Word: jefferson
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...neglect the longer view, to forget the lessons of history. At TIME, we try to make the past a frequent companion. Every so often the magazine does a cover story on a figure of both historical significance and current concern: Adam Smith (the future of capitalism, 1975), Thomas Jefferson (the nation's Bicentennial, 1975) and, this week, the American past. Our subject, on the eve of Independence Day, is history itself, specifically the growing reappraisal by historians and ordinary citizens alike of the civics-book homilies that once passed for U.S. history...
When Thomas Jefferson, an an amateur scientist himself, wrote the nation's first patent law in 1793, he was deter mined to ensure that "ingenuity should receive a liberal encouragement." Under his law, "any new and useful art, machine, manufacture or composition of matter" was patentable and thus legally shielded from theft. Last week, in a 5-to-4 decision, the Supreme Court applied the Jeffersonian measure to one of the latest examples of human ingenuity. It ruled that new forms of life created in the laboratory could be patented...
...patent officials balked. They argued, in effect, that if either Jefferson or Congress had intended life to be patentable, special laws would not have been needed to protect certain new plant hybrids like the Red American Beauty Rose. But when GE pressed its case, the Court of Customs and Patent Appeals rejected the Government's argument, and the Supreme Court last week went along with that position. As Chief Justice Burger explained, the issue is "not between living and inanimate things, but between products of nature-whether living or not -and human-made inventions...
...Detroit has had a black mayor, Coleman Young, whose aggressive leadership is respected nationally and has given him influence in Washington. Six of the nine members of the city council are black, including its president. So is Chief of Police William Hart, as well as Superintendant of Schools Arthur Jefferson and a majority of the county supervisors...
DIED. Julian Parks Boyd, 76, former Princeton historian who headed one of the most monumental publishing ventures ever undertaken: collecting and editing the complete papers of Thomas Jefferson; of cancer; in Princeton, N.J. Boyd was the university's librarian in the 1940s when he launched the prodigious project, which may run to 60 volumes (19 have appeared so far) and which for almost four decades kept him happily immersed in more than 60,000 items of Jeffersoniana...