Nonetheless, we have the will.
Last Tuesday evening (April 15), after arriving home, feeding the cats, and changing out of my work clothes, I opened Google News to discover Harvard's resistance to demands by President Trump's administration. Columbia's capitulation was easy to retrieve and I quickly built the presentation which I posted that night.
Driving in to work the next morning and commuting home that afternoon, I decided to send a donation to Harvard. Right now, the check is in an envelope with a cover letter and a printout of that blog post. I will drop it into a Postal Service branch along tomorrow's commute in and it will move to a USPS regional point after 11:30 AM. It took almost a week because my days begin at 4:30 AM and by 5:00 PM composing literature is difficult. Admittedly, the letter betrayed little erudition. Plain speaking is fundamental to technical communication, validating the importance of the narrative. After a few edits, the letter carried my message.
Originally, the post launched with a bold blue Helvetica kicker: "TANSTAAFL: There ain't no such thing as a free lunch." After a couple of days of reading and reviewing, I edited that out because it was too much message without context and delivering those precepts and conclusions would have detracted from the impact of the post. Silence is golden.
My point then (and now) is that university researchers always believed that government money came with no other requirements than honesty. After a submitted proposal is accepted, following the norms of research were all that was required. The political progressivism of academia was never challenged by the granting agencies which largely shared those assumptions--and when not, they still gave out the money, lest they deny a valid inquiry for an invalid motive.
That began with Vannevar Bush. "In Science, The Endless Frontier, his 1945 report to the president of the United States, Bush called for an expansion of government support for science, and he pressed for the creation of the National Science Foundation." -- (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush) As an inventor, and then director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II, Bush articulated well the fact that the ultimate rewards of original research are often not predictable at the moment of creation. So, the government should fund "everything" (within reason; subject to peer review).
But there is no such thing as a free lunch. Finally, the government came to collect its due and what it wanted was less, not more. There was now a political price to be paid. The social agenda of the party in power is now the norm and there is no peer review. Lysenkoism and Aryan Physics were someone else's problems and now they are ours.
Edward Jenner's small pox vaccines (1796) were predicated on over 50 years of general scientific reporting from Constantinople and other Asian entrepôts. This was the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason. Experiment, publication, discussion, and debate brought material progress which included the steam engine. But there was no theory of thermodynamics--and no germ theory of disease. For over 100 years, the "animicules" revealed by Anton Leeuwenhoek's microscope were accepted as a consequence of disease, rather than the cause. Common knowledge credits Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister, and others with the proofs, but ahead of them, in 1847, John Leonard Riddell of the New Orleans Medical College argued well. (NecessaryFacts here .)
Does inoculation have unintended consequences? How could it not? Exploring those, understanding them, and building a theory that can be tested is a scientific project.
"Cloudy Nights" is a discussion board for amateur astronomers. Chatting about the recent discovery of dimethyl sulfide in the atmosphere of an exoplanet, I pointed out that DNA can edit and repair itself. My current library here in my office includes Genetics for Dummies. I make no pretense. And that is just one reason why I am not the U.S. Secretary of Health & Human Services.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.