Among my extracurricular activities was a five- or six-year period spent at the, in part at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences where I established a program called Initiatives for Children. I did this shortly after I came to the Brigham and before I got heavily involved in work here. It was a part-time activity. It seemed to me that the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which is a venerable organization, had a number of issues on its agenda, but nothing concerned with children, and since there was no dispute but that children represent the most fragile members of our society and the people that we have to, or should be, worrying about most, I thought we could encourage members of the Academy to join me in a range of issues that we would approach.

It was a successful venture in the sense that very early on I was able to recruit Fred Mosteller who had retired from Harvard and who was very interested in the possibility of looking at education in much the way that he had looked at medical practices, and I suppose that was the most successful of the ventures we undertook. Fred and a group of colleagues from around the country did undertake studies of educational programs and subjected them to... and evaluated them in much the fashion that he evaluated the approach to cancer treatment and to other medical procedures. Books were published and many seminars were held and I think young people were encouraged to continue the work that began there and that was a chapter that I was glad to be associated with, but when I became more involved at the Brigham, particularly with the work in global health, I did give that up.