Tuesday Top of Mind 12/9/25- Empty stools in empty lab rooms

With apologies to Claude-Michel Schonberg, Herbert Kretzmer, and Cameron Mackintosh and the original singers of this adapted song.

I speak of course of Les Misérables.

All of the albums, the 1985 cast album, The 10th anniversary Dreamcast, and the 2012 movie soundtrack, have been on near repeat in my head and in my speakers since the first No Kings protests. I’ve written about it before but something about the failed revolution speaks to me in these WTF times.

My favorite song has always been Empty Chairs at Empty Tables when the survivor of the barricade, Marius, sings to the phantoms of his friends. It is hard to be a survivor of atrocities. I imagine it is harder yet to be among the survivors desperately trying to salvage what they can at the CDC. Because of the grant pulling and the firings and the August 20, 2025 attack on the CDC itself where a police officer died.

I was driving home from baking Christmas cookies with my mom when I started humming this song. I started changing the lyrics right then. I tried to stay true to the original cadence of the song and I changed some words.

Empty Stools in Empty Lab Rooms
There’s a rage that can’t be spoken
There’s a fear goes on and on
Empty stools in empty lab rooms
Now my friends are fired and gone

Here they talked of exploration
Of possibilities
Here they talked about diagnoses
And the diagnoses never came

From the laboratory in the hallway
They could see a germ defeated
And they rose crying Eureka
And I can see them now
The very science that they had worked
In the lonely lab at dawn

Oh, my friends, my friends, forgive me
That I work and you are gone
There’s a rage that can’t be spoken
There’s a fear that goes on and on

The lonely faces on the screen
Phantom shadows on the Zoom
Empty stools in empty lab rooms
Where my friends will work no more

Oh, my friends, my friends, forgive me
That I work and you are gone
There’s a rage that can’t be spoken
There’s a fear that goes on and on

What scientific advances won’t be made? What cancers will grow out of control because there is no one to stop them?

How people have to die because this is happening?