TWIMC: I've been Mathematician and Mother for ~30 years (now also Grandmother) and this is what matters. I spent the last 10 years studying individual variation on characteristics that are under selection but that have no heritability repercussions in the time scale under study.

In these studies I have "used" (please make a note of this word) primarily host-pathogen systems but my curiosity for completely different systems was particularly vivid last year and I was happily moving away from infectious diseases when the pandemic started.

Early in the Covid pandemic I started being approached by reporters who wanted to understand what was happening and what to expect over times to come. To respond to them I started studying the data and interpreting it in light of my models.

We were in March-April and kept hearing herd immunity thresholds around 60-80%. So as a matter of honesty I had to explain to my reporters that under the models I was using (which accounted for individual variation as that's what I do) HITs were much lower (10-20% in Europe).

In matter of days my life turned 180 degrees! All sorts of craziness from people challenging those numbers to going all the way to challenge me as a person and a suite of models that have nothing to oppose. When in fact neither me nor the models really care about what HITs are.