Just a couple of years ago, if you can believe it, leading scientists from all over the country held a symposium in Washington along with federal officials from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. According to a senior director at the NIH, the point of the symposium was to address a “defining issue” of the current era. So the A-team was going to tackle one of the most difficult and pressing matters in the entire field of scientific and medical research.
Hearing that, you might conclude that these scientists were going to discuss, say, a cure for cancer, or a major breakthrough in gene-editing. Or if nothing else, they might talk about the development of the 50th COVID booster or something like that. Surely, at a minimum, they would discuss a topic that had some kind of relevance to the fields of “health” or “science” or “technology.” Those would all seem to be safe assumptions.
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