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‘Welcome to a Grand Adventure’
NCATS Holds First All-Staff Meeting, Others Expected |
| By Rich McManus |
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| NIH director Dr. Francis Collins and NCATS acting deputy director Dr. Kathy Hudson |
It was with a sense of excitement and relief that NIH director Dr. Francis Collins and the 7-person leadership team of the new National Center for Advancing Translational
Sciences assembled Jan. 4 in Masur Auditorium for the new entity’s first all-staff meeting.
Many employees of the former National Center for Research Resources, which has been subsumed by NCATS, arrived by bus from off-campus sites for the meeting.
“This is one of the most exciting things that’s happened at NIH in a very long time, and you are at the heart of that,” said Dr. Thomas Insel, acting director of NCATS and director of NIMH. Acknowledging
a period of disruption, uncertainty
and “hardship for all of us” that preceded
establishment of NCATS, he said the meeting was the first of several gatherings to assure “that we’re all working on the same team.
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‘Nudges’ Help People Choose Rightly, Says Thaler |
| By Rich McManus |
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| Dr. Richard Thaler |
So there are two kinds of beings in the world: humans, with their messy, faltering, blinkered
and occasionally
brilliant existences, and “econs,” imaginary creatures invented by economists who are unfailingly rational, undistractable, self-interested—
but also “unboundedly unscrupulous; they try to exploit humans.”
The differences between these two species define the field of behavioral economics, according to one of its founding adherents, Dr. Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago,
who visited NIH as a guest of the National Institute on Aging recently. Whereas humans suffer from bounded rationality, bounded willpower and are easily distracted,
econs “never overeat, never have hangovers
and they save for retirement,” Thaler observed.
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