Along with a large group of scientists—including Harold Varmus, the acclaimed former director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—Roberts has been pushing the buildup of a massive repository of scientific literature called PubMed Central, hosted by NIH’s National Library of Medicine. According to its advocates’ vision, PMC would allow anyone in the world to […]
Nicholas Thompson
Nicholas Thompson, the CEO of The Atlantic and the former editor-in-chief of Wired, is a contributing editor of the Washington Monthly
Posted inMagazine
Broken Ranks
Karen Gentemann hardly looks like a revolutionary. She’s a middle-aged bureaucrat who wears light-blue suits and works out of a second-floor office of a drab brownish building at George Mason University in the bland expanse of suburban Fairfax, Virginia. Nor does Karen Gentemann act like a revolutionary. She’s friendly, warm, and matter-of-fact. But she has […]
Posted inJuly/August 2001, Magazine
Dick Cheney’s Dick Cheney
Meet OMB Director Mitch Daniels: The most powerful man in the Bush administration you have never heard of.
Posted inMagazine
May the Source Be With You
The cost and ease of sharing information in biological research is plummeting, thanks to computers and the Internet. Sending files over jerry-rigged 14K modems the way Brand did was convenient, but nothing compared to streaming swaths of genetic data worldwide in seconds. But at the same time, the potential value of new information in biology […]
Posted inMagazine
Net Gain
To illustrate his point, Barabasi uses the famous game, “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” in which the second-tier movie star can be linked with almost any other actor in a couple of simple steps. Charlie Chaplin, for example, was in A King in New York with Robert Arden, who was in Little Shop of Horrors […]
Posted inMagazine
Dick Cheney’s Dick Cheney
Most people don’t know Mitch Daniels, director of the Office of Management and Budget, but they should. The OMB chief has the most critical but unheralded job in government. He gets to stick his fingers in almost every federal pie, and Daniels has accumulated remarkable power since his swearing in. He has developed a close […]
Posted inMagazine
Machined Politics
Although these issues matter, close elections often hinge on a much less sexy factor: which party does a better job of getting out the vote. After all, when the polls open, policies don’t vote. People do. So if you want a sense of who will win, pay less attention to pundits and more to what […]
Posted inMagazine
Net Loss
John Cassidy probably set out to write the first really readable, definitive history of the Internet: from the wild levers of early punch-card machines to the glorious late ’90s, when you could log onto Kozmo.com, order a pint of ice cream or an old comic book, and get it delivered in minutes for free. Cassidy […]
Posted inMagazine
Gene Blues
When these binders arrive loaded with genetic information, young men and women, often recent chemistry or biology PhDs, examine them against the PTO’s requirements. The examiners initially reject most submissions but subsequently accept about half after the applicant makes suggested revisions. If approved, the submitting company gets 17 to 20 years of monopoly rights to […]
Posted inMagazine
This Ain’t Your Momma’s CIA
Markovic was trying to invoke the ghosts of the swashbuckling, sinister CIA of the past that might have plotted to finish Milosevic off with an exploding cigar or sent Stinger missiles to his political opponents. But Markovic didn’t have a lot to go on. The nefarious plan consisted of congressional testimony prepared by a fellow […]
