Jeffery H. Toney Quotes
We cannot wait for regulators to catch up with science.
Jeffery H. Toney, Chemist and Provost of Kean University, Letter to New York Times, November 10, 3014
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Regulators, like any other group of people, with the exception of an inventor or innovator and his/her team, are ALWAYS way behind the innovators. However, typically the regulators are not even up on innovations after their creation for several years. They generally are not appointed or hired for their technical skills, and Congress rarely provides enough of a budget to hire enough staff to give them the time to keep up with the field. For a professor in a University, this alone requires about half of his time. No agency can allocate that kind of time. Worse, is the ultimate regulators are the legislators—Congress at the Federal level. They often do not invest enough time to read the regulatory legislation upon which they vote, much less keep up with the fields they regulate.
By “arts” Jefferson meant the mechanical arts—inventions and engineering. Jefferson Extrapolated the science and technology progress at the time to the future in a way that few others did at that time.
Bush and some religious fundamentalists believe that even a fertilized human egg cell created for in vitro fertilization and not needed, is an incipient life. As such they oppose any use of these cells for anything but procreation of human life, and many oppose the concept of in vitro fertilization completely as it involves the killing and trivialization of life. Most Americans disagree and want to use the excess of fertilized eggs for research and help prolong and sustain life.
Explaining the difficulty of lobbying for controls on science and technology:
Coburn advocated Congress appropriating money for research and then staying out of the details of how the research is conducted and which scientific or medical problems are researched.
Most scientists do not have the skill or the totality of knowledge to accurately predict the effect of scientific research and learning on society. Many are not interested. Those who try to communicate with politicians and the public are usually met with indifference or suspicion. Above all, the scientific and mathematical literacy of the public is so weak, that it is impossible in much of science to even explain the science to the lay public much less explain its implications. Soddy was a bit of an idealist from a class society and he felt the upper classes should be better informed by scientists.
Stem cells are cells of the body that transform into all other cells as needed. Embryonic stem cells are the ones most easily transformed to create other needed cells. There was and is a large supply of embryonic stem cells but religious abortion opponents were concerned that if there were enough success there would be a market for fetal stem cells which would encourage some women to have abortions so that they could sell the embryonic stem cells. President Bush, to placate his religious right wing, had banned federal funds being used for fetal stem cell research. President Obama, who had campaigned on this issue and been elected, then overturned the ban with this quote.
At the time, the financial industry spent more money for lobbyists and campaign contributions than any other sector of the economy. The result is that they had extraordinary access to and influence upon members of Congress and their staffs, that more often than not, the actually drafted the language for laws, amendments and regulations and then les the strategy to pass the legislation or finalize the rule. Moreso than any other industry, they wrote their own rules. Even after the Meltdown of 2008 and the Great Recession where there was a public outcry for reform, the Dodd Frank legislation was influenced by the industry and after passage most of the rules and interpretations were written by the industry or greatly influenced by them.
Most environmentalists limit the vision of their solutions to using less of our precious natural resources which is very important but just as important and perhaps more so in the long run is increasing the supply of these resources. Food is an example. The major reason that there is no serious food shortage world-wide is that we have increased the productivity of agriculture requiring less labor, less water, less fertilizer, less land, and less dependency on weather. Distribution has also improved, but there is no very good way of distributing something for which there is a great shortage.
His major facilities are located in Rockville, Maryland in the “Biotechnology Corridor” which is 10 minutes from the National Institutes of Health, the Surgeon General’s Office, the Food & Drug Administration and 40 minutes to the White House or Capital Hill.
