If Charles Darwin had wanted to be comfortable, he never would have taken the voyage on the HMS Beagle. Page Few companions accompany us on our attempts to climb our individual, intellectual Everests as scholars. The cherished diversity and depth of scholarship leave a vacuum of universally applicable benchmarks with which to measure our progress.
Money fills that gap.
Monetary standards are easily codified, can be universally applied, give the impression of objectivity, evoke a sense of possession, and are transferred easily from source to user. The alternative measure, less stable and tangible, is trusting a necessarily subjective process of collegial evaluation. Those of us in academic medicine and biomedical research daily face difficult choices concerning money, and these pressures are putting academic medical centers on the endangered species list. One of those choices is how academic physicians use every minute of their day. Time is critical to inventive thought.