University Of Chicago Alumni

"The wilderness begins at the edge of my body, at the edge of my consciousness, and extends to the edge of the universe, and it is filled with menace."

"This is not a man who sits down to "write a poem"; rather, some burden of understanding and feeling, some need to know, forces his poems into being. Thoreau said, "Be it life or death, what we crave is reality." So it is with Carruth. And even in hell, knowledge itself bestows a halo around the consciousness with, at moments, attains it."

"I had always been aware that the Universe is sad; everything in it, animate or inanimate, the wild creatures, the stones, the stars, was enveloped in the great sadness, pervaded by it. [...] Never then or now have I been able to look at a cloudless sky at night and see beauty there."

"There were travel accounts and anthropological disquisitions; there were histories of philosophy and a bumper crop of inquiries into the history of mythology, which opened the way for investigations of such favorite romantic subjects as folkloric legends, epic poetry, golden ages, pagan gods, natural religions, and the hidden meaning of symbols. As in the case of Friedrich Schlegel, interest in the East arose remarkably quickly; Schelling perhaps saw similarities between his work and that of the Greek mysteries as early as 1802, but only in 1805-6 did he decide this pre-rational Greece had oriental origins. As his Bruno (1802) suggests, Schelling too came to his iconoclastic conclusions by way of the Neoplatonic, western images of the mystical and wise East, rather than by reading eastern texts directly. Christian Bunsen may have learned Mythenforschung from the elderly Heyne, but he took his ardent devotion to Sanskrit and Persian from Friedrich Schlegel; by 1814, Bunsen was determined to integrate the study of these oriental languages into German culture so thoroughly that ‘‘even the devil would not be able to tear it out!’ The romantic geographer Carl Ritter leaned heavily on William Jones and Friedrich Creuzer, but his remarkable Die Vorhalle europäischer Völkergeschichten vor Herodotus (1819) fleshed out an ur-Indian diffusionary history that was even more ambitious than were their models."

"But the “furious” generation did not want to tarry in positivist particularism, for they thought they now had the materials and expertise to tackle big questions. The biggest of these was the one ethnographers had failed to answer, classicists had ignored, and positivist orientalists had sidelined since the 1820s: that was, of course, Creuzer’s classic question, the question of the geographical origins of all myths, religions, and symbols, or, put differently, the question of the West’s cultural dependence on the East."

"What a large number did, however, have in common was the longing to return to subjects left fallow by mid-century scholars, namely, the impact of eastern cultures on western ideas; the erotic life of the ancients; and the role of religion in pagan antiquity. Certainly, the liberal positivist generation had begun to feel some of these pressures by the time they achieved chaired status, but most were unable and unwilling to alter their research programs to suit the new opportunities and new demands; often, indeed, their reaction to the next generation was a kind of retreat from lines of inquiry they feared would cast them back into the pre- wissenschaftlich world of their romantic forbears. For them, to break with Greek sources, as also to break with the Old Testament texts over which they had labored so intensively, was to lose touch with history, a disastrous leap of faith into an alien and mistrusted modern world. Many members of the fin de siécle generation were unequally dubious about the modern world — but they were, with respect to the interpretation of the ancient world, much more inclined to be risk- takers and self-confident propagandists for the Orient’s coming of age."

"But Creuzer was also a product of his age and its aspirations; like Friedrich Schlegel, he was seeking a supra-confessional history of religion, and his combination of Neo- platonic sources and romantic ideas allowed him to craft a story of the western migration of myths and symbols, mysterious puzzles created by a small elite, who hoped to transfer true knowledge only to those intellectuals suited to understand it."

"Some academic linguists tried to discourage this neoromantic furor in their students, as did Lüders; but some were at least mildly attracted to it, and around the academy’s fringes, at least, one begins to see it seeping into scholarly circles, Both Eduard Meyer and Carl Becker — arch enemies over university reform during the Weimar period — found much to chew on in Spengler’s Decline of the West. The innovative, if peripheral, art historians Aby Warburg and Fritz Saxl were drawn together by their mutual interest in the impact of oriental astrology on western art — a subject near and dear to the hearts of the “furious”’ orientalists. Academic work in the circles that surrounded Rudolf Otto, Rudolf Bultmann, Martin Heidegger, Jung, Martin Buber, Richard Wilhelm, and Josef Strzygowski increasingly took eastern forms of mysticism seriously, and faced few — like Johannes Voss or August Lobeck in the 1820s — willing and able to drag students and scholarship back into neoclassical rationalism. Some of this ferment also touched literary writers like Hesse, Thomas Mann, Alfred Déblin, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Berthold Brecht, all of whom wrote orientalizing master- pieces — though of sorts that could not have been written in the mid-nineteenth century."

"Though they tended to religious radicalism and political liberalism, most mid-century orientalists did not, as had Montesquieu and Voltaire, contrast rational oriental sages with western intolerance and cruelty — though there were a few philosophers, like Arthur Schopenhauer and Marx’s friend Karl Friedrich Koeppen, who continued this tradition. A few picked up Friedrich Schlegel’s suggestions about affinities between medieval Germans and Indians or Persians, and speculation intensified on the question of the ‘‘Indo-German” homeland."

"This opened the way, as Partha Mitter has argued, for Hegel’s insight that since art represented not reality but some ideal of it, different cultures might have different ideals, and ultimately, much later, for Heinrich Zimmer’s contrast between the seductive but superficial beauty of the Greeks and the more profound religious aims of Indian forms."

"Here, however, I will argue that the cultural politics of Orientalistik were defined much less by ‘“‘modern” concerns — such as how to communicate with or exert power over the locals — than by traditional, almost primeval, Christian questions, such as (1) what parts of the Old Testament are true, and relevant, for Christians? (2) how much did the ancient Israelites owe to the Egyptians, Persians, and Assyrians? (3) where was Eden and what language was spoken there? and (4) were the Jews the only people to receive revelation? The German Reformers’ attempts to clean up God’s Word had involved orientalist knowledge from the first — and indeed sixteenth-century humanists had already struggled with many of the philological and chronological questions that would plague their descendants 300 years later. Although new sources were added, the old ones — particularly the Old Testament, the church fathers, and classical authors — continued to exert a powerful effect on the imaginations of even the most cutting-edge scholars long beyond the Enlightenment."

"Despite the author’s commitment to universalism, Carl Ritter’s Vorhalle (1819) already looked in this direction. In this text, Ritter speculated that a prehistorical diaspora had pushed peoples from northern India westward, laying the foundations for European civilization. To demonstrate that the Black Sea kingdom of Colchis, mythical home of Medea and destination of the Argonauts, was not an Egyptian, but an Indian settlement, he depended partly upon physical characteristics, arguing that the Colchians’ facial features and hair were different from those of the Egyptians, though both were, according to Herodotus, dark- skinned.©® Ritter insisted that the Indians, Persians, Germanic tribes, Scandinavians, Greeks, and Scythians shared a ‘“‘common root” as well as a kind of primeval monotheism, commonalities that made them more like one another than were some groups who shared spaces contemporaneously, like the Romans and Etruscans, or those who shared it over time, such as ancient and modern Indians. Ritter was not too worried about dark-skinned Indian ancestors, but as the British extended more and more control over the subcontinent, this relationship between modern — “fallen” — Indians and idealized ancient Indians began to become more problematic. Increasingly pervasive was the view that India was not the homeland of the Aryans, but rather the place where Aryans had mixed with darker others, instigating the cultural decline and weakness that would characterize Indian history ever afterward. Those who elaborated this view included A. W. Schlegel, Christian Lassen, Theodor Benfey, and C. F. Koeppen.” That these leading Indologists spent so much time, and spilled so much ink, in discussing this subject confirms the field’s sense that this was not only a crucially important issue, but also one for which a variety of difficult-to-interpret sources needed to be read to yield essentially the same results.” If these scholars used “race” in varying ways, clearly it was becoming a more prominent, and meaningful, part of the study of the ancient Orient."

"I have been forced to conclude that German orientalism — defined as the serious and sustained study of the cultures of Asia — was not a product of the modern, imperial age, but some- thing much older, richer, and stranger, something enduringly shaped by the longing to hear God’s word, to understand the meaning of his revelation, and to propagate (Christian) truths as one understood them. But I have also concluded, and will attempt to persuade my readers as well, that this legacy was by no means a simple one, and endowed German orientalism with a cultural ambivalence we have yet to appreciate."

"..Iamblichus, Pausanias, Plotinus, and Strabo, scholars who wrote in times of relative Greek insecurity vis-a-vis the Orient and who not only appreciated their debts to the East but also, however dimly, realized that the perfect clarity of their Olympian culture was in some sense superficial compared to the mysterious profundity of their eastern neighbors."

"Though generated by thoroughly western rivalries and concerns, invoking the Orient has often been the means by which counter-hegemonic positions were articulated; ‘‘orientalism”’ then, has played a crucial role in the unmaking, as well as the making, of western identities."

"Although she was primarily a particle theorist, her most important work may well be her contribution to our understanding of superconductivity. She was a trailblazer for and, in her retirement, led the effort to chronicle the contributions of women to physics in the 20th century."

"Enrico Fermi lived from 1901 to 1954, a period of great progress in physics and a period in which opportunities for women to study and work in institutions of higher learning increased significantly in Europe and North America. Though there are a few examples of women who made important contributions to physics in the 18th century such as and , it was only in Fermi's time that the number began to increase significantly. It is remarkable that almost immediately after they gained entrance to laboratories and universities, among them appeared women of great creative ability who made lasting contributions to physics. This talk is mainly about some of these whose scientific lives are not as well known as their contributions deserve — Emmy Noether, , , . Additionally, some outstanding women whose work played a role in Enrico Fermi's life in physics are noted - , , , and ."

"In 1943 fear that the German war machine might use s was abating and among s another fear was taking its place - that of a postwar nuclear arms race with worldwide proliferation of nuclear weapons. Manhattan Project scientists and engineers began to discuss uses of in the postwar world. Niels Bohr, Leo Szilard, James A. Franck and others launched a concerted effort to lay groundwork for international control of the technology. Realizing the devastation nuclear weapons could cause and that they could be made and delivered much more cheaply than conventional weapons of the same power, they tried to persuade policy makers to take into account long range consequences of using atomic bombs and not base their decisions on short range military expediency alone. They met with little success. The scientists' main message, unheeded then and very relevant now, is that worldwide international agreements are needed to provide for inspection and control of nuclear weapons technology. Their memoranda and reports remain as historic documents eloquently testifying to their concern."

"Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard worked together at in 1939-40, just after was discovered, to ascertain the feasibility of a nuclear chain reaction, and then on the construction of the first nuclear reactor. Szilard believed a nuclear bomb could be built, and that the Germans may be doing so, but Fermi was sceptical. The Anglo-American project to build a bomb began late in 1941 after brought the to the attention of U. S. physicists. Szilard recalled "On matters scientific or technical there was rarely any disagreement [but] Fermi and I disagreed from the very start of our collaboration about every issue that involved not science but principles of action in the face of the approaching war. If the nation owes us gratitude — and it may not — it does so for having stuck it out together as long as was necessary." As the war with Germany was drawing to a close and the successful construction of the atomic bombs was well underway, these two men took opposing positions regarding use of the bombs."

"Emmy Noether proved two deep theorems, and their converses, on the connection between and s. Because these theorems are not in the mainstream of her scholarly work, which was the development of modern abstract algebra, it is of some historical interest to examine how she came to make these discoveries. The present paper is an historical account of the circumstances in which she discovered and proved these theorems which physicists refer to collectively as . The work was done soon after . The failure of local energy conservation in the general theory was a problem that concerned people at that time, among them David Hilbert, Felix Klein, and Albert Einstein. Noether's theorems solved this problem. With her characteristically deep insight and thorough analysis, in solving that problem she discovered very general theorems that have profoundly influenced modern physics."

"There is work that profits children, and there is work that brings profit only to employers. The object of employing children is not to train them, but to get high profits from their work."

"If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn’t have to lug a camera."

"While photographs may not lie, liars may photograph."

"The terminal phase of the life cycle is receiving increased attention from social scientists. While this may be caused by the student interested in the sociology of knowledge, it is nevertheless striking that in the past few years there has been a sudden multiplication of studies of perceptions of time, finitude, attitudes toward death, and other psychological and sociological aspects of death and dying (an interest which is reflected also in the professional literature of physicians, psychiatrists, nurses, and s)."

"Studies of human behavior in different societies have helped the social scientist understand the relations between culture and personality and have helped him shake free his hypotheses about human behavior from particular sets of cultural biases. These points are as important in studying middle age and aging as in studying child development."

"The of are rapidly changing, thereby altering the traditional relations between age groups. Some observers think ageism is increasing in the United States; others, that it is decreasing. In either case, stereotypes of old age are now changing with the rise of the young-old—that is, the age group 55 to 75, who constitute 15 percent of the population—who are relatively healthy, relatively affluent, relatively free from traditional responsibilities of work and family and who are increasingly well educated and politically active. This group will develop a variety of new needs with regard to meaningful use of time and for maximizing the opportunities for both self-enhancement and community participation. The young-old have enormous potential as agents of social change in creating an age-irrelevant society and in thus improving the relations between age groups."

"Age is an underlying dimension of social organization, for in all societies the relations between individuals and between groups are regulated by age difference. Thus far, however, little systematic attention has been paid by sociologists or social psychologists to the ways in which age groups relate to each other in modern complex societies, to age-grading, to relations between generations, of to systems of norms which govern ."

"Social scientists are interested in two broad themes or aspects of . The first is how any society functions as an age structure and how changing over time affect economic, political, and other aspects of social organization. The second is how attitudes and roles change over the life cycle of the individual or in cohorts of individuals."

"Evidence is presented to show that there is no toxin producing the in . Partial evidence is presented to show that the periods of active blood destruction which are seen as the exception in pernicious anemia cases during a series of transfusions are due to the activity of the blood-destroying organs of the body rather than to the intrinsic weakness of the pernicious anemia blood corpuscle. It is questionable whether blood destruction is as important a factor in producing the anemia of pernicious anemia as it is at present usually assumed to be."

"In a previous publication I showed that the transfused red blood-corpuscle does not have a transitory existence in the body, but that it remains in the blood-stream for a considerable length of time. The method used to show this is dependent on the iso-agglutinins present in blood and is based on the fact (which demonstrated with in vitro mixtures of blood corpuscles) that corpuscles belonging to two different blood groups if mixed can be separated quantitatively from one another by treating with a serum that will differentially agglutinate the corpuscles of one kind, leaving the others free. This method applies equally well to in vivo mixtures; the transfused blood-corpuscles in a patient can be separated from. the recipient’s native corpuscles by differentially agglutinating the recipient’s corpuscles with appropriate serum, provided the donor and recipient are in different groups. This method is only applicable, of course, to cases in which patients belonging to (’s nomenclature) are transfused with Group IV blood, or in which patients belonging to Group I are transfused with Group II or Group III blood, but in these cases the history of the transfused blood can be followed readily."

"Ashby accurately measured the life span of s to be up to 110 days, contradicting the perceived convention of an erythrocytic life span of only 14-21 days. She was best known for developing the Ashby technique for determining red blood cell survival, but also contributed to the diagnosis of and studied in the brain. Ashby was also an amateur pianist and composer with numerous compositions published between 1955-1968."

"It was hoped that some light might be thrown on the length of life of normal blood corpuscles and the mechanism of their removal from the circulation by the study of the elimination of transfused blood, which it is possible to make when the transfused blood is of a group unlike that of the recipient. This study has brought to light two facts, first, that the length of time that transfused blood remains in the circulation varies greatly; and second, that the elimination is not a continuous process but takes place in more or less cyclic crises, so that the circulation seems to rest more heavily on this cyclic activity of the body than on the condition of the corpuscle."

"1. It is possible in mixtures of corpuscles of different groups to separate the corpuscles practically quantitatively by treating with a serum that agglutinates the corpuscles of one kind, leaving the others unagglutinated. 2. After a recipient has been transfused with blood of a group other than his own, specimens of his blood treated with a serum that will agglutinate his own corpuscles but not the transfused corpuscles show unagglutinated corpuscles in large numbers. 3. These unagglutinated corpuscles which appear in the recipien's blood after such a transfusion are the transfused corpuscles and their count is a quantitative indicator of the amount of transfused blood still in the recipient's circulation. 4. The life of the transfused corpuscle is long; it has been found to extend for 30 days and more. The beneficial results of transfusion are without doubt not due primarily to a stimulating effect on the bone marrow, but, it is reasonable to assume, to the functioning of the transfused blood corpuscles."

"On April 20, 1988, throughout the United States and Canada, the first certification examination in will be administered. Those who pass will be awarded a certificate "of recognition of added competence" in geriatrics. This is a landmark event, for several diverse reasons. has emerged as a well-defined field of expertise. Since the now almost legendary committee, chaired by , issued its report in 1979,1 stating that there was clearly a distinct area of geriatric medicine that could be identified by its special body of knowledge and approach to patient care, there has been growing acceptance of that assertion. While at first many in academic medicine and community practice were skeptical, saying "I have been taking care of old people for years already," there is an increasing understanding of better ways to evaluate patients, establish the goals of treatment, and achieve those goals."

"The landscape of the US continues to undergo change. As market forces are invoked to drive lower cost, better access, and improved quality, the entities in the health care market continue to diversify. For instance, (with personal electronic health records), // (with the promise of an affordable nonprofit employer health care system), / (combining a health plan with s), emerging -- relationships, and (in discussion to acquire ) represent major relatively recent developments. CVS/Aetna is the most well-developed of these changes. Nearly 6 years ago, the growth of retail clinics was described as a potentially positive disruptor, especially in the expansion of access and convenience.1 Many clinicians were concerned about lack of continuity and delegation of care to nonphysicians, yet these clinics seemed to offer a more accessible and less costly point of care compared with emergency department visits or even physicians’ office visits. If retail clinics could overcome the limits of legacy electronic health records to connect to other components of patients’ care, this model could even create a virtual comprehensive “system” as a point of connectivity and care coordination."

"The science of has advanced dramatically. As recently as 20 years ago, theories of the were just beginning to emerge and were largely theoretical. ... In the last 2 decades, advances in genetics and have led to extraordinary new understandings in how cells age, how programs cells to die, and how plays a role in the lifespan of organisms. ... The dual challenges for the 21st century are to link progress in basic science and clinical research to effective clinical care, and to create a health care system with properly trained physicians to provide evidence-based care for the growing numbers of older people."

"Though many of our geographers give most attention to special phases of their study, there is a common ground upon which all should stand. The geographical needs of America are great. Most of our teachers are so deficient in knowledge of the subject that our general educational standards are low. Geography, on the whole, occupies a low plane. We know of no way to improve these conditions in which the efforts and influence of the working geographers shall not be paramount. This is a duty that our geographers owe to their study; and there is nothing that will bring them into closer touch, that will make their united influence in such Associations as ours more effective, than to work together, not as experts in this or that department of the study, but as geographers, pure and simple, who have a common interest in the improvement of geographical conditions and who desire and expect to participate in the promotion of all approved measures designed to bring about better conditions."

"Map-makng is very old, and has been practised by the most primitive peoples for many ages. Rude scratches on many rocks in South America are now interpreted as maps. East Greenland natives carve maps out of wood; American Indians make map-sketches on birch and other barks; the Marshall Islanders charted the sailing routes along their coasts long before they knew of the white man; the desert nomad sketches maps in the sand to illustrate his wanderings, and nearly every primitive tribe to-day makes maps to show routes to hunting-grounds, animal paths, fisheries, fords, etc. They know as well as we do that maps are practically a human necessity; but we know further that a good map often places before our eyes an amount of accurate geographical information that might take many months to dig out of books."

"Post-translational modifications, PTMs, in histone proteins, including lysine methylation and acylation, regulate gene expression through recruitment of reader proteins to the nucleosome. Dysregulation of these events is prevalent in a wide range of diseases, such that there is much interest in characterizing these modifications and their binding partners as well as developing inhibitors for these protein-protein interactions."

"I will discuss mechanistic studies of the factors that contribute to these PTM-mediated protein-protein interactions using a combination of high-throughput mechanistic screening, genetic code expansion, and investigation of PTM-isosteres, and how this has led to novel approaches to inhibit them."

"I wanted to go to a Black college to allow the students to have the opportunity to get the kind of education that I had gotten; because I felt coming from where I came from that it was almost impossible for me to get the kind of training I had gotten. (...) I squeezed through the wire mesh fence."

"You must love chemistry; you must be committed; and you must prove yourself over and over."

"Except for the extermination of the Tasmanians, modern history recognizes no case in which the virtually complete supplanting of the indigenous population of a country by an alien stock has been achieved in as little as two generations. Yet this, in fact, is what has been attempted in Palestine since the beginning of the Twentieth century. Herein lies the nub of the Middle East – at once its greatest tragedy and its most perplexing but inescapable problem."

"...One can see traces of arguments that she developed in her later work critiquing the orientalist notion of an Islamic city, or the urban apartheid of Rabat, when she carefully explains the ways in which foreign elites separated government and social decision-making from the indigenous population for centuries."

"...For many years the only woman in her department, she along with others established the Organization of Women Faculty at Northwestern University in the late 1960s. In the late 1970s their study of faculty salaries revealed significant gender disparities that embarrassed the administration."

"Since the very beginning of the history of the State, the Catholic Church has been an important factor in the upbuilding of the commonwealth and the welfare and education of the people. The difficulties encountered were not easy to overcome in the midst of an unsettled, careless, and often lawless community."

"Devotion to the Bible remains an underappreciated aspect of American religious life partly because it fails to generate controversy. This essay opens a window onto America's relationship with the Bible by exploring a controversial moment in the : the public reception of professor Edgar J. Goodspeed's American Translation (1923). Initially, at least, most Americans flatly rejected Goodspeed's impeccably credentialed attempt to cast the language of the Bible in contemporary “American” English. Accusations of the professor's irreligion, bad taste, vulgarity, and crass modernity emerged from nearly every quarter of the Protestant establishment (with the exception of some card-carrying theological modernists), testifying to a widespread but unexplored attachment to the notion of a traditional Bible in the early twentieth century. By examining this barrage of reaction, “Monkeying with the Bible” argues that Protestants, along with some others in 1920s America, believed that traditional biblical language was among the forces that helped stabilize the development of American civilization."

"Four hundred years ago the Bible of England was the . Few men could read it, and fewer women. For knowledge of it ordinary people were dependent upon the clergy, who were themselves none too well acquainted with its meaning. It was at such a time that a young Oxford man, William Tyndale, undertook the task of making a translation of the New Testament directly from the into the , and thus laid the foundation of the . The disfavor with which the medieval church regarded the circulation of the Bible among the people had found expression in a regulation of the , passed in 1229 , that no layman should be allowed to have any book of the Bible, especially in a translation, except perhaps the ."

"Not a few of the experienced times of , when in s they felt themselves in the very presence of God, heard him speak, and saw celestial realities."

"Milton] felt you could influence the political sphere. So he wrote a lot about politics--of course--and public policy. Not politics--public policy. But at the same time, I think he believed, or at least it was his public persona, that he was also a scientist. That his scientific work was different. That he could, as one EconTalk guest said: He could put on his science hat, and then take it off and put on his ideology hat. And my claim is that that's a delusion--I don't mean to be critical about Milton, who I'm a big fan of, and incredibly important person in my education and in my life. But I think it is--so I don't know how aware or unaware he was about it. I don't want to say he was deluded. But I think many economists are deluded into thinking, and want to believe that they can wear those two hats separately. And it's very self-serving. We need to confront the fact that it's very much in our interest to pretend to the world that we have a scientific aspect to our work that is free of values. And I think that's--I think it's fundamentally deceptive, and dishonest."