emolument nostalgia
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I did my duty as reviewer on an NIH study section for four years – three times per year – for a total of twelve trips to DC, in the 1990s. I still have the plaque acknowledging my service. It was still the time of crawling internet speed, so the up to 80 proposals arrived as a heavy bundle by postal mail ahead of time, and everybody brought it back to the meeting and piled it up on the table at the start of the day.
(What I remember most fondly were the moments, after the review of each grant, when we all trashed the copies of the proposal by tossing it into large empty boxes in the center of the U-shaped arrangement of tables. It was the delicious sound of the paper bundle fluttering through the air and landing in the box, or right next to it, and the visible shrinkage of the pile in front of me, that marked the steady progress of the day).
At the end of the day, with its exhausting eight- or nine-hour session, all members of the review panel (which might be between twelve and fifteen people) and the program officer typically wound up in a restaurant – either in the hotel we were staying, or in walking distance from the hotel.
And each time after dinner there was this long ritual of paying the bill, by calculating and adding the tip and dividing the lot and throwing bills into a bowl and dealing with people who didn’t have enough cash, and trading between people who did or did not have bills with the wrong denominations.
But each time the NIH program officer had to do his own number crunching separate from the pool because of the strict emolument rules on the books of the federal government. No part of his/her bill could be paid by the reviewers on the panel. (Also, the alcoholic beverage had to be split off the official bill, but this is the part we owe to the puritan tradition of this country).
I had a mighty respect for this behavior as it reminded me of the legendary caste of German civil servants with strict rules of ethics created under Bismarck; with their Unbestechlichkeit, or literally their inability to be bribed. The conviction, among people, that any impropriety would not escape their attention
Scratch all this. The United States I made my home in back in 1975 has all but disappeared within the past 120 days. There is this barely articulate president, convicted criminal, giddy from his seemingly unlimited power bestowed on him by his appointees at the Supreme Court, surrounded by inane sycophants, foam at his mouth from declaring non-white immigrants vermin, accepting a 400-million gift from a country that harbors terrorists.
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