Harvard's lawsuit against the Trump administration

 Read it and weep for our country:

"7. Defendants’ actions are unlawful. The First Amendment does not permit the Government to “interfere with private actors’ speech to advance its own vision of ideological balance,” Moody v. NetChoice, 603 U.S. 707, 741 (2024), nor may the Government “rely[] on the ‘threat of invoking legal sanctions and other means of coercion . . . to achieve the suppression’ of disfavored speech,” Nat’l Rifle Ass’n v. Vullo, 602 U.S. 175, 189 (2024) (citation omitted). The Government’s attempt to coerce and control Harvard disregards these fundamental First Amendment principles, which safeguard Harvard’s “academic freedom.” Asociacion de Educacion Privada de P.R., Inc. v. Garcia-Padilla, 490 F.3d 1, 8 (1st Cir. 2007). A threat such as this to a university’s academic freedom strikes an equal blow to the research conducted and resulting advancements made on its campus.
8. The Government’s actions flout not just the First Amendment, but also federal laws
and regulations. The Government has expressly invoked the protections against discrimination
contained in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a basis for its actions. Make no mistake: Harvard rejects antisemitism and discrimination in all of its forms and is actively making structural reforms to eradicate antisemitism on campus. But rather than engage with Harvard regarding those ongoing efforts, the Government announced a sweeping freeze of funding for medical, scientific, technological, and other research that has nothing at all to do with antisemitism and Title VI compliance. Moreover, Congress in Title VI set forth detailed procedures that the Government “shall” satisfy before revoking federal funding based on discrimination concerns. 42 U.S.C. § 2000d-1. Those procedures effectuate Congress’s desire that “termination of or refusal to grant or to continue” federal financial assistance be a remedy of last resort. Id. The Government made no effort to follow those procedures—nor the procedures provided for in Defendants’ own agency regulations—before freezing Harvard’s federal funding.
9. These fatal procedural shortcomings are compounded by the arbitrary and
capricious nature of Defendants’ abrupt and indiscriminate decision..."

Food: from luxuries to tragedies--chocolate and peanut butter at the opposite ends of human welfare

Below are two stories about food, that couldn't be more different (although the foods, chocolate and peanut butter, have some connection when times are good).

 The (sort of) luxury story, from the Guardian comes with a picture of bonbons:

 US chocolate prices surge amid soaring cocoa costs and tariffs
Price of cocoa – chocolate’s key ingredient – has climbed over past year and tariffs on imports will keep prices high  by Lauren Aratani

 And here's the tragedy, reported on in The Atlantic

‘In Three Months, Half of Them Will Be Dead’
Elon Musk promised to preserve lifesaving aid to foreign children. Then the Trump administration quietly canceled it. By Hana Kiros

"As DOGE was gutting USAID in February, it alarmed the global-health community by issuing stop-work orders to the two American companies that make a lifesaving peanut paste widely recognized as the best treatment for malnutrition"

...

"The move reneged on an agreement to provide about 3 million children with emergency paste over approximately the next year. What’s more, according to the two companies, the administration has also not awarded separate contracts to shipping companies, leaving much of the food assured by the original reinstated contracts stuck in the United States."

The Mystery of the Ultimatum Game, by Kayoko Kobayashi,

 I get very little snail mail these days, but every now and then an interesting book arrives.  The latest is the English translation of the prizewinning book (originally in Japanese) by Kayoko Kobayashi, an economist at Nanzan University. (The link is to her English language webpage, but Google translate is still helpful...)

 The Mystery of the Ultimatum Game. Why We Are Predictably Irrational by Kayoko Kobayashi, Springer, 2025.

"The original Japanese edition won the Nikkei Prize for Economics Books (the 64th Nikkei-Keizai Tosho Bunka award) in 2021, an accolade bestowed upon an outstanding economics book published in a given year. Furthermore, this edition also received the Takashima Kunio Jiyu Prize Encouragement Award in 2024."

While the book invites one to think about "irrationality," the introductory chapter ends with a brief encomium towards the traditional notion of economic rationality, as exhibited by those mythical creatures, homo economicus, also known as the Econ.

"I will close with a modest defense of the Econ.  I said earlier that the Econ might not be much fun to be around. Yet the Econ is also a good person, and in some sense an amazing one.  The Econ does not get jealous. The Econ does not deprecate himself in comparison with others. He does not abandon hope for the future nor sink into despair. He is the kind of person who, no matter how hopeless the situation may seem, doe not dwell on the past but calmly assess the present, focuses solely on the future, and pursues what needs to be done with unwavering determination, choosing the best course of action from the options available."

 

One Nation One Swap: National kidney exchange in India

 In India, the National Organ and Tissue Transplant Organization (NOTTO) wrote this week to all the State organizations (the SOTTOs) announcing the plan to form a nationwide kidney exchange program, called the "Uniform One Nation One Swap Transplant Program."

This has been the work of many people for a long time.  Of particular importance has been and will continue to be Dr. Vivek Kute from IKDRC Ahmedabad

 Here's the story in the Hindustan Times.

 NOTTO writes to states, UTs to implement swap organ transplant

Here's the letter itself:

#########

Earlier post:

Tuesday, February 27, 2024  Stanford Impact Labs announces support for kidney exchange in Brazil, India, and the U.S.

MAID in the Netherlands, together

 The Guardian publishes a moving photo, and an interview with the photographer about his parents' decision to avail themselves of medical aid in dying, together.

My parents holding hands after their assisted deaths: Martin Roemers’ most personal photograph Interview by Charlotte Jansen   16 Apr 2025

 

 

"They had a good life and a very happy marriage, but the last years were difficult. They were both sick and exhausted. Both had heart failure, my mother had a lot of pain. Both were in a really bad shape. They still lived in their own house but life was getting harder and harder, even with help. They did not want to go to a nursing home and neither wanted to live without the other – they wanted to step out of life together. They were afraid one would die naturally and the other would be left behind. They were very close, and did everything together, really everything – so it made sense they would leave this life together

 

"In the Netherlands, where assisted dying is legal, this is possible if you have a very good reason. My mother always said: ”We will stay with you as long as we can, until we can see no other way out.” Physicians have to be convinced that the patient is suffering unbearably and has no chance of recovery. My parents were independently evaluated by different doctors, and it was granted to both of them.

 

"It’s a very long process but once the decision was made, it all happened very fast. They picked a date, and it was a week later – much sooner than I had thought. My father wanted to go out to dinner somewhere, and on the last evening before they would die, we were able to do that. My father was a very optimistic and worry-free person who would always laugh at our jokes, until the end. He was visibly enjoying his dinner that evening – that was good".

Kidney transplantation in Latin America, and School assignment in Chile, Friday lectures at Stanford by Julio Elias and Juan Matta

 Two lectures tomorrow at Stanford's Center for Latin American Studies may be of interest to market designers.

The Economics of Kidney Transplantation in Latin America / The Importance of Peers in Education: Evidence from Chile
Sponsored by      Center for Latin American Studies

 Friday, April 18, 2025  1:30pm PT  In person and online

Bolivar House, 582 Alvarado Row, Stanford, CA 94305Event Details:

"The Economics of Kidney Transplantation in Latin America"

This lecture explores the economics of kidney transplantation in Latin America, applying the economic approach to analyze organ procurement systems, their history, and evolution in the region. We will examine the social costs associated with the organ shortage and the accessibility challenges that affect kidney transplantation in the region. The session will also discuss potential solutions to address these issues. The lecture highlights the effects of altruistic versus incentive-based policies and the ethical complexities surrounding organ donation systems.

Julio J. Elias is Professor of economics at Universidad del CEMA (UCEMA), Argentina, and the Executive Director of the UChicago/UCEMA Joint Initiative for Latin American Experimental Economics (JILAEE). He earned his BA from Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Argentina, and his MA and PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago. Elias's research focuses on organ donation, exploring financial incentives, strategies to alleviate organ shortages, and the associated moral aspects. He also studies Creativity Economics and its relation to economic development, particularly in Latin America. Together with Casey B. Mulligan and Kevin M. Murphy, he edited a collection of Gary Becker’s unpublished writings, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2023.

"The Importance of Peers in Education: Evidence from Chile"

How do classmates influence a student’s academic success? While peer effects are widely recognized as important, measuring their true impact is challenging. Students are not randomly assigned to classrooms, making it difficult to separate peer influence from other factors like family background or school quality. This talk explores new evidence from Chile’s centralized school admissions system, which uses a lottery-based mechanism to assign students, providing a unique opportunity to study peer effects more rigorously. Understanding these dynamics is crucial for designing policies that promote equitable access to quality education. The discussion will highlight key findings, the challenges of measuring peer effects, and what these results mean for school admissions policies and educational equity in Chile and beyond.

Juan Matta is a professor of economics at Universidad Diego Portales in Chile, specializing in the economics of education. His research uses empirical methods to study the causes and effects of educational choices, with a particular focus on gender and social mobility. Professor Matta is currently a Luksic Visiting Scholar at Stanford University’s Center for Latin American Studies.

Livestream: tinyurl.com/CLAS041825
 

Freezing and thawing organs for transplant moves one step closer

 In March, surgeons at Mass General Hospital thawed and transplanted a frozen pig organ into a pig.  The challenge of freezing and then thawing an organ back to life, so that it can be stored until an appropriate transplant can be arranged, is one of long standing. The difficulty is that during both freezing and thawing, there is a danger of ice crystals forming inside the cells, which would destroy them.

Here's a NYT article that explains why being able to freeze and then successfully thaw organs could help relieve the congestion in kidney transplants for humans.

This Kidney Was Frozen for 10 Days. Could Surgeons Transplant It?
Scientists developed a way to freeze a large mammal’s kidney, which could ease organ shortages in the future. First, they had to see if their method would work in a pig.   By Gina Kolata

"the promise from freezing and storing organs is great.

"There is a severe and ongoing shortage of kidneys for transplants — more than 92,000 people are on waiting lists. One reason is that the window of 24 to 36 hours is so brief that it limits the number of recipients who are good matches.

"How much better it might be to have a bank of stored, frozen organs so an organ transplant could be almost like an elective surgery.

"That, at least, has been the decades-long dream of transplant surgeons.

But the attempts of medical researchers to freeze organs were thwarted at every turn. In many cases, ice crystals formed and destroyed the organs. "

 

HT: Colin Rowat

#############

Here's an earlier post, about a 2017 paper that turns out to have set some of the goal posts:

Monday, June 12, 2017  Organ preservation could bring big changes to transplantation

Transplantation would be a lot less hectic if organs could be preserved. Here's a 42-author paper (the biggest coauthorship I've been involved in) that discusses some of the possibilities.

The promise of organ and tissue preservation to transform medicine 
 Sebastian Giwa, Jedediah K Lewis, Luis Alvarez, Robert Langer, Alvin E Roth, George M Church, James F Markmann, David H Sachs, Anil Chandraker, Jason A Wertheim, Martine Rothblatt, Edward S Boyden, Elling Eidbo, W P Andrew Lee, Bohdan Pomahac, Gerald Brandacher, David M Weinstock, Gloria Elliott, David Nelson, Jason P Acker, Korkut Uygun, Boris Schmalz, Brad P Weegman, Alessandro Tocchio, Greg M Fahy, Kenneth B Storey, Boris Rubinsky, John Bischof, Janet A W Elliott, Teresa K Woodruff, G John Morris, Utkan Demirci, Kelvin G M Brockbank, Erik J Woods, Robert N Ben, John G Baust, Dayong Gao, Barry Fuller, Yoed Rabin, David C Kravitz, Michael J Taylor & Mehmet Toner

Nature Biotechnology 35, 530–542 (2017) doi:10.1038/nbt.3889
Published online 07 June 2017

##

Here's the Google Scholar link, which also includes links to the subsequent literature:

The promise of organ and tissue preservation to transform medicine

S Giwa, JK Lewis, L Alvarez, R Langer, AE Roth… - Nature …, 2017 - nature.com

Cited by 552 Related articles All 17 versions Web of Science: 371

 

Pat Bajari (1969-2025)

 Pat Bajari has died at 55.  As Amazon's chief economist from 2010-2023, he oversaw a revolution in the labor market for economists, making Amazon at least for a time the leading employer of new PhD economists, and firmly establishing them among Amazon's many product lines.

He also taught at Harvard, Stanford, Duke, Michigan, Minnesota and U. of Washington.

There are a whole lot of moving tributes to him at the memorial Kudaboard: Celebrating Pat Bajari. He apparently touched a lot of lives.

 Here's an old CNN story:

 Amazon gets an edge with its secret squad of PhD economists 
By Lydia DePillis, CNN Business, Wed March 13, 2019

"In the past few years, Amazon has hired more than 150 PhD economists

...

"The architect of Amazon’s massive team of data crunchers is Pat Bajari

...

"At other companies, economists are often clustered in a small team, but at Amazon, they are integrated into many teams across the company. In a glossy recruiting brochure, Amazon describes how its economists help build risk models for lending to third-party sellers, advise on product design and engagement tracking for devices like Alexa and Kindle, help target customers for its booming cloud services business, and forecast server capacity needs for the consumer website."

##########

Here's the obit from U. Minnesota:

Remembering Patrick L. Bajari (1969-2025),  April 15, 2025

"Pat Bajari, a major figure in the economics profession who was deeply connected to Minnesota Economics, tragically passed away on Monday at age 55 after a battle with cancer. Our heartfelt condolences go out to his family.

"Pat was born and raised in Minnesota. He completed both his undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Minnesota, earning BS degrees in Economics and Mathematics in 1992 and his PhD in Economics in 1997. His academic career included faculty positions at Harvard, Stanford, Duke, and Michigan before he returned in 2006 to join the Minnesota faculty. In 2010, he went on leave to become Chief Economist at Amazon, eventually making the move permanent. In Pat’s words, “...when I saw the data wave blowing up in tech, I knew I had to stay and be a part of it. I gave up tenure and dove all in.” He played a transformational role in leading the emergence of tech-economics in industry—one of the major developments in economics in recent years. In 2023, he became Chief Economist at Keystone."

 

Danny Kahneman's last interview, and its backstory

 Sometimes the backstory is more revealing than the story.

In yesterday's NYT, the philosophers Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer published a piece that recalled their interview with Danny Kahneman, a week before he flew to Switzerland to end his life.

There’s a Lesson to Learn From Daniel Kahneman’s Death, by  Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer  April 14, 2025

"On March 19, 2024, we emailed the psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, inviting him to appear on our podcast, “Lives Well Lived,” and suggesting a date in May. He replied promptly, saying that he would not be available then because he was on his way to Switzerland, where, despite being relatively healthy at 90, he planned to die by assisted suicide on March 27.

"In explanation, Professor Kahneman included a letter that his friends would receive a few days later. “I have believed since I was a teenager,” he wrote, “that the miseries and indignities of the last years of life are superfluous, and I am acting on that belief. I am still active, enjoying many things in life (except the daily news) and will die a happy man. But my kidneys are on their last legs, the frequency of mental lapses is increasing, and I am 90 years old. It is time to go.”

 ...

"We did not try to dissuade Professor Kahneman, but we asked him to view the interview as a final opportunity to tell people what he thought they should know about living well. He accepted the invitation, though he did not wish to discuss his decision to end his life."

"The interview took place on March 23. Professor Kahneman was cheerful and lively, with no mental lapses."

######### 

They go on to think aloud about why Danny might have decided to end his life, and about medical aid in dying--i.e. physician assisted suicide--more generally.  But, as agreed, they didn't discuss this in the interview, which you can listen to below.  (I found it a little slow moving, almost as if they would have preferred to be talking about assisted suicide...)

 

“Schrödinger’s persons". The indeterminate legal status of embryos.

 Courts are increasingly called on to decide who should get custody of frozen embryos. Their decisions will touch on both abortion and IVF.

This NYT oped discusses some of the issues.

Are Embryos Property? Human Life? Neither?  By Anna Louie Sussman

 "For over a century, courts generally did not grant personhood or independent rights to embryos or fetuses in utero. An 1884 decision by Oliver Wendell Holmes, at the time a Massachusetts Supreme Court justice, held that when a pregnant woman slipped and fell on a road, resulting in the loss of the fetus, no claim could be pursued on behalf of the fetus against the town; he voiced skepticism about “whether an infant dying before it was able to live separated from its mother could be said to have become a person recognized by the law.”

"Once embryos began appearing ex utero, however, courts and legislatures were forced to reckon with their legal status in novel scenarios — notably in divorce cases in which the parties disagreed on how to deal with frozen embryos created during the marriage. The answers courts have come up with for how to view embryos have been all over the map, ranging from seeing them as property to declaring them, in the Alabama decision, “unborn children.”

...

"Embryo custody cases, as they’re sometimes termed, were typically resolved along similar lines — that parenthood should not be forced on a person who does not want it, with a few exceptions, said Ellen Trachman, a Denver-based lawyer specializing in assisted-reproduction-related cases. That principle was challenged in 2018, when the Arizona State Legislature passed a law requiring judges to award disputed embryos “to the spouse who intends to allow the in vitro human embryos to develop to birth,” regardless of any contracts signed by both parties 

...

"The murkiness of embryos’ status has sent courts on strange detours in their legal reasoning. In a 2023 Virginia case a judge was tasked with deciding whether two frozen embryos should be awarded to Honeyhline Heidemann, who wanted to implant them, or kept frozen, per the wishes of her ex-husband, Jason Heidemann. Ms. Heidemann asked that the embryos be considered property, so they could be assigned to her like any other salable item. Mr. Heidemann said each was unique and nonfungible and thus could not be treated as personal property.

"The case, as Leah Libresco Sargeant wrote, turned embryos into “Schrödinger’s persons,” resulting in “one parent bizarrely needing the embryos to be considered persons in order to prevent them from being born and the other parent needing to argue the children were property in order to let them be born.”

##########

Earlier:

Tuesday, February 20, 2024 Frozen embryos are children: Alabama Supreme Court ruling