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65-466: In November 1949, with the seminal paper, " Sickle Cell Anemia, a Molecular Disease ", in Science magazine, Linus Pauling , Harvey Itano and their collaborators laid the groundwork for establishing the field of molecular medicine. In 1956, Roger J. Williams wrote Biochemical Individuality , a prescient book about genetics, prevention and treatment of disease on a molecular basis, and nutrition which

130-461: A "memorandum on principles and policies" for an early meeting of the trustees that established a rough framework for the foundation's work. It was initially located within the family office at Standard Oil 's headquarters at 26 Broadway , later (in 1933) shifting to the GE Building (then RCA ), along with the newly named family office, Room 5600 , at Rockefeller Center ; later it moved to

195-766: A compartment of molecular medicine. Molecular medicine is a new scientific discipline in European universities . Combining contemporary medical studies with the field of biochemistry , it offers a bridge between the two subjects. At present only a handful of universities offer the course to undergraduates . With a degree in this discipline, the graduate is able to pursue a career in medical sciences, scientific research, laboratory work, and postgraduate medical degrees. Core subjects are similar to biochemistry courses and typically include gene expression , research methods, proteins , cancer research, immunology , biotechnology and many more. In some universities molecular medicine

260-463: A different form of the metalloprotein hemoglobin in their blood. The paper, published in the November 25, 1949 issue of Science , reports a difference in electrophoretic mobility between hemoglobin from healthy individuals and those with sickle-cell anemia, with those with sickle cell trait having a mixture of the two types. The paper suggests that the difference in electrophoretic mobility

325-473: A guest lectureship in England. Using a "Tiselius Apparatus" to perform free-boundary electrophoresis , Pauling's three researchers were able to estimate that molecules of sickle-cell hemoglobin had about three more positive charges than normal hemoglobin. They also estimated that blood from those with sickle cell trait was a mixture of 60 percent normal hemoglobin and 40 percent sickle-cell hemoglobin. Near

390-619: A haven for scholars threatened by the Nazis. After World War II the foundation sent a team to West Germany to investigate how it could become involved in reconstructing the country. They focused on restoring democracy, especially regarding education and scientific research, with the long-term goal of reintegrating Germany into the Western world. The foundation also supported the early initiatives of Henry Kissinger , such as his directorship of Harvard's International Seminars (funded as well by

455-528: A number of other human hemoglobin variants, including some associated with other diseases. At Caltech, a comparison of the amino acid content of normal and sickle cell hemoglobins showed that there were several differences in chemical makeup, but did not explain the difference in electric charge that made electrophoretic separation possible. The cause of this difference was pinpointed in 1956 and 1957, when Vernon Ingram used protein fingerprinting (a combination of electrophoresis and chromatography ) to show that

520-589: Is a pilot grant program that is overseen by the Lincoln Center . The grants are to be used towards art and cultural opportunities in the underserved areas of Brooklyn and the South Bronx with three overarching goals. The Rockefeller Foundation supported the art scene in Haiti in 1948 and a literacy project with UNESCO . Rusk was involved with funding the humanities and the social sciences during

585-510: Is an American private foundation and philanthropic medical research and arts funding organization based at 420 Fifth Avenue , New York City. The foundation was created by Standard Oil magnate John D. Rockefeller ("Senior") and son " Junior ", and their primary business advisor, Frederick Taylor Gates , on May 14, 1913, when its charter was granted by New York . It is the second-oldest major philanthropic institution in America (after

650-427: Is combined with another discipline such as chemistry , functioning as an additional study to enrich the undergraduate program. Sickle Cell Anemia, a Molecular Disease " Sickle Cell Anemia, a Molecular Disease " is a 1949 scientific paper by Linus Pauling , Harvey A. Itano , Seymour J. Singer and Ibert C. Wells that established sickle-cell anemia as a genetic disease in which affected individuals have

715-795: Is especially symbolic because the Rockefeller Foundation was founded by oil money." Public health , health aid , and medical research are the most prominent areas of work of the foundation. On December 5, 1913, the Board made its first grant of $ 100,000 to the American Red Cross to purchase property for its headquarters in Washington, D.C. The foundation established the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and Harvard School of Public Health , two of

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780-556: Is modeled on the International Health Division of the foundation, which sent doctors abroad to study and treat human subjects. The National Science Foundation and National Institute of Health are also modeled on the work funded by Rockefeller. It has also been a supporter of and influence on the United Nations . In 2020, the foundation pledged that it would divest from fossil fuel , notable since

845-475: Is now variously referred to as individualized medicine and orthomolecular medicine . Another paper in Science by Pauling in 1968, introduced and defined this view of molecular medicine that focuses on natural and nutritional substances used for treatment and prevention. Published research and progress was slow until the 1970s' "biological revolution" that introduced many new techniques and commercial applications. Some researchers separate molecular surgery as

910-417: Is probably due to a different number of ionizable amino acid residues in the protein portion of hemoglobin (which was confirmed in 1956 by Vernon Ingram ), and that this change in molecular structure is responsible for the sickling process. It also reports the genetic basis for the disease, consistent with the simultaneous genealogical study by James V. Neel : those with sickle-cell anemia are homozygous for

975-556: Is sometimes referred to as the " Villa Serbelloni ", the property bequeathed to the foundation in 1959 under the presidency of Dean Rusk (who was later to become U.S. President Kennedy 's secretary of state). The Bellagio Center operates both a conference center and a residency program . Numerous Nobel laureates , Pulitzer winners, National Book Award recipients, Prince Mahidol Award winners, and MacArthur fellows , as well as several acting and former heads of state and government, have been in residence at Bellagio. Agriculture

1040-572: The Carnegie Corporation ) and ranks as the 30th largest foundation globally by endowment, with assets of over $ 6.3 billion in 2022. According to the OECD , the foundation provided $ 284 million for development in 2021. The foundation has given more than $ 14 billion in current dollars. The foundation has had an international reach since the 1930s and major influence on global non-governmental organizations . The World Health Organization

1105-560: The Central Intelligence Agency ) and the early foreign policy magazine Confluence , both established by him while he was still a graduate student. In 2021, Rajiv J. Shah , president of the Rockefeller Foundation, released a statement condemning eugenics and supporting the anti-eugenics movement. He stated that "[...]we commend the Anti-Eugenics Project for their essential work to understand[...]

1170-769: The Cold War period, including study of the Soviet Union . In July 2022, the Rockefeller Foundation granted $ 1m to the Wikimedia Foundation . The foundation also owns and operates the Bellagio Center in Bellagio, Italy . The center has several buildings, spread across a 50-acre (200,000 m ) property, on the peninsula between lakes Como and Lecco in Northern Italy . The center

1235-880: The International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines . Part of the original program, the funding of the IRRI was later taken over by the Ford Foundation. The International Rice Research Institute and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center are part of a consortium of agricultural research organizations known as CGIAR . Costing around $ 600 million, over 50 years, the revolution brought new farming technology, increased productivity, expanded crop yields and mass fertilization to many countries throughout

1300-1171: The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics , (also known as the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research ) which conducted eugenics experiments in Nazi Germany and influenced the development of Nazi racial scientific ideology. Rockefeller spent almost $ 3 million between 1925 and 1935, and also funded other German eugenicists, Herman Poll , Alfred Grotjahn , Eugen Fischer , and Hans Nachsteim , continuing even after Hitler's ascent to power in 1933; Rüdin's work influenced compulsory sterilisation in Nazi Germany . Josef Mengele worked as an assistant in Verschuer's lab, though Rockefeller executives did not know of Mengele and stopped funding that specific research before World War II started in 1939. The Rockefeller Foundation continued funding German eugenics research even after it

1365-580: The Social Science Research Council . In January 1929, LSRM funds were folded into the Rockefeller Foundation, in a major reorganization. The Rockefeller family helped lead the foundation in its early years, but later limited itself to one or two representatives, to maintain the foundation's independence and avoid charges of undue family influence. These representatives have included the former president John D. Rockefeller III , and then his son John D. Rockefeller, IV , who gave up

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1430-586: The Time-Life Building in the center, before shifting to its current Fifth Avenue address. In 1914, the trustees set up a new Department of Industrial Relations, inviting William Lyon Mackenzie King to head it. He became a close and key advisor to Junior through the Ludlow Massacre , turning around his attitude to unions ; however the foundation's involvement in IR was criticized for advancing

1495-482: The US Senate in 1910, with at one stage Junior even secretly meeting with President William Howard Taft , through the aegis of Senator Nelson Aldrich , to hammer out concessions. However, because of the ongoing (1911) antitrust suit against Standard Oil at the time, along with deep suspicion in some quarters of undue Rockefeller influence on the spending of the endowment, the result was that Senior and Gates withdrew

1560-501: The 100 Resilient Cities program funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. In January 2016, the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development announced winners of its National Disaster Resilience Competition (NDRC), awarding three 100RC member cities – New York, NY ; Norfolk, VA ; and New Orleans, LA – with more than $ 437 million in disaster resilience funding. The grant was the largest ever received by

1625-718: The 1930s. Even into the 1950s, Rockefeller continued to provide some funding for research borne out of German eugenics. The foundation also funded the relocation of scholars threatened by the Nazis to America in the 1930s, known as the Refugee Scholar Program and the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars. Some of the notable figures relocated or saved, among a total of 303 scholars, were Thomas Mann , Claude Lévi-Strauss and Leó Szilárd . The foundation helped The New School provide

1690-815: The American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut , Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., Karamu House in Cleveland , and Lincoln Center in New York. The foundation underwrote Spike Lee 's documentary on New Orleans , When the Levees Broke . The film has been used as the basis for a curriculum on poverty, developed by the Teachers College at Columbia University for their students. The Cultural Innovation Fund

1755-648: The Caribbean including Italy , France , Venezuela , Mexico , and Puerto Rico , totaling fifty-two countries on six continents and twenty-nine islands. The first director was Wickliffe Rose , followed by F.F. Russell in 1923, Wilbur Sawyer in 1935, and George Strode in 1944. A number of notable physicians and field scientists worked on the international campaigns, including Lewis Hackett , Hideyo Noguchi , Juan Guiteras , George C. Payne , Livingston Farrand , Cornelius P. Rhoads , and William Bosworth Castle . In 1936, The Rockefeller Foundation received one of

1820-606: The Mexican Government and derail any possible communist infiltration, in order to protect the Rockefeller family's investments. By 1943, this program, under the foundation's Mexican Agriculture Project , had proved such a success with the science of corn propagation and general principles of agronomy that it was exported to other Latin American countries; in 1956, the program was then taken to India; again with

1885-430: The bill from Congress in order to seek a state charter from New York. On May 14, 1913, New York Governor William Sulzer approved a charter for the foundation with Junior becoming the first president. With its large-scale endowment, a large part of Senior's fortune was insulated from inheritance taxes. The first secretary of the foundation was Jerome Davis Greene , the former secretary of Harvard University , who wrote

1950-678: The center of all our work: [...] confronting the hateful legacies of the past [...] we understand that the work we engage in today does not absolve us of yesterday's mistakes. [...]" Although the United States never joined the League of Nations , the Rockefeller Foundation was involved, and by the 1930s the foundations had changed the League from a "Parliament of Nations" to a modern think tank that used specialized expertise to provide in-depth impartial analysis of international issues. After

2015-461: The city of Norfolk. In April 2019, it was announced that the foundation would no longer be funding the 100 Resilient Cities program as a whole. Some elements of the initiative's work, most prominently the funding of several cities' Chief Resilience Officer roles, continues to be managed and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, while other aspects of the program continue in the form of two independent organizations, Resilient Cities Catalyst (RCC) and

Molecular medicine - Misplaced Pages Continue

2080-446: The disease gene, while heterozygous individuals exhibit the usually asymptomatic condition of sickle cell trait. The paper introduced the concept of a "molecular disease", and is considered a major impetus to the development of molecular medicine . The paper helped establish that genes control not just the presence or absence of enzymes (as genetics had shown in the early 1940s) but also the specific structure of protein molecules. It

2145-473: The end of the project, they learned of parallel results by geneticist James V. Neel, who demonstrated the inheritance pattern of the disease by traditional genetic methods; both Neel's work and that of Pauling's group were published in the same issue of Science . Following the 1949 paper, Itano left the Pauling laboratory to work with Neel; in the following years Itano and Neel used electrophoresis to identify

2210-558: The endowment was largely funded by Standard Oil. The foundation also has a controversial past, including support of eugenics in the 1930s, as well as several scandals arising from their international field work. In 2021, the foundation's president committed to reckoning with their history, and to centering equity and inclusion. John D. Rockefeller Sr. first conceived the idea of the foundation in 1901. In 1906, Rockefeller's business and philanthropic advisor, Frederick Taylor Gates , encouraged him toward "permanent corporate philanthropies for

2275-773: The eugenics movement. The Rockefeller Foundation, along with the Carnegie Institution , was the primary financier for the Eugenics Record Office , until 1939. The foundation also provided grants to Margaret Sanger and Alexis Carrel , who supported birth control, compulsory sterilization and eugenics . Sanger went to Japan in 1922 and influenced the birth control movement there. By 1926, Rockefeller had donated over $ 400,000, which would be almost $ 4 million adjusted for inflation in 2003, to hundreds of German researchers, including Ernst Rüdin and Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer , through funding

2340-495: The family's business interests. The foundation henceforth confined itself to funding responsible organizations involved in this and other controversial fields, which were beyond the control of the foundation itself. Junior became the foundation chairman in 1917. Through the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial (LSRM), established by Senior in 1918 and named after his wife, the Rockefeller fortune

2405-553: The first awarded Walter Reed Medals from The American Society of Tropical Medicine & Hygiene to recognize its study and control of Yellow Fever . The World Health Organization , seen as a successor to the IHD, was formed in 1948, and the IHD was subsumed by the larger Rockefeller Foundation in 1951, discontinuing its overseas work. While the Rockefeller doctors working in tropical locales such as Mexico emphasized scientific neutrality, they had political and economic aims to promote

2470-759: The first such institutions in the United States, and established the School of Hygiene at the University of Toronto in 1927, and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the United Kingdom. they spent more than $ 25 million in developing other public health schools in the US and in 21 foreign countries. In 1913, it also began a 20-year support program of the Bureau of Social Hygiene , whose mission

2535-588: The foundation granted $ 100000 to the Institute for Psychoanalysis in Chicago. This grant was renewed in 1938, with payments extending into the early-1940s. This division funded women's contraception and the human reproductive system in general, but also was involved in funding controversial eugenics research. Other funding went into endocrinology departments in American universities, human heredity, mammalian biology, human physiology and anatomy, psychology , and

2600-467: The foundation. Stock in the family's oil companies had been a major part of the foundation's assets, beginning with Standard Oil and later with its corporate descendants, including ExxonMobil . In December 2020, the foundation pledged to dump their fossil fuel holdings. With a $ 5 billion endowment, the Rockefeller Foundation was "the largest US foundation to embrace the rapidly growing divestment movement." CNN writer Matt Egan noted, "This divestment

2665-434: The gene had both positive and negative effects and demonstrated heterozygote advantage , Pauling suggested that molecular diseases were actually the basis of evolutionary change. He also advocated eugenic policies, such as marking all who carry the sickle cell trait and other molecular disease genes, to reduce the number of children born with genetic diseases. Rockefeller Foundation The Rockefeller Foundation

Molecular medicine - Misplaced Pages Continue

2730-713: The geopolitical imperative of providing an antidote to communism. It wasn't until 1959 that senior foundation officials succeeded in getting the Ford Foundation (and later USAID , and later still, the World Bank ) to sign on to the major philanthropic project, known now to the world as the Green Revolution . It was originally conceived in 1943 as CIMMYT , the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico. It also provided significant funding for

2795-400: The good of Mankind" so that his heirs should not "dissipate their inheritances or become intoxicated with power." In 1909 Rockefeller signed over 73,000 Standard Oil shares worth $ 50 million, to his son, Gates and Harold Fowler McCormick as the third inaugural trustee, in the first installment of a projected $ 100 million endowment. The nascent foundation applied for a federal charter in

2860-403: The harmful legacies of eugenicist ideologies. [...] examine the role that philanthropies played in developing and perpetuating eugenics policies and practices. The Rockefeller Foundation is currently reckoning with our own history in relation to eugenics.  This requires uncovering the facts and confronting uncomfortable truths, [...] The Rockefeller Foundation is putting equity and inclusion at

2925-479: The identification of human viruses, techniques for virus identification, and arthropod -borne viruses. Bristol-Myers Squibb , Johns Hopkins University and the Rockefeller Foundation are currently the subject of a $ 1 billion lawsuit from Guatemala for "roles in a 1940s U.S. government experiment that infected hundreds of Guatemalans with syphilis ". A previous suit against the United States government

2990-472: The key difference between normal hemoglobins and sickle cell hemoglobins was a single difference in one chain of the protein: a glutamic acid residue on the normal hemoglobin in place of a valine residue on the sickle cell hemoglobin. The molecular disease concept put forward in the 1949 paper also became the basis for Linus Pauling's view of evolution. In the 1960s, by which time it had been shown that sickle cell trait confers resistance to malaria and so

3055-452: The mid-1930s, Pauling turned his attention to the physical and chemical nature of hemoglobin. In 1946, he set graduate student Harvey Itano (who had been previously trained as a physician) the task of finding differences in hemoglobin that might explain sickle cell disease. After failing to find any differences in size, weight, or acid-base titration (despite the advanced instruments available at Caltech), Itano found that oxygen could inhibit

3120-475: The sickling process while various reducing agents could speed it up; this was the basis of Pauling and Itano's first publication on the disease. Itano also found that the globin portion of sickle cell hemoglobin had a barely detectable difference in electrical charge. To measure this electrical difference precisely, Pauling assigned graduate student John Singer to work with Itano and another medical researcher, Ibert C. Wells, before Pauling left in early 1948 for

3185-584: The studies of human sexual behavior by Alfred Kinsey . In the interwar years, the foundation funded public health, nursing, and social work in Eastern and Central Europe. In 1950, the foundation expanded their international program of virus research, establishing field laboratories in Poona , India, Trinidad , Belém , Brazil, Johannesburg , South Africa, Cairo , Egypt, Ibadan , Nigeria, and Cali , Colombia, among others. The foundation funded research into

3250-588: The trusteeship in 1981. In 1989, David Rockefeller 's daughter, Peggy Dulany , was appointed to the board for a five-year term. In October 2006, David Rockefeller Jr. joined the board of trustees, re-establishing the direct family link and becoming the sixth family member to serve on the board. C. Douglas Dillon , the United States Secretary of the Treasury under both Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson , served as chairman of

3315-817: The use of so-called terminator genes; the company later complied. In the 1990s, the foundation shifted its agriculture work and emphasis to Africa; in 2006, it joined with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in a $ 150 million effort to fight hunger in the continent through improved agricultural productivity. In an interview marking the 100 year anniversary of the Rockefeller Foundation, Judith Rodin explained to This Is Africa that Rockefeller has been involved in Africa since their beginning in three main areas – health, agriculture and education, though agriculture has been and continues to be their largest investment in Africa. A total of 100 cities across six continents were part of

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3380-456: The value of public health to improve American relations with the host country. Although they claimed the banner of public health and humanitarian medicine, they often engaged with politics and business interests. Rhoads was involved in a racism whitewashing scandal in the 1930s during which he joked about injecting cancer cells into Puerto Rican patients, inspiring Puerto Rican nationalist and anti-colonialist leader Pedro Albizu Campos . Noguchi

3445-618: The war, the foundation was involved in the establishment of the United Nations . Senate House (University of London) was built on donation from Rockefeller Foundation in 1926 and a foundation stone laid by King George V in 1933. It is the headquarters of the University of London since 1937. In the arts, the Rockefeller Foundation has supported the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario , Canada, and

3510-598: The world's universities at the post-doctoral level . The Foundation also maintained a close relationship with Rockefeller University (also known as the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research) with many faculty holding overlapping positions between the institutions. The Sanitary Commission for the Eradication of Hookworm Disease was a Rockefeller-funded campaign from 1909 to 1914 to study and treat hookworm disease in 11 Southern states. Hookworm

3575-514: The world. Later it funded over $ 100 million of plant biotechnology research and trained over four hundred scientists from Asia, Africa and Latin America. It also invested in the production of transgenic crops, including rice and maize. In 1999, the then president Gordon Conway addressed the Monsanto Company board of directors, warning of the possible social and environmental dangers of this biotechnology, and requesting them to disavow

3640-509: Was also an important triumph in the efforts of Pauling and others to apply the instruments and methods of the physical sciences to biology, and Pauling used it promote such research and attract funding. Linus Pauling was a prominent physical chemist at the California Institute of Technology (a main focal point of Warren Weaver 's efforts to promote what he called "molecular biology" through Rockefeller Foundation grants). In

3705-430: Was also involved in an unethical human experimentation scandal. Susan Lederer , Elizabeth Fee , and Jay Katz are among the modern scholars who have researched this period. Researchers with the foundation including Noguchi developed the vaccine to prevent yellow fever . Rhoads later became a significant cancer researcher and director of Memorial Sloan-Kettering , though his eponymous award for oncological excellence

3770-531: Was clear that it was being used to rationalize discrimination against Jewish people and other groups, after the Nuremberg laws in 1935 . In 1936, Rockefeller fulfilled pledges of $ 655,000 to Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, even though several distinguished Jewish scientists had been dropped from the institute at the time. The Rockefeller Foundation did not alert the world about the racist implications of Nazi ideology , but furthered and funded eugenic research through

3835-551: Was dismissed in 2011 for the Guatemala syphilis experiments when a judge determined that the U.S. government could not be held liable for actions committed outside of the U.S. An experiment was conducted by Vanderbilt University in the 1940s where they gave 800 pregnant women radioactive iron , 751 of which were pills, without their consent. In a 1969 article published in the American Journal of Epidemiology , it

3900-481: Was estimated that three children had died from the experiment. With significant post-war activity John D. Rockefeller Jr. was an outspoken supporter of eugenics. Even as late as 1951, John D. Rockefeller III and John Foster Dulles , who was chairman of the foundation at the time, established the Population Council to advance family planning , birth control , and population control , and goals of

3965-491: Was for the first time directed to supporting research by social scientists. During its first few years of work, the LSRM awarded funds primarily to social workers, with its funding decisions guided primarily by Junior. In 1922, Beardsley Ruml was hired to direct the LSRM, and he most decisively shifted the focus of Rockefeller philanthropy into the social sciences , stimulating the founding of university research centers, and creating

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4030-471: Was introduced to the Natural Sciences division of the foundation in the major reorganization of 1928. In 1941, the foundation gave a small grant to Mexico for maize research, in collaboration with the then new president, Manuel Ávila Camacho . This was done after the intervention of Vice President Henry Wallace and the involvement of Nelson Rockefeller ; the primary intention being to stabilise

4095-531: Was known as the "germ of laziness". In 1913, the foundation expanded its work with the Sanitary Commission abroad and set up the International Health Division (also known as International Health Board), which began the foundation's first international public health activities. The International Health Division conducted campaigns in public health and sanitation against malaria , yellow fever , and hookworm in areas throughout Europe, Latin America and

4160-573: Was renamed after the scandal reemerged. During the late-1920s, the Rockefeller Foundation created the Medical Sciences Division, which emerged from the former Division of Medical Education. The division was led by Richard M. Pearce until his death in 1930, to which Alan Gregg succeeded him until 1945. During this period, the Division of Medical Sciences made contributions to research across several fields of psychiatry. In 1935

4225-425: Was research and education on birth control, maternal health and sex education. In 1914, the foundation set up the China Medical Board , which established the first public health university in China, the Peking Union Medical College , in 1921; this was subsequently nationalized when the Communists took over the country in 1949. In the same year it began a program of international fellowships to train scholars at many of

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