Vico E. Henriques, an interview by Daniel McCool, November 9, 2004: Saving the legacy tape no. 729

Page 66

I 0 E. ENRIQUES and manipulating information. That s basically all govemm nt r 11 d money attached to it. Some of it may have penalties attached to it and n. uti look at what government's doing; and, therefore, what the budg t director n d t d 1 th as much information as he can, and can I do 100% welfare? How do I account for fal po iti and false negatives? And, you know, what level of? And you don t need to get minute by minute snapshots of everything because that just clouds your vision. What you need to do is g t summaries that are cogent and relative. And, anyway, I had a lot of fun writing that stuff. And I used to give lectures to the U.S. Civil Service Commission on that. DAN: Okay. I think one way to describe budgeting is you try to minimize who you irritate. VIC: Well, and you try to maximize your effectiveness. And if you know that you don't have enough to do something, you say, "I am only going to do 10% of what you ask me to do. 1. Because you won't give me the money. 2. The populous isn't going to cooperate. Being a political scientist you'll appreciate-! had some pretty highflown ideas working with the departments up there in New York. And, particularly, I was working with the epidemiologist in the Health Department. But they thought they'd died and gone to heaven because: 1. I got them a computer. 2. I understood what epidemiology was. 3. I was sympathetic to them. And, so, we had two big projects that we were going to do: One was to do a historical epidemiological look at Tay-Sachs and at Sickle Cell. DAN: What was the first one? VIC: Tay-Sachs Disease. It's a genetic disease that is found in Ashkenazi Jews almost singularly, but it is passed down. And I think they've determined now that it's not necessarily 64