Something Is Very Right In the State of Denmark
What Illumina's new CEO and Novo Nordisk could do for America and our national security.
One of the underreporting subjects lately has been the rise of Denmark.
Just today I read about how Novo Nordisk is the world’s largest charity displacing the Welcome Trust and the Gates Foundation. (I have my doubts as to whether the Welcome Trust or the Gates Foundation even are charities but that’s for another post.)
Something is very right in the state of the Denmark.
You can think of this is as a Danish moment which began when a team of filmmakers observed the conspiracy in action — and became useful, turning their footage over to the U.S. government. Their film — A Storm Foretold — comes out in America in January.
As the Washington Post reported:
A team of Danish filmmakers spent more than two years following Trump confidant and adviser Roger Stone. Their footage — and an investigation from The Washington Post — shed new light on Stone's efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Add to that and you see Denmark once again working to move the world away from oil with wind farms. America’s first offshore wind farm was Danish-made, naturally.
For a long time Denmark was operating under the control of the United Kingdom. The Danish resistance was closely connected to the British who rescued Danish physicist Niels Bohr, after all.
Speaking of the Danish resistance my favorite film was Flame & Citron (Danish: Flammen & Citronen), a film I must have seen a dozen or so times since it came out. It features what may well be one of my favorite scenes in any film ever.
That British-Danish alliance seemingly ended when the toffs appeared too addicted to Russian oligarch cash to be of much use in our modern world.
The Danes, meanwhile, continue to be what amounts to our greatest ally on the European continent.
The Atlantic has a discussion about the scientific breakthroughs of the past year.
“Half a billion people around the world live with diabetes, and 40 percent of Americans alone are obese.”
In other words relax. America’s not going to have a civil war because we’re too fat. Whereas my grandfather could argue with Ronald Reagan that we needed a draft lest Americans be too fat or too drug-addled the truth is that there are few standards of physical fitness.
Maybe our Danish friends can get us back into fighting shape.
“In one trial supported by Novo Nordisk, the drug reduced the incidence of heart attack and stroke by 20 percent. Morgan Stanley survey data found that people on GLP-1s eat less candy, drink less alcohol, and eat 40 percent more vegetables.”
Denmark may not be able to do much about the quality of our food but it’s seemingly doing what it can to keep us Americans alive despite our own best efforts to do ourselves in.
A friend of mine is manufacturing the weight loss drug Ozempic in Florida. This’ll undoubtedly save lives. We’re partnering with him for Traitwell in the coming year.
An alliance between Novo Nordisk and Illumina — whose new CEO Jacob Thaysen is Danish — could help dramatically change the world for the better. You could imagine Novo Nordisk and Illumina (and Traitwell) working to build a pharmacogenomics database by offering subsidized genomic sequencing. It is, after all, one of the leading causes of death in America and precisely why we offered a predictor at Traitwell for free to the public.
Add in Google Cloud — who will store all this data — and you’re really off to the races. You could imagine a world where Danish drug companies’ profits — driven by American consumers — actually helps clean up the pharmaceutical industry’s excesses.
If you get really creative you could imagine a world where the leading causes of death in America were identified through a genome-wide database. You’d sequence all the dead people and match their cause of death with their DNA. Later, the living could compare their own DNA to that database.
Microsoft, meanwhile, is being sued for failing to secure health data. Open AI is being sued over copyright infringement.
The future is coming into view.
If Traitwell can unlock (more clearly) the genetics behind weight gain, downwind is a tailored weight loss product according to one’s specific DNA.
We have Ozempic now but what are the side effects? Does it work for everyone? Traitwell might provide an answer.
This is, of course, easier said than done and will require R&D in a lab environment but every government in the world will want this IP and they will do anything to get it.
We should offer Ozempic as a promo offer to sell with kits. Novo Nordisk’s marketing department might even lend a hand in helping to push sequencing to the masses.
Does this all mean that Danish intelligence will help clean up the American pharmaceutical industry?
America, fresh from making a deal with Japanese steel, can make a similar trade with the Danish pharma.
Think of it as wind farms and anti-obesity pills for protection from the Russians. Not a bad deal for the 5 million or so Danes—and the 40 million plus fat Americans.