Want to Work for Trump?

I have a friend named Ira Helfand, who is a family physician in Springfield, MA and also happens to have won two Nobel Prizes — not one, but two.

When Ira was in medical school at Harvard, he and a bunch of other students decided that since this was the 1960’s, they needed to do something political, if only to keep aligned with everyone who had time to protest the Viet Nam war.

So, a bunch of these youngsters got together in someone’s Cambridge apartment and out of that meeting came Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), an advocacy organization which still exists.

Their first big issue was to agitate against above-ground nuclear testing, and they got noticed after the Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979. PSR’s work led to the first Nobel, the second was awarded when PSR led the fight for the non-proliferation treaty in 2017.

I once asked Ira to compare building and running an advocacy organization both before and after the internet, because he had done it both before and after the digital world came to be.

His answer: “The difference is that now you have no idea how many people are really committed to your organization because looking at a website is a lot easier than mailing in a letter or getting on the phone.”