As America celebrates its 250th birthday, I'm reminded of how grateful I am to be an American.
The United States is the greatest country in the world. It's sad how easy that is to forget. But America has led modern medicine for the better part of a century. We gave the world surgical anesthesia (which made modern surgery possible), the first successful organ transplant, and the implantable pacemaker. We developed the polio vaccine that freed millions of children from paralysis, the hepatitis B vaccine, and the HPV vaccine that now prevents cancer before it starts. We pioneered cutting-edge cancer treatments and the cell-and-gene therapies saving lives that would have been lost a generation ago.
And it goes well beyond medicine. We split the atom, put a man on the moon, and built the airplane, the transistor, the internet, and modern AI. In just 250 years, a blink against the sweep of human history, we've reshaped the world in ways no one could have fathomed in 1776.
Behind all of this is the relentless, unshakeable American spirit. It began with a group of rebels who staked their lives on a laughable idea no one had proven could work, and it runs straight through to the founder chasing a ridiculous vision, the immigrant opening a business, and the researcher who refuses to believe a disease is incurable. It's the conviction that the impossible is just the not-yet-done, the willingness to laugh in the face of near-certain failure and push the world forward anyway. That's the American spirit.
My parents came here chasing exactly that. 30 years ago, they landed at JFK, and I was born a few years after. They had immigrated from Shanghai, which had been expanding its manufacturing footprint exponentially, with no limit in sight to its growth. But they still came, because building things faster and cheaper was never the whole story. What was missing was the promise the American dream painted so well: the chance to craft a story for themselves in a place where the ideas that move the world still get their start. That promise is why they crossed an ocean, and it's the same one that's pulled dreamers here for two and a half centuries.
That's the America I'm grateful for. As we celebrate 250 years, that's worth raising a glass and fighting for.
Happy birthday, America. šŗšø
