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Tag: MIT

Eric Steven Lander the 54 year old US Professor of Biology at MIT and co-chair of the US president’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, has been profiled by Gina Kolata for the New York Times. Kolata states in the article, “His Ph.D. is in pure mathematics, in a subfield so esoteric and specialized that even if someone gets a great result, it can be appreciated by only a few dozen people in the entire world. But he left that world behind and, with no formal training, entered another: the world of molecular biology, medicine and genomics… he heads a biology empire and raises money from billionaires. He also teaches freshman biology (a course he never took) at M.I.T., advises President Obama on science and runs a lab… To him, biography is something of a confection: “You live your life prospectively and tell your story retrospectively, so it looks like everything is converging.”

 

Inspired by Gina Kolata http://ow.ly/8lLwt image source http://ow.ly/8lLCj

Kamer Daron Acemoğlu the 44 year old Turkish-American Professor of Economics at MIT has argued in an interview published by The Browser that it is important that we understand how and why leading western nations have over the past 30 years become far less equal. Acemoğlu states, “A lot of things don’t change radically, but inequality has… it’s an important topic and there is no reason for it to be taboo… if you want to understand the top inequality, why the top 0.1% – even more than what the 1% Occupy Wall Streeters are talking about – have been earning such huge amounts, then really you have to think about the social policy aspects of it and the politics of it. There is perhaps some sort of failure in how our system is working… if you look from the 1950s up to the end of the 1970s, the share of total national income in the US earned by the richest 1% was about 10%. If you look at the 2000s, it’s well over 20%…”

 

Inspired by The Browser http://ow.ly/82LW8 image source M.Weitzel http://ow.ly/82LZ8

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