Today word passed rapidly among the history-of-science community of the sudden death of Professor Michael S. Mahoney, one of my undergraduate advisors in the History and Philosophy of Science Program at Princeton University in the mid-1970s. It was in Mike’s classes on the scientific worldview of the middle ages and antiquity and the origins of modern science that I placed my interests in science and technology in a historical context, and in his graduate seminar on problems in early modern mathematics that I was lucky enough as an undergraduate to get a taste of real humanistic scholarship, alongside an incredibly talented collection of graduate students.

For the last 10 or 15 years, Mike had been struggling along with other scholars to create the new discipline of the “history of computing and software,” a topic on which he once very kindly solicited some artifacts and mementos from my own software business venture of the 1980s (though these trifles do not figure at all in his much higher-level thoughts on the topic). He will be sorely missed at Princeton and among his past students and until-recent-days collaborators. UPDATE (7/30): official obituary. I will also monitor changes the websites linked above.

And it was only in today’s paper that word appeared of the death of Professor Victor McKusick, who was one of my wife’s teachers at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. I know that my wife saw him as a committed guardian for much of what was beautiful about the Hopkins medical tradition: exceptional science and scholarship combined with a deep and humane concern for patient care and teaching. Although I once saw him up close at a faculty event, I knew him mainly through her eyes and press coverage.

Somehow I had always linked him in my mind’s eye with another figure whom I knew much better, William O. Baker, the late materials scientist, and former chairman of Bell Labs who was also vice chairman at the New Jersey Commission on Science and Technology, where I worked in the 1990s. Baker and McKusick — the surnames alone speak of a different time in American science when it was predominantly a WASP enterprise, at least at the highest levels of institutional authority — were both great scientists, complete gentlemen, and so far as I can tell entirely committed to achieving a fuller diversity in American science.

Though Baker died in 2005, my tendency to link the two was oddly echoed in the obituaries: I had not realized until reading McKusick’s that another trait both men shared was primary education in a one-room schoolhouse, McKusick in Maine, and Baker in Maryland. So with two deaths this week and another one linked in my mind, it has not been a good week.

I’ve finally signed up as a supporter of Science Debate 2008, a few days after it didn’t take place, and not without some misgivings. Yes, it’s probably a good thing that the presidential candidates start talking about the role of science, technology and innovation in economic recovery (and in fact it’s a theme I’ve heard creep into Sen. Clinton’s speech in recent days).

But the Science Debate organization itself raises a few concerns. I can’t find it listed on Guidestar as as a charitable organization, and actually it bears the strong marks of an “astroturfing” operation put together by DC lobbyists for the major research universities. [UPDATE 8/9/08: ScienceDebate now says clearly that it is applying for charitable status. See their donation form. I still have some misgivings.] Please, prove me wrong in the comments if you will, but if you want to get the sense of how astroturf looks different from a venture motivated by the genuine joy in science, check out Prof. Brian Greene’s World Science Festival planned for here in New York later this spring. Both have impressive steering committees, but there’s a big, big difference in tone. Which do you think will be more effective at building public support in the long run?

It’s not that the organizers of Science Debate 2008 are wrong to focus some public attention on the reasons national governments in the industrialized nations fund scientific investigation, even in relatively hard times. These are well understood: above-average economic growth owes to innovation, and innovation looks to basic science, and the positive externalities of basic science are so strong that private industry will not itself fund it adequately.

And yet, these are hard times. And there’s something more than a little troublesome about one sector of the economy among the many dependent on public support presuming that its needs are so much more obvious and compelling than those of the others. Almost, er, elitist, one might say.

More on OK, let’s have a ‘Science Debate’ . . . but a full one

Here’s an interesting trend to watch in the convergence of various economic development activities where universities and communities interact.

The Connective Corridor initiative at Syracuse University and the UniversityCity Connections initiative at Colorado State University in Fort Collins are interesting examples I’ve recently come across of universities being used as key components of downtown economic-development strategies.

Both campuses are not quite downtown, but each is clearly conceived as part of the overall asset base of its central city. Through these initiatives, civic leadership is assuring connectivity – both concretely in terms of transportation infrastructure and abstractly in terms of “mind share” – between the healthy asset and the part of town needing improvement or stimulation.

I don’t know Fort Collins except through reading about it for my professional work, but I know Syracuse well enough to know this connectivity is an urgent matter. Without it, the gorgeous architecture of downtown, the emerging arts district of the Near Westside, the Technology Garden business incubator, and the nightlife around Armory Square all remain dangerously disconnected from the source of vitality (and purchasing power) up University Hill.
More on Some thoughts on university/downtown connections

Those research institutions that moved early to raise state or other non-federal funding for research on “unapproved” embryonic stem-cell lines now confront an uncomfortable implication or two. Bear with me. . .

Any one who set up such a program understood — though perhaps many outside the university system did not — that not only would they be charging all direct costs of “unapproved” research to non-federal sources, but they would also be forgoing recovery of all related indirect costs.

In other words, if a university financed a facility in which non-approved research would be done, it could not then allocate its amortization of these capital costs to the pool from which indirect cost recoveries are negotiated with the feds. Same with shared research infrastructure and administrative services related to unapproved research projects, and with facilities maintenance.
More on Implications of the recent stem cell news . . . will the race go to the slow?