Cancer vaccine, solar energy, and fishing nets

Good morning {{name!|reader}},

This weekend, Zac, Jordan, and I had the chance to return to Weequahic with all our friends for our camp’s first-ever alumni reunion weekend. It’s where the three of us met over 14 years ago and was our first time back since working there in 2021. It’s a weird feeling to reconnect with people you haven’t so much as thought of in the last decade and walk around the camp seeing all the changes and upgrades they’ve made. There’s also an unwavering familiarity as most of camp looks exactly the same. You jump back into conversations about color war events from ten years ago, and your old teenage habits feel like second nature.

One of the clearest fixtures of camp is its values. Our director Cole would talk about GAC: Gratitude, Attitude, and Courage, during our campfires each Friday night and the importance of practicing each one. When you’re a little kid, it’s hard to see the value in being taught about values and even now in writing this, it definitely sounds corny, but I think those weekly speeches (and of course the classic read-aloud of Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree) had a profound impact on all of us.

This past Friday night, Cole spoke to us about the most important things he’s learned in his 17 years running Weequahic. One was that habit we learned many years ago from which this newsletter got its name – sharing three good things from your day plus one thing you appreciate about the person across from you. He and his wife have done it nightly for 25 years and can still count the number of nights they’ve missed. What he kept returning to wasn’t any particular evening but the cumulative outcome. Ask someone that question a few thousand times and you end up knowing exactly what makes them happy, without ever having set out to learn it.

Little did we know that as kids running around, jumping in the lake, making s’mores and so much more, what stuck with us most all those years later were the Friday night conversations. On that note, in each of this week’s stories, the ground is laid well before the public outcome. Merck and Moderna initiated the personalized cancer therapy program in 2016, years before most of us knew what mRNA was. California’s solar grid has been doubling battery storage every 15 months for the last 10 years, fueled by solar farms that were developing years before that. In Hawaii, a legal category laid the groundwork for community-managed fishing areas 30 years anyone implemented it.

With gratitude,

Brenner, Jordan, and Zac

Merck and Moderna’s new drug is a little different from your typical pharmacy prescription – intismeran autogene is an mRNA product built uniquely around each person’s tumor. After the melanoma is surgically removed, the tumor is sequenced, and software picks up to 34 mutations that exist solely in the cancerous DNA then encodes them in the drug. It’s injected into the muscle to teach the immune system what to hunt.

The biotech companies recently announced their Phase 3 randomized trial of 1,137 patients where their drug (or a placebo in a third of patients) was given alongside Keytruda (the standard treatment post-surgery). They found both delays in the same cancer returning and a delayed spread to distant organs (while statistically significant – and a major win, no other details were provided on the magnitude). This marks the first time an individualized therapy has won a randomized Phase 3 trial and the first such win for any mRNA cancer therapy.

Stepping back: we’ve been attempting to develop cancer vaccines for decades but have consistently come up short. The common theme has been chasing mutations shared by patients. This time is different. The term mRNA may jog some fond memories of the pandemic as the technology behind the COVID-19 vaccine. The cancer work started before any of that. In June 2016, Merck and Moderna signed a $200 million collaboration agreement to develop personalized mRNA cancer therapies. First patient dosing took place the following year.

What COVID actually supplied was the manufacturing scale, regulatory familiarity, and capital. That infrastructure paved the way for the trial to run at 165 sites across 26 countries (more than the average pilot visits in their lifetime). That’s a multi-year hurdle removed to develop a vaccine for each patient.

What now? Melanoma can recur in three ways: local (by the surgery), regional (nearby lymph nodes), or distant (a new organ entirely like the brain, liver, or lungs). The first two can often be cut out again. However, cancer metastasizing in a distant organ (Stage IV) means a coin flip chance of survival at five years. So, the goal is to delay distant metastasis for as long as possible. This is the first thing to do just that. Now their results will go to a medical meeting then regulators for approval while the trial (and several others in parallel) keeps running to fully prove the results.

In May, solar energy supplied 51% of the electricity California generated, the first full month above half for any major economy globally per the US Energy Information Administration’s monthly reports (represents energy made, not used). The change wasn’t more solar panels. For years, the state has had more midday solar than it can use. They were missing somewhere to store it for later.

Zooming out: a decade ago, the power grid had 61 megawatts of batteries. Today it has 16 gigawatts, a 260x multiplier, or a doubling roughly every 15 months for ten straight years (faster growth than Nvidia’s stock price over that time). Now, it can leverage the midday production for the evening hours it lacked. It still had to curtail nearly 5 gigawatts of solar in May because it had nowhere to put it. The state is targeting 50 gigawatts of capacity. Every battery added from here charges off electricity that already exists but hasn’t been absorbed.

The new storage is helping the state cut down on polluting energy sources. Natural gas is California’s most-used fossil fuel, but solar has been pushing it out, and May wasn’t a fluke – in every month of 2026 leading up to it, solar outproduced gas. However, May has historically been the lightest month for energy usage, so demand sits at its annual floor, giving solar an easy path to covering it. The summer months will be a tougher test, but the record progress represents a meaningful path toward natural gas elimination.

California’s playbook is not novel. Hungary reached 47% last June in a smaller population. Batteries are commodity hardware sold by the container. And now, the evening problem has a solution being proven out by the world’s fourth-largest economy. If the fix can work at scale here, it can succeed anywhere.

Off the end of Kaua’i’s north shore in Hā’ena, families fish by standing ankle-deep in water, wading slowly to avoid spooking fish with their shadows and footsteps, while a net sits wrapped around their waist and shoulders, then throwing out the nets by hand to catch a dozen fish at a time. In this six square mile range of water, anyone else can fish this way too. There are just a few explicit rules. Three-prong spears rather than spear guns, nothing sold, nothing taken at night when the fish are asleep, bag and size limits, and one stretch left entirely alone as a nursery. Ultimately, this levels the playing field and gives the fish a better chance of getting away. The community wrote those rules for itself.

How we got here: Large schools of fish started disappearing in the 70s when fishermen traveled from neighboring areas with big nets and boats. Then through the next 20 years, dozens of tour boats ran in the area, leaving oily films that damaged the shallow water and limu, the seaweed the fish graze on. Permission to do anything about it took 30 years. Hawaiʻi created the legal category of community-managed subsistence fishing areas in 1994 (this allowed the self-determined designations but did not grant any). Through sixty community meetings, ten rounds of agency revision, and extensive objections from commercial fishermen, rules were developed and finally signed in 2015. It marks the first permanent administrative code of this type in the state.

The results: state and university biologists surveyed the water in 2013 before any of this existed. Then they compared with data from 2016, the first year in effect, and found no significant difference in biomass. However, that number started to appear in 2017 and has held since, including through a record flood the following spring. At the five-year review, fish counts, species counts and biomass were all higher inside the boundary than out.

The ten-year assessment marks the point where trends can start being detected in protected marine areas. The full evaluation is coming this fall, but researchers note high fish count plus fish and coral they normally don’t see in other parts of the island. Other communities are picking up on this with Miloli’i adopting the model in 2022 and Kīpahulu in 2024. On an island chain where families have fished the same reefs for generations, the model represents an opportunity to ensure food can always be put on the table.