Pergamon, or Pergamum, sometimes referred to by the modern Greek form Pergamos, was a rich and powerful ancient Greek city in Aeolis. It is located 26 kilometres from the modern coastline of the Aegean Sea on a promontory on the north side of the river Caicus and northwest of the modern city of Bergama, Turkey. During the Hellenistic period, it became the capital of the Kingdom of Pergamon under the Attalid dynasty in 281–133 BC, who transformed it into one of the major cultural centres of the Greek world. Many remains of its impressive monuments can still be seen and the outstanding masterpiece of the Pergamon Altar. Pergamon was the northernmost of the seven churches of Asia cited in the New Testament Book of Revelation; the city is centered around a 335-metre-high mesa of andesite. This mesa falls away on the north and east sides, but three natural terraces on the south side provide a route up to the top. To the west of the acropolis, the Selinus River flows through the city, while the Ketios river passes by to the east.

Pergamon lies on the north edge of the Caicus plain in the historic region of Mysia in the northwest of Turkey. The Caicus river breaks through the surrounding mountains and hills at this point and flows in a wide arc to the southwest. At the foot of the mountain range to the north, between the rivers Selinus and Cetius, there is the massif of Pergamon which rises 335 metres above sea level; the site is only 26 km from the sea, but the Caicus plain is not open to the sea, since the way is blocked by the Karadağ massif. As a result, the area has a inland character. In Hellenistic times, the town of Elaia at the mouth of the Caicus served as the port of Pergamon; the climate is Mediterranean with a dry period from May to August, as is common along the west coast of Asia Minor. The Caicus valley is composed of volcanic rock andesite and the Pergamon massif is an intrusive stock of andesite; the massif is about one kilometre wide and around 5.5 km long from north to south. It consists of a broad, elongated base and a small peak - the upper city.

The side facing the Cetius river is a sharp cliff, while the side facing the Selinus is a little rough. On the north side, the rock forms a 70 m wide spur of rock. To the southeast of this spur, known as the'Garden of the Queen', the massif reaches its greatest height and breaks off immediately to the east; the upper city extends for another 250 m to the south, but it remains narrow, with a width of only 150 m. At its south end the massif falls to the east and south, widening to around 350 m and descends to the plain towards the southwest. Settlement of Pergamon can be detected as far back as the Archaic period, thanks to modest archaeological finds fragments of pottery imported from the west eastern Greece and Corinth, which date to the late 8th century BC. Earlier habitation in the Bronze Age cannot be demonstrated, although Bronze Age stone tools are found in the surrounding area; the earliest mention of Pergamon in literary sources comes from Xenophon's Anabasis, since the march of the Ten Thousand under Xenophon's command ended at Pergamon in 400/399 BC.

Xenophon, who calls the city Pergamos, handed over the rest of his Greek troops to Thibron, planning an expedition against the Persian satraps Tissaphernes and Pharnabazus, at this location in March 399 BC. At this time Pergamon was in the possession of the family of Gongylos from Eretria, a Greek favourable to the Achaemenid Empire who had taken refuge in Asia Minor and obtained the territory of Pergamon from Xerxes I, Xenophon was hosted by his widow Hellas. In 362 BC, satrap of Mysia, based his revolt against the Persian empire at Pergamon, but was crushed. Only with Alexander the Great was the surrounding area removed from Persian control. There are few traces of the pre-Hellenistic city, since in the following period the terrain was profoundly changed and the construction of broad terraces involved the removal of all earlier structures. Parts of the temple of Athena, as well as the walls and foundations of the altar in the sanctuary of Demeter go back to the fourth century. Lysimachus, King of Thrace, took possession in 301 BC, but soon after his lieutenant Philetaerus enlarged the town, the kingdom of Thrace collapsed in 281 BC and Philetaerus became an independent ruler, founder of the Attalid dynasty.

His family ruled Pergamon from 281 until 133 BC: Philetaerus 281-263. The domain of Philetaerus was limited to the area surrounding the city itself, but Eumenes I was able to expand them greatly. In particular, after the Battle of Sardis in 261 BC against Antiochus I, Eumenes was able to appropriate the area down to the coast and some way inland; the city thus became the centre of a territorial realm. This final step was only taken by his successor Attalus I, after he defeated the Galatians in 238, whom Pergamon had paid tribute to under Eumenes I. Only at this point did an independent Pergamene kingdom come into existence, which would reach its greatest power and territorial extent in 188 BC; the Attalids became some of the most loyal supporters of Rome in the Hellenistic world. Under Attalus I, they allied with Rome against Philip V of Macedon, during the first and second Macedonian Wars. In the Roman–Seleucid War against the Seleucid king Antiochus III, Pergamon joined the Romans' coalition and was rewarded with all the

Henry Peter Metzger was a German-born American immunologist. Metzger was born to a Jewish family in Mainz on March 23, 1932, to a hardware store owner and a homemaker; some of his relatives perished in the Holocaust. At the suggestion of his sisters, Metzger's father moved to the United States in 1937, followed by his wife and sons in January 1938. Henry Metzger attended the Bronx High School of Science, as did his brother earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Rochester in 1953, followed by a medical degree at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1957. Metzger completed his residency at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, joined the Public Health Service in 1959, through which he began working at the National Institutes of Health. After two years of post-doctoral study with Seymour Jonathan Singer, funded by the Helen Hay Whitney Fellowship, Metzger returned to the National Institutes of Health, working in the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases.

The American Association of Immunologists awarded Metzger its Distinguished Service Award in 1986, the same year he began serving on the AAI Council. He was president of the AAI from 1991 to 1992, stepped down from the association's executive council in 1993. Six years Metzger received the American Association of Immunologists Lifetime Achievement Award, the AAI's highest honor; this followed Metzger's 1992 induction as a member of the National Academy of Sciences and his election as fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Metzger died in Hanover, New Hampshire, on November 20, 2018, aged 86

Thomas Reid was a religiously trained Scottish philosopher. He was the founder of the Scottish School of Common Sense and played an integral role in the Scottish Enlightenment. In 1783 he was a joint founder of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. A contemporary of David Hume, Reid was "Hume's earliest and fiercest critic". Reid was born in the manse at Strachan, Aberdeenshire, on 26 April 1710 O. S. the son of Lewis Reid and his wife Margaret Gregory, first cousin to James Gregory. He was educated at Kincardine Parish School the O'Neil Grammar School in Kincardine, he went to the University of Aberdeen in 1723 and graduated MA in 1726. He was licensed to preach by the Church of Scotland in 1731, he began his career as a minister of the Church of Scotland but ceased to be a minister when he was given a professorship at King's College, Aberdeen, in 1752. He obtained his doctorate and wrote An Inquiry Into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, he and his colleagues founded the'Aberdeen Philosophical Society', popularly known as the'Wise Club'.

Shortly after the publication of his first book, he was given the prestigious Professorship of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow when he was called to replace Adam Smith. He resigned from this position in 1781, after which he prepared his university lectures for publication in two books: Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man and Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind. In 1740 Thomas Reid married his cousin Elizabeth, daughter of the London physician Dr George Reid, his wife and "numerous" children predeceased him, except for a daughter who married Dr Patrick Carmichael. Reid died in Glasgow, he was buried at Blackfriars Church in the grounds of Glasgow College and when the university moved to Gilmorehill in the west of Glasgow, his tombstone was inserted in the main building. Reid believed that common sense is, or at least should be, at the foundation of all philosophical inquiry, he disagreed with Hume, who asserted that we can never know what an external world consists of as our knowledge is limited to the ideas in the mind, George Berkeley, who asserted that the external world is ideas in the mind.

By contrast, Reid claimed that the foundations upon which our sensus communis are built justify our belief that there is an external world. In his day and for some years into the 19th century, he was regarded as more important than Hume, he advocated direct realism, or common sense realism, argued against the Theory of Ideas advocated by John Locke, René Descartes, nearly all Early Modern philosophers who came after them. He had a great admiration for Hume and had a mutual friend send Hume an early manuscript of Reid's Inquiry. Hume responded that the work "is wrote in a lively entertaining manner," although he found "there seems to be some Defect in Method", he criticized Reid's doctrine for implying the presence of innate ideas. Reid’s theory of knowledge had a strong influence on his theory of morals, he thought epistemology was an introductory part to practical ethics: When we are confirmed in our common beliefs by philosophy, all we have to do is to act according to them, because we know what is right.

His moral philosophy is reminiscent of Roman stoicism in its emphasis on the agency of the subject and self-control. He quotes Cicero, from whom he adopted the term "sensus communis". Reid's answer to Hume's sceptical and naturalist arguments was to enumerate a set of principles of common sense which constitute the foundations of rational thought. Anyone who undertakes a philosophical argument, for example, must implicitly presuppose certain beliefs like, "I am talking to a real person," and "There is an external world whose laws do not change," among many other positive, substantive claims. For Reid, the belief in the truth of these principles is not rational, it is for this reason that Reid sees belief in the principles of common sense as a litmus test for sanity. For example, in The Intellectual Powers of Man he states, "For, before men can reason together, they must agree in first principles. One of the first principles he goes on to list is that "qualities must be in something, figured, hard or soft, that moves or resists.

It is not to these qualities, but to that, the subject of them, that we give the name body. If any man should think fit to deny that these things are qualities, or that they require any subject, I leave him to enjoy his opinion as a man who denies first principles, is not fit to be reasoned with." Reid made positive arguments based in phenomenological insight to put forth a novel mixture of direct realism and ordinary language philosophy. In a typical passage in the Intellectual Powers he asserts that when he has a conception of a centaur, the thing he conceives is an animal, no idea is an animal; this point relies both on an account of the subjective experience of conceiving an object and on an account of what we mean when we use words. Because Reid saw his philosophy as publicly accessible knowledge, available both through introspection and through the proper understanding of how language is used, he saw it as the philosophy of common sense. Rei