Good news. My advice is find something new that you can reliable reproduce, and leverage the hell out of it. Let me know what you end up working on.
Turns out there's a lot of underexplored space in the signaling networks / systems biology of most of the above and that the tools for actually seeing and manipulating these systems are just coming online. So that makes me pretty hopeful that I can be useful! Quote from a discussion yesterday: "Alzheimer's is presently where cancer was about 30 years ago. Everyone has their favorite gene to explain what's going on, but no one has really started looking at how they all play together." Malaria has progressed even less, and the NTDs are, well... neglected. The word from an alumni in this lab is that Tb is in a similar position (But biofilms are another nut entirely to crack). Alzheimer's runs in my family and is one of the worst ways to die, so I'd be pretty happy to make even a dent that disease (Or really any of the above). So yeah, left my meeting on Friday pretty excited!