James’ son, currently a freshman at Pomona. “This moment in time has so fundamentally changed his trajectory in some regards, and what he cares about, and what’s important and what’s not important,” she observes. “I think that will last a lifetime. This is a defining moment for a generation.”

Powell notes that millennials, born between 1981 and 1996, have already faced four huge challenges in their relatively short working lives—the Great Recession, housing inflation, wage stagnation and now COVID-19. He tells of four friends, three of whom recently lost jobs—a restaurant manager, a flight attendant and a construction worker. “They feel they can’t catch a break,” he says. People he knows who have never taken an interest in politics were planning to vote this year. “In the next eight to 10 years, I think you’ll see an FDR-type New Deal,” he predicts.

Indeed, it is the generations coming into their own that give people like Lozano and James and Powell reason for optimism. “The people joining the labor force right now, I think they are more aware, not only of the environment but of those around them,” says Lozano. He sees in his students “a large sense of kinship and also a sense of political activism to make things better.”

“It’s so easy to frame what we’re currently experiencing as negative and bad, and it is for so many reasons, especially for people who have been physically affected by the pandemic,” says James. “But it is in these moments that innovation occurs, and the world makes shifts that, over time, are really positive.”

Change, James notes, “doesn’t feel good in the moment. But there will likely be a day, however many years from now, where we look back on this time and can’t believe how backward we were. ‘How could we have ever thought or acted or done those kinds of things?’

“Because of COVID,” James concludes, “we’ve had to innovate in new ways that are fundamentally going to change our future. We can’t predict what they are now. This is one of those defining moments in history, and that’s a good thing. There will be good that comes from this. We don’t know what it is yet.”