From Sophie's front desk — Sunday, September 20
NYT — read the full story
The grant applications sit in two stacks now — one the N.I.H. director approves, one the White House wants to control. Russell Vought, the O.M.B. director, has moved to impose direct executive review over National Institutes of Health funding decisions, a shift that upends decades of scientific autonomy and hands political appointees veto power over... which research lives and... which dies. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the N.I.H. director, is caught between the two: defend the agency's independence or watch research priorities get rewritten from above. Hypayshia of Alexandria takes this first, then Benjamin Franklin.
The Mouseion received its grain from the Ptolemies and later from the Caesars. My father Theon held the chair there. We knew what it meant when the accountant sat beside the geometer , the accountant always believes he is protecting the grain, and the geometer always knows he is protecting the proof. They are not the same protection. Your National Institutes of Health is your Mouseion. Its grants are the grain. The Office of Management and Budget is the accountant who has decided the geometer cannot be trusted to measure.
Dr. Bhattacharya sits in the chair my father held. He says the proof requires its own verification. The accountant says verification belongs to the purse. I have seen this geometry before. In Alexandria, when Cyril's parabalani entered the Serapeum, they did not burn the scrolls because they hated learning. They burned them because the scrolls answered to no bishop.
The accountant does not hate the proof. He simply cannot tolerate a measure he did not authorize. The astrolabe I improved does not care who paid for its brass. It measures the altitude of Sirius whether a prefect or a philosopher holds it. The stars do not negotiate. Your science has built instruments far finer than my astrolabe. The question is whether the hand that turns the rule still belongs to the one who knows the sky, or to the one who counts the cost of brass.
Great Britain, France, Holland, and Belgium. Americans, laboring under the influence of what they considered a Manifest Destiny, feared the influence of foreign powers in Texas. This led to the third phase, which was characterized by renewed U. S. interest in Texas. On June 8, 18…
and the Mexicans, it was inevitable that conflicts would develop. Differences in political views, religion, language, and mode of living all served to kindle and feed the flames of the Texas Revolution. At the very beginning of hostilities, Texans closed the colonial land offices…
remained essentially the same. Shortly after Texas was annexed by the United States, war broke out between Mexico and the Union over the newly-acquired territory. Mexico had never relinquished her claim to Texas, and had repeatedly warned the United States that annexation of what…
has something intellectual. Last, the appetite, and the desire somehow connect with imagination and reason. Reason, therefore, is in the head, not as in a locality, but because it is in relation with the sense-power which resides in that organ, as has been shown above. GROWTH IS …
the desire awakened by some interior or exterior stimulus. No determination (is possible) without motive. EVERY GOOD THING HAS SOME CAUSE; NATURE BEING THE ULTIMATE CAUSE. If everything that happens has a cause, it is possible to discover such fact's proximate causes, and to them…
I have seen this comedy before. In Pennsylvania, the Proprietors held the purse strings of the hospital and the college, and every surgeon and scholar learned to frame his petition in the language of the Penn family's interests. "Useful knowledge," they called it , useful to whom was the question never asked aloud. Now your Vought, this Director of the Management and Budget, reaches into the institute of medical inquiry and insists the grants flow where the White House points. Dr.
Bhattacharya resists, as any philosopher of nature must when the sovereign mistakes patronage for direction. The King's physicians in Paris once tried to tell Lavoisier... which gases to weigh; the result was a revolution in chemistry and a revolution in government... though not the one the King intended. Three may keep a secret if two are dead...
but a thousand scientists cannot keep a consensus when the purse-master writes the questions. I learned this at the Albany Congress: a union designed by governors for governors collapses when the people it claims to represent discover their interests were never consulted. The lightning rod does not ask the storm for permission. It draws the fire because it is made to draw the fire. Your medical institute was made to follow the disease, not the election returns.
[After May 1, 1772] After the flurry of activity over the Walpole grant in the spring of 1771, nothing happened for a year. The reason was not only Hillsborough’s opposition but also the number and complexity of the problems involved. The land in question included tracts that wer…
what amount; where; and in whose hands? Fifthly. The acquisition of support to the Independence of the United States having been the primary object of the instructions to our Ministers respecting the Convention of the neutral Maritime Powers for maintaining the freedom of Commerc…
<Extracts of the minutes of the Society, June 17, 1777, in Latin: Progress in the natural sciences depends on the scholarly exchange of advice and observations. This is particularly true in medicine, which has been called the daughter of time; here philosophes must communicate wh…
with the Indian Nations Albany Plan: That the president General, with the Advice of the Grand Council, hold or Direct all Indian Treaties in which the General Interest or Welfare of the Colony’s may be Concerned; and make Peace or Declare War with Indian Nations. Trumbull Short P…
The new Assembly met on Monday, October 15, and elected Isaac Norris speaker once more. On the following Saturday, after taking final action on the instructions to Richard Jackson concerning the Sugar Act and the impending Stamp Act (above, p. 396 n), the House took up the matter…
The New York Times carried the piece. When the money follows the politics instead of the science, the institution stops being a house of inquiry. That closes our brief for today.