I enjoy Stephen Malina’s post “Energetic Aliens” about people who are in a certain weight class of productive:

  1. Able to indefinitely sustain focus on cognitive tasks for more than the well-documented 4-6 hours a day without burning out or starting to make tons of mistakes.
  2. Often described as full of energy or having an abundance of energy.
  3. Obsessed with their work.
  4. (Optional) Can function well while getting less than or equal to 6 hours of sleep.

People who meet Malina’s defintion:

  • George Church, synthetic biology legend who worked 100 hour weeks in grad school, famously got kicked out for neglecting his classes because he was so absorbed in research, and gets so “focused on one particular topic” that he forgets to eat for days,
  • Napoleon Bonaparte, who “spent 20 years flinging himself around every inch of Europe micromanaging things, including military conquests, government formations, diplomatic negotiations, the economy, universities, the media, theater, and once he weighed in a Parisian murder investigation”,
  • Robert Moses, the NYC politician whose biographer called his energy “inexhaustible”,
  • Alexander Grothendieck, the mathematician who “had done mathematics twelve hours a day, seven days a week, and twelve months a year for twenty years”, and
  • Isaac Asimov, whose “usual routine was to awake at 6 A.M., sit down at the typewriter by 7:30 and work until 10 P.M.”

One of the most fun parts of reading Gregory Zuckerman’s A Shot to Save the World, a book on the science and history of the COVID-19 vaccine, was discovering another example of an energetic alien: Uğur Şahin, founder of BioNTech, the German company that produced the single most efficacious COVID-19 vaccine, and went from pathogen identification to the first non-trial jab in less than a year.

The book talks about Şahin’s competitive streak, which dates back to his PhD days in the University of Cologne:

[Michael] Pfreundschuh [Şahin’s thesis advisor] bred intense rivalries among young scientists in his lab, believing that conflict and pressure lead to breakthroughs. He hosted weekly meetings in which he encouraged researchers to criticize one another’s work, stoking various clashes. Şahin and [Özlem] Türeci [Şahin’s partner] embraced the intense environment and were viewed by others as overly ambitious. Labmates enjoyed discussing progress they were making on various projects and comparing techniques, but Şahin and Türeci rarely shared details of their own work, sparking resentment from peers.

“They kept to themselves and took the competition more seriously than others,” says Bjöern Cochlovius, a colleague at the time.

Şahin exhibited similar impulses outside the lab. Each year, the scientists left for a day of exercise and fun in a nearby park, an outing highlighted by a relay race, four legs of four hundred meters each. Most viewed the day as a rare opportunity for bonding and relaxation. Not Şahin. He hungered to win each year’s competition, and he usually succeeded. One time, though, his team lost by a nose, with Şahin running the anchor leg. He was stunned by the result, so upset after the race that he told a teammate he needed time to calm himself, taking a half-hour walk so his anger could dissipate. Back in the lab, someone asked Şahin how he was doing.

“I’m fine,” he said, demonstrating an irritation that told a very different story.

“The race mattered to him in some important way,” says Thomas Brunk, a labmate.

Others found Şahin’s reaction distasteful, but Brunk saw it as a sign he’d likely go far in science.

“The research world is one big competition,” Brunk says.

At their first biotech startup, Ganymed Pharmaceuticals, Şahin and Türeci “worked late into the night and they expected colleagues to match their work ethic” (this was a sign of things to come at BioNTech). After scientific meetings, colleagues would head to dinner after the day’s events, but Şahin would go back to his hotel room to read a pile of journals. Şahin told staffers he felt more stress when he wasn’t working, and that his goal was to “eradicate” everything in his life unrelated to his work.

One day, a senior researcher named Michael Koslowski tried to get Şahin to temper his expectations of his staffers.

“Uğur, you have to understand that some people see this as a job, they go home and don’t think about it,” Koslowski told him.

Şahin looked genuinely shocked.

“It was a concept he didn’t understand,” Koslowski says.

Later, when some employees grumbled that they weren’t receiving enough Ganymed shares, Şahin was taken aback.

“Money shouldn’t be their motivation,” he told Koslowski. […]

Şahin’s stance didn’t reflect any kind of hunger for fortune. Material items had little value to him and Türeci. They lived in a modest apartment in downtown Mainz and didn’t own a television or car. Şahin didn’t even have a driver’s license. He relied on an aging Trek bicycle to get to work, or a regular taxi driver named Parviz if he had to go to the airport or elsewhere. Once, after colleagues saw moth holes in Şahin’s shirts and rips in the elbows of his jackets, they urged him to buy some new clothing. He just smiled, as if to say clothing and other material goods were unimportant distractions from science.

Instead, Şahin and Türeci seemed to cling to Ganymed shares as a means to maintain control of the company, perhaps because they worried their investors might halt their cancer research or even remove them from the company if Ganymed’s results proved disappointing.

Here is how Şahin and Türeci got married:

One day in 2002, they did agree to take a short break from their lab bench. Around lunchtime that day, they headed to Mainz’s city hall to get married. There were four people in the wedding party—Koslowski was the best man and the company’s administrative assistant was a witness. After a fifteen-minute ceremony, the group headed back to the lab to resume their research.

“It felt exactly as it should have been,” Koslowski says. “Anything else would have been a distraction.”

Years later, they celebrated data showing BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine efficacy in similar fashion: “Şahin surprised an associate by saying that he and Türeci were allowing themselves a reward: a thirty-minute walk”. Even after the success of the COVID-19 vaccine (which catapulted him into billionaire status and made him one of Germany’s hundred richest individuals), “[s]till biking to work, Şahin continued to leave colleagues slack-jawed with his commitment to his research. He even developed novel ways to squeeze more work time from the day. Now, he divided his days into thirty-minute blocks, without a break, as a means of making himself even more efficient, he said. Associates and others knew they had a better chance of reaching him over the weekends, though, which he filled with somewhat less-intense, sixty-minute work blocks that included a few moments of down time.”

During 2018, when BioNTech was still perfecting its mRNA technology, Şahin and Türeci “were still all work and very little play”:

Each evening they went home, brewed some coffee or tea, and began a night shift of more research and writing. They worked so hard that they only had time to sleep about four hours a night, they told members of their team. Fine, a lot of executives are workaholics. With Şahin and Türeci, though, it never was the same four hours—the couple only overlapped in bed about two hours each night, a staffer was told. It wasn’t entirely clear why the couple had adopted the gonzo sleep habits. Some employees speculated they were trying to send a passive-aggressive message to their researchers, reminding them of the preeminence of the company’s research.

“Uğur’s attitude is, if you don’t think you sleep enough, just look at me,” says a former senior BioNTech scientist. “He expects you to dedicate your life to the company.”

Employees traded stories about Şahin’s quirks, most of which related to how consumed he was by his research. There was the running to-do list he supposedly kept of all the things he wished to accomplish, such as learning a new computer language, if he ever had ten free minutes. They buzzed that he sometimes pulled out a mat and placed it on the floor of his office to grab five-minute catnaps, but he didn’t want anyone knowing that he needed the short breaks.

When Şahin and Türeci and their daughter, Delphine, went on a holiday, the family liked visiting all-inclusive resorts in the Canary Islands or elsewhere. These weren’t traditional family vacations, though. They usually shipped three or four hulking computers to these hotels, along with twenty-seven-inch computer screens, and they packed six suitcases, at least one stuffed with scientific papers. Şahin spent most days reading and writing in their hotel room while Türeci and Delphine hit the swimming pool, accompanied by a nanny or two. Şahin sometimes joined the family, lugging his scientific papers to the pool.

In 2018, the couple still lived in the same apartment in Mainz, even as their ownership stakes in BioNTech surged in value as the company raised money from new investors. Wealth and signs of affluence barely crossed Şahin’s mind, however. In a town hall meeting with employees after Türeci became BioNTech’s chief medical officer, she said she had purchased herself a necklace as a treat.

“I bought it myself because he would never buy it,” she said about Şahin. Türeci wasn’t leveling criticism—she was just teasing Şahin for how little he valued luxuries and material rewards.

Asked about his motivations, Şahin told a colleague: “You do it for the altruism, for the patients, for the glory.”