Harvard Professor Quietly Gives His Lab Workers His Entire Salary Every Year

As billionaire tech moguls ravish public research funds and startups siphon knowledge workers into pie-in-the-sky venture capitalist schemes, one professor has found his own key to innovation: scientists who are able to do crucial lab work without going broke. David Liu is a chemistry professor and director of the Merkin Institute of Transformative Technologies in Healthcare at Harvard. For the past five years, he's celebrated Thanksgiving by giving away his entire salary — sans taxes — to the students and workers who staff his biomedical lab. According to The Guardian, the tradition kicked off during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Liu learned that his student researchers were struggling to afford bikes to get to work. He started trying to redistribute his income by way of Amazon gift cards, but quickly switched to checks because "everyone thought they were being scammed." While individual salaries for Harvard staff aren't publicly available, we can assume Liu takes home a pretty penny ... Read full article.