SONG: “What To Do (On mRNA Immune Checkpoint Blockade)”. (OGG version here.)
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: Based on “People with some cancers live longer after a COVID vaccine”, Nature, 22 Oct 2025, as used in the post “Covid vaccine boosts life-saving cancer treatment”.
ABSTRACT:
I have this guitar. Really, what it is is that I have a problem, I suppose, or at least they call it that when you start getting gray in your beard, and the problem is I like collecting musical instruments, but not top-quality ones. I have a kid-sized accordion (needs straps replaced) and a children’s piano, and a few other gizmos and hand-me-downs and souvenir whatsits. A guitar the girl in the next dorm room over gave me after her nervous breakdown. Another guitar a girlfriend gave me right before a breakup. And then there are the found ones….
There’s this one keep forgetting I have, which I found in a literal trash heap in its case. It’s a black acoustic guitar, the only steel-stringed acoustic in the house. Its bridge is wonky — at some point, it pulled off the face and someone tried reattaching it with wood glue but a/ couldn’t get the little stoppers out that cover the screws that hold it down and b/ didn’t line the screws up with the holes that they pulled out of to begin with, so it sort of sits at an angle, lifting the strings about a half-inch too high over the neck. It’s a little too precarious for me to tighten the strings to where they should be, so it’s downtuned something like half an octave, which gives it this sound like a braided cable unraveling. For a long time, I had it tuned open-E and would make bad slide guitar sloshing noises on it (this was before I learned most slide was played in open-D).
Anyway, it has this not-in-tune, not-entirely-out-of-tune sound that I kind of love, like it’s barely hanging on but also just sort of hanging out. Not a slack-key guitar, but a slacker guitar. It’s nearly impossible to do anything multi-tracked with because I can’t tune it to what it should be, and it doesn’t really stay where it shouldn’t be so it’s super hard to tune anything to it, either. But that baroqueness (in the sense of freshwater pearls more than being well-tempered like a clavier, but maybe that too) is what I kind of love about it.
This has to be the first song I’ve ever written on it.
I brought it out, sat it on my knee once or twice, and then this came out. I recorded it quickly on an iPhone voice memo (the phone is not as old as the guitar, but almost, and it’s an iPhone 6). Afterwards, I realized that the “verse” parts are basically the same D-twiddle thing I have done for many songs in the past, like a change I can’t get away from. The choruses are the same G-A-D as probably 80 bajillion early 00s indie songs, Magnetic Fields and Mountain Goats to hell and back. But I still really liked the broken-downness of it, and the perseverance of it. It was familiar, but the guitar made it different enough to build with.
The piano was a natural addition. Getting it close to in tune was a bear. I duplicated the guitar track, then put one of the dupes through an autotuner. It didn’t sound any more in-tune after that, but when played alongside the original, it gave it that nice flanger sound. (There is no flanger on either track, and no delay or reverb. That’s just the same guitar, tweaked a little on one track.)
The percussion was just a noise the guitar made when I leaned forward to hit the record button, looped in either ear with a tempo-matching short delay on it.
I did not record this to a click track, so had to estimate the beat as best I could and then stretch or shrink the track ever so slightly to align it here and there, or stretch or shrink the beat tracks here or there to fit the guitars.
I didn’t think I’d have any words, though. I’d been lousy about posting science news over the last month, and I’ve been more and more distracted by other things. Then I found that Nature article I think a couple hours after it went up on their site: Covid vaccines actually improve outcomes for cancer immunotherapy patients.
I am rather closely related to one such patient.
But there’s all sorts of other things going on in that story. It’s about a broken cell-regeneration system being set right by other cells that deceptively use broken parts of viruses to learn how to fight off that infection. Something about the bits of proteins reminded me of the sound of this not-quite-right guitar.
And there’s also (sigh) all the politics that’s gotten wound up in the medical science here. The immunotherapy trials using NIH grants that have been cancelled. The panic over and rejection of mRNA vaccines in public health in the wake of a pandemic that was almost a whole lot worse. The fact that even saying that means I have taken a political side. These are all symptoms of a body politic that is at war with itself, a broken system deceptively using bits of misinformation against itself. The mRNA vaccine and the immune checkpoint blockade seem like metaphors for American political discourse.
So this is, if not a song of healing, at least a song looking forward to a time when this is all something we look back on and remember. We will get better. We will learn.
(And yes, this song is still technically a day late, so I owe a penitential cover. I wonder where that will go….)
LYRICS:
(vs D, D/E, D/G-D/G[x3] A, A/B/A/D-A/D… ch G-A-D-G [x3] G-A)
Here’s how it starts – with a cell dividing
The chromosomes break and re-fuse
Fill the cracks with proteins
Using RNA like glueThe guards at the cell are sleeping
Until a therapy raises an alarm
Then they inhibit all the checkpoints
And sort what’s broken from what belongsCH:
And when the war is over, we’ll be better, we’ll be new
Inside, the soldiers …, will remember what we went through
And we’ll know what’s true.V2:
It starts with a cell invaded
We send messengers through RNA
We wear our stolen crowns with pride
Look at this. Now look away, look away.(piano)
CH:
And when the war is over, we’ll be better, we’ll be new
Inside, the soldiers will remember what we went through
We’ll know what’s true.We’ll know what to do again
We’ll know what to do.