Latest news with #JohnTrump
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
How One Trump Is Saving Harvard's Next-Door Neighbor from Another Trump's War
As President Donald Trump seeks to defund, devalue and maybe destroy Harvard, another prestigious university a little over a mile away is escaping his unreasoning wrath. Since Trump is always ultimately about himself, we can assume that the reason is one he has often been able to cite as supposed proof of his 'good genes': that his paternal uncle was a longtime professor of particular brilliance at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 'You know my uncle was a great—he was at MIT," Trump said in March 2020 while visiting the Centers for Disease Control headquarters in Atlanta. 'He taught at MIT for a record number of years,' Trump said 'He was a great super genius, Dr. John Trump.' John Trump did not teach for a record number of years, but he was a professor there for 44 years, the last seven as an emeritus researcher, receiving considerable federal funding throughout his decades there. And he was recognized as an actual stable genius among many who would have called themselves one. 'Genius, you have to be careful around here, we don't throw those words around here very loosely,' O. Robert Simha, who helped John Trump develop a new laboratory facility at MIT in the 1960s, told the Daily Beast. 'Everybody's in the same business trying to make the world a little bit better, do interesting things, and he was a wonderful example of that. He made a great contribution.' Among other things, John Trump made major advances in using radiation to treat cancer. He was the younger brother of Fred Trump, who went into the family business started by their widowed mother. The brothers were so different as to be an example of what genetics cannot explain about siblings. Fred was notably tall, irritable, conniving and avaricious, an unpleasant bully given to garish clothing. John was short, and his sibling's opposite in seemingly every way. 'He was remarkably even-tempered, with kindness and consideration to all, never threatening or arrogant in manner, even when under high stress,' fellow scientist Dennis Robinson wrote in his 1985 obituary of John Trump in Physics Today. 'He was outwardly and in appearance the mildest of men, with a convincing persuasiveness, carefully marshaling all his facts.' Robinson further noted, 'He cared very little for money and the trappings of money.' John did not name his laboratory or anything else after himself. He did not tell his colleagues he had won a Presidential Medal for Science in 1983. They only found out when it was in the newspaper. He had served his country with distinction: His citation with the National Science & Technology Medals Foundation notes, 'During World War II, Trump went to work at the MIT Radiation Lab, which used microwave radar to help with the war effort. In 1944, Trump headed the lab's British branch. After the liberation of Paris, he rode into the city with General Dwight D. Eisenhower to begin setting up a Paris branch for the lab.' A longtime colleague remembers that at a memorial gathering at an historic church in Lexington, Massachusetts, following John's death in February of 1985, Fred remained outside the entrance in an expensive-looking silk suit. 'He was just standing outside,' the colleague, noted medical physicist Bob Wenstrup, told the Daily Beast. 'He was not inside, where everybody else was. He was there just by himself, standing by the door, and with the impression that he was not going to go in there, and he was going to probably get the hell out of Dodge as soon as he could.' Fred struck Wenstrup as dour and crude and generally nasty. 'He made no pretense of being civil,' Wenstrup remembered. 'I shook his hand. I might have liked to cut it off.' Wenstrup does not remember John's nephew, Donald Trump, being there at all. But his uncle's colleagues and the rest of the country came to know him. 'John was as different from his nephew as you can imagine, and so I don't know why the DNA didn't spread over to his brother Fred,' Sinha told The Daily Beast. 'We haven't figured that one out yet.' Donald has nonetheless been quick to claim a genetic link to his genius Uncle John at MIT when in a place such as the CDC people might consider him to be a less-than-high-IQ individual. And that is surely why President Trump has largely spared MIT while fixating on Harvard. International students make up 27.2 percent of the total enrollment at Harvard. They make up 28 percent of the total at MIT. But Donald Trump has said nothing about foreign students at MIT, while seeking to bar Harvard from enrolling any at all. 'We want those names and countries,' he posted online. MIT has also been spared the ominous threats and demands regarding such matters as diversity and course content that Harvard declared unacceptable. Trump is moving to end Harvard's tax-exempt status and cut some $8 billion in research funding. To her great credit MIT president Sally Korbluth told the student newspaper The Tech that while the university is not seeking to provoke the Trump administration, it will stand up against 'incursions into academic freedom.' She indicated what is at stake for the whole county by pointing out a 2015 report that figured MIT has started over 30,000 companies that earn some $1.9 trillion a year. But while the uncle connection seems to have spared MIT from Trump's wrath, the university is still joining a host of other institutions - and science itself - in suffering his ignorance/indifference when it comes to cutting funds for research. 'He's been very respectful of his uncle's achievements here, but one can't really explain his mentality,' Simha said. 'He has already done us a lot of damage.' Simha continued, 'The real problem is that the evolution of science and engineering is not something you turn on and turn off, and it takes a long time to train people, to have them work on problems, have them struggle through bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees and then work on research programs that take an issue and develop it.' He went on, 'That's a long, long process. And when you stop it, when you cut off resources to support those young people, it does not come back. You lose it. And so you lose many years of talent that could have been put to much better use.' He described support for graduate programs as 'mother's milk in terms of science and engineering.' Cutting that off has a predictable result: 'You die,' he said. 'Whoever is advising [President Trump] is somehow untethered to the reality of how progress in this country is made.' He was talking about research such as in the past enabled John Trump to use his genius for the continuing public good. He noted that we have gone through other administrations that were anti-science, and we will get through this one. 'We've been through other times, and you could see the results when those people try to shut down science,' he said. 'We just lost many years of development in all kinds of fields.' He then said, 'But I mean, that's politics and you'll have to explain that to me sometime.' Wenstrup offered another measure of how different John had been from both his brother and nephew. 'If John had something to say, he'd say it very precisely, and then ask you if you agree or not, or is there more to be added to what he said?' Wenstrup said. 'So he was a man on a very steady plane. He knew what he was.' Combined with the brilliance and kindness and unfailing good temper, John sounded like exactly what we need in a Trump. 'Can we revive a dead man?' Wenstrup asked. 'Boy, we could really do something.'
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Health
- Yahoo
Hidden in plain sight: Trump's enduring mark on Massachusetts
Over the past few weeks, I've been collecting examples of Trump's forgotten contributions to Boston's universities, hospitals, technology startup scene — and even the Museum of Science in Boston. No, not Donald J. Trump, the president. His paternal uncle, John G. Trump, the MIT professor and entrepreneur. John Trump lived in Winchester, but because he died forty years ago, in 1985, it's hard to find people who knew him or remember his work. President Trump has occasionally referenced his 'super genius uncle,' who taught at MIT for 'a record number of years.' Some think that the familial connection may be why MIT has not wound up directly in the federal government's sights, in the same way that universities such as Harvard, Columbia, Cornell and Brown have. MIT, of course, is still smarting from significant reductions in federal research funding — and is suing the government to do what it can to block cuts from agencies like the National Science Foundation. John Trump, as it happens, worked on several federally funded projects over the course of his life, including the Radiation Lab at MIT. The lab worked to perfect and deploy the radar systems that helped the Allies win World War II, and radiation to treat cancer, funded by the National Institutes of Health. And in the mid-1970s, it worked on a project to treat sewage before it entered waterways like Boston Harbor, funded by the National Science Foundation. John Trump was born in New York City to German immigrants, and while his family hoped that he might design buildings for their growing real estate business, when he was a freshman in college, he decided to change his focus from architecture to engineering. He eventually earned a master's degree in physics from Columbia and then a doctorate in electrical engineering at MIT. He collaborated with another physicist to build an early kind of particle accelerator called a Van de Graaff generator. It could produce intense X-ray beams. The two later started a company together, High Voltage Engineering Corp., with another MIT professor. It attracted funding from Georges Doriot, a Harvard Business School professor who ran one of the first venture capital funds, American Research & Development, in Boston. High Voltage Engineering, founded in a Cambridge garage, built Van de Graaff generators and other high-end equipment that were 'in increasing demand for cancer therapy, industrial radiography and nuclear particle acceleration,' according to 'Creative Capital,' a book about Doriot and his venture capital firm. Trump was also a key contributor to the development and deployment of radar technology to Allied forces, including for use during the D-Day invasion in 1944. He headed up the British branch of MIT's Radiation Laboratory and worked to improve the resolution of the newly developed radar systems, which gave the Allies a strategic edge in locating bombing targets and spotting and firing on incoming enemy aircraft. But some of Trump's most significant research contributions before and after the war involved building and using powerful X-ray generators to deliver radiation for cancer treatments. Trump had a close collaboration with what is now the Lahey Hospital and Medical Clinic, working to advance the use of radiation to reach deeper into the body without harming healthy tissue. He also modified the device to treat skin cancers and taught courses for hospital physicists throughout the Northeast about how to use the technology. During his lifetime, more than 10,000 patients were treated at Lahey, and in his High Voltage Research Lab at MIT, according to an obituary published by the National Academy of Engineering. 'He had a rich career at MIT, and was as different [from] his brother Fred and his nephew Donald as you can imagine,' says O. Robert Simha, 93, a retired director of planning at MIT who collaborated with John Trump to build one of his labs on campus. 'He was thoughtful, kind, polite, understanding, and cooperative as one could hope for.' The admiration President Trump has expressed for his late uncle is 'probably to our advantage,' Simha says. 'He's not attacking MIT directly.' If you have spent time in the Boston area, my bet is that you have seen some of the traces of John Trump here — perhaps without even realizing it. There is a John G. Trump building at the Lahey Hospital campus in Burlington, which currently houses Lahey's outpatient behavioral health and psychiatry departments, according to spokeswoman Sonya Vartabedian. A recently established John G. Trump Fund for Innovation in Diagnostic Radiology' will be used to support promising new technologies or applications that enhance and complement diagnostic radiology techniques,' she writes via email. Trump was chairman of Lahey's board of trustees from 1974 to 1985. On MIT's campus, his former research lab is still standing, right on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, just across the street from the university's nuclear reactor. And at the Museum of Science, where Trump was also a life trustee, there's a plaque honoring his contributions. It's right near the museum's Theater of Electricity, which features a large Van de Graaf generator that Trump helped build and install. The theater's 'Lightning!' show is on hiatus now because of construction, but museum spokesperson Meaghan Agnew expects it to return sometime in June. John Trump 'never promoted himself in any way,' says Bob Wenstrup, 87, who worked with him as a medical physicist at MIT and Lahey. Wenstrup remembers Trump going to Washington, D.C., to receive an important award, but not telling his colleagues, who learned about it by reading the next day's newspaper. Trump was 'a man who had made enormous contributions in every area he worked in,' Wenstrup said. 'It's simply unbelievable how much he did.' Wenstrup is not a fan of John Trump's nephew, the president. 'He resents people who are intelligent,' Wenstrup said, but he 'uses John Trump as an indication of how extraordinary he is himself.' Wenstrup has clear memories of attending John Trump's funeral in February 1985 and meeting Fred Trump there, the president's father. But he doesn't recall encountering Donald Trump there. Waymo's driverless taxis will face some unique obstacles in Boston MassLive's 12 innovation leaders to watch in 2025 New head of $100M AI hub says Massachusetts' strengths shouldn't be a 'best-kept secret' These seven dynamics are making the Mass. job market 'chaotic' in 2025 Read the original article on MassLive.
