The University of Michigan School of Public Health will not admit a 2025-2026 admissions cycle cohort to its PhD in Epidemiologic Sciences program.

> # “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The quote above is attributed to George Santayana (1905). Regrettably we seem to be in the midst of many who do not remember the past, never learned about the past, or find what happened in the past to be irrelevant. My particular interests are environmental quality and environmental health. I find the sledgehammering of key Federal agencies set up and designed to protect people and the environment from damages via exposure to man-made insults to be abhorrent. As a high school senior, I experienced the first Earth Day. US EPA was set up during my 1st year in college, and I was a personal witness to the establishment of the modern-day environmental charter. EPA and other environmental agencies, set up to protect public and environmental health were required because the vagaries of unfettered economic competition do not adequately assimilate long and short term adverse impacts from environmental degradation nor impairment of human health. The fact that such adverse impacts cannot be quantified with as much precision as the cost of a gallon of gasoline or a kWhr of electric energy does not make such costs less real. In the words of William Bruce Cameron, 1963: > “not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted” Source Since the 1970’s, progress had been made at avoiding prior incidents, and reversing and restoring damages from previous environmental insults. There has been great progress. I am a firm believer in the following maxims: “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” NOT: “move fast and break things” It is important to understand where we have come from so that we do not go back. In this spirit, I will try to follow up on this blog with short pieces on the progress that was made. > ### Share this: * Twitter * Facebook * LinkedIn * Email * Like Loading... ### _Related_

<p>I was going to start a longer blog post, which I hope to finalize in the next day or so.  But current times (as I write this, it is immediately after the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of personnel in the Federal Government) really drive me to put something out more quickly.</p> <p>There is an apt phrase, with which I titled this piece, of consuming harvest that should have been left for subsequent crops, thereby forestalling the opportunity for the next harvest.</p> <p>There ought to be no doubt that a continued stream of commercial innovation and economic progress requires a continued stream of a pipeline of research from fundamental to applied to translational.  If the initial flows of fundamental and applied research are cut off, there will inevitably be a future forestalling of commercial innovation.</p> <p>If we think of innovations in all sectors, such as the polymerase chain reaction, transistors and integrated circuits, the internet, gene therapy, battery technology for electric vehicles, etc., few if any of them could have occured without contributions from fundamental and applied research.</p> <p>If one wanted to slow the pace of future innovation, one would stanch research at universities and research institutions and restrict and wither agencies, such as NSF, NIH, DOD and DOE that support such research.  Unfortunately this seems to be occurring in real time.</p> <p>Without this pipeline, responding to challenges such as population growth and migration, climate change, loss of biodiversity, aging demographics, and emergence of pandemic potential diseases will become increasingly difficult.</p> <p>It is worrisome.  As a senior academic, I will do my best to support my junior colleagues.</p> <p>As is frequently the case, Benjamin Franklin said it aptly:</p> <blockquote> <p>We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.</p> </blockquote> <p>My thoughts and wishes are with all who have been or will be harmed by actions that occurred and will be occurring, including EPA, NSF, NIH, FDA, USDA, NASA, NOAA …, and to those researchers who have benefited from these dedicated government servants.</p> <div id="atatags-370373-67b61f4ba12cd"> <script type="text/javascript"> __ATA.cmd.push(function() { __ATA.initVideoSlot('atatags-370373-67b61f4ba12cd', { sectionId: '370373', format: 'inread' }); }); </script> </div><span id="wordads-inline-marker" style="display: none;"></span> <div id="atatags-26942-67b61f4ba1309"></div> <script> __ATA.cmd.push(function() { __ATA.initDynamicSlot({ id: 'atatags-26942-67b61f4ba1309', location: 120, formFactor: '001', label: { text: 'Advertisements', }, creative: { reportAd: { text: 'Report this ad', }, privacySettings: { text: 'Privacy', } } }); }); </script><div class="sharedaddy sd-like-enabled sd-sharing-enabled" id="jp-post-flair"><div class="sharedaddy sd-sharing-enabled"><div class="robots-nocontent sd-block sd-social sd-social-icon-text sd-sharing"><h3 class="sd-title">Share this:</h3><div class="sd-content"><ul><li class="share-twitter"><a class="share-twitter sd-button share-icon" data-shared="sharing-twitter-136" href="https://chaasblog.wordpress.com/2025/02/19/eating-ones-seed-corn/?share=twitter" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" title="Click to share on Twitter"><span>Twitter</span></a></li><li class="share-facebook"><a class="share-facebook sd-button share-icon" data-shared="sharing-facebook-136" href="https://chaasblog.wordpress.com/2025/02/19/eating-ones-seed-corn/?share=facebook" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" title="Click to share on Facebook"><span>Facebook</span></a></li><li class="share-linkedin"><a class="share-linkedin sd-button share-icon" data-shared="sharing-linkedin-136" href="https://chaasblog.wordpress.com/2025/02/19/eating-ones-seed-corn/?share=linkedin" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" title="Click to share on LinkedIn"><span>LinkedIn</span></a></li><li class="share-email"><a class="share-email sd-button share-icon" data-email-share-error-text="If you're having problems sharing via email, you might not have email set up for your browser. 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I had a wonderful job, until I didn’t. This is about what happened—and what is happening.

Engineers, architects, and other technological professionals designed the genocidal death machines of the Third Reich. The death camp operations were highly efficient, so these technological professionals knew what they were doing: they were, so to speak, good engineers. As an educator at a technolo …