John Stanford
speaker
1,479 appearances
11 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 13 Aug
John Stanford’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 11 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 4.
Appearances
And today, we're talking a little history because the story of American research universities starts a lot earlier than most people realize.
Higher education in this country goes back over 300 years.
William and Mary, and full disclosure, that's my alma mater, was chartered in 1693 by King William III and Queen Mary II, making it the second oldest college in America after Harvard.
But schools like William and Mary and Harvard weren't founded to do research.
They were built to train clergy and civil servants, teaching divinity, philosophy, and the classics.
That shift towards research
didn't happen until more than 100 years later, in 1862 and the middle of the Civil War, when President Lincoln signed the Morrill Act, handing states federal land to build public colleges focused on agriculture, science, and engineering.
That was a turning point, and that's where schools like Cornell, MIT, and Ohio State come from.
It was the first time the federal government invested directly in practical, technical education for the American public.
The bigger turning point came during World War II.
An MIT engineer named Vannevar Bush convinced President Roosevelt that America's scientific talent needed to be mobilized.
And out of that came a landmark report, Science, the Endless Frontier, as we'll talk about with Kate.
It became the blueprint for federal agencies like the NIH and NSF to fund basic research inside university labs.
That's the moment American universities became the launchpad for the research that leads to new medicines.
It's hard to overstate the transformational moment World War II played in turning America's academic engines into research engines.
There are a few other dates throughout history that celebrate the moments universities played a bigger role in the world of medicine.
beginning back in 1765 at the University of Pennsylvania, where Penn School of Medicine became the first medical school in the 13 American colonies, founded by John Morgan, establishing formal university-based medical training in America for the first time.
Almost 100 years later in 1846, it would be Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital where William T.G.
Morton's public demonstration of anesthesia at the Harvard Teaching Hospital transformed surgery from an agonizing hospital
high mortality ordeal into a survivable procedure.
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