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| Volume 46, Number 2, Fall 1998 |
George Mason, Founding Father and author of the Virginia Bill of Rights, and George Clinton, governor of New York (1777-95 and again 1801-04; vice president, 1805-12) may have been right when they opposed designating a 10-mile-square area as the “federal region.”
From Catherine Drinker Bowen’s Miracle at Philadelphia: the Story of the Constitutional Convention, May to September, 1787, quoting Mason: “This ten miles square may set at defiance the laws of the surrounding states and may... become the sanctuary of the blackest crimes!”
And, summarizing and quoting Clinton: “In this place men would see all the vices of princely courts: ‘ambition with idleness, baseness with pride, the thirst of riches without labor... flattery... treason... perfidy; but above all the perpetual ridicule of virtue.’”
Victor Cohn
Washington, DC
Your piece on Kolata et al. was exemplary. As good as anything I’ve seen in ScienceWriters: lively, thoughtful and reported with exceptional diligence. The only thing I found lacking, if that’s the right word, are some lessons, if any, to be learned from this noisy brouhaha – but in light of the detailed comments from almost everyone in science journalism such a coda may not have been necessary.
In Peter Wehrwein’s piece on the NEJM, he says black men were deliberately infected with syphilis in that infamous Tuskegee study. I know government doctors acted shamefully in this affair, but my recollection is not that they infected anyone but that they denied treatment to participants in the study so that the course of the disease could be followed. Bad enough, to be sure, but not quite the same as actually giving them the disease.
Salutes again on another fine issue.
Frederic Golden
Santa Barbara, CA